Alan Buckley has released a new version of PackMan, a package manager designed to work with packages distributed via the RISC OS Packaging Project. The main reason for the update is compatibility with the Raspberry Pi 3 – although an existing bug has also been squashed, whereby it wasn’t possible to exit the application when first run without installing the ‘Packages’ directory. Continue reading »
A modern event with a retro bent!
I
n just over a week’s time, the Centre for Computing History, based in Cambridge, will be hosting an event that should be of interest to anyone with fondness for computers that came from the Acorn stable – Acorn World 2017.
The event has been organised by the Acorn & BBC User Group in association with the museum, and will give visitors an insight into how Acorn started, some of their innovations, and the legacy they left behind – successes such as ARM and other technologies, RISC OS, and modern systems that use the processors and operating system. Continue reading »
Between sealing the doors shut on the RISCOSitory bunker and my arriving at the Cedar Court Hotel in Wakefield, RISC OS Open Ltd have teased out another announcement – of sorts – concerning tomorrow’s show. I say “of sorts” because that announcement consists of nothing more than an image, which I have shamelessly lifted from their website and present below: Continue reading »
Insert witty comment about Witty Pi here. Um… that’ll do.
The next meeting of Bristol RISC OS Users (BRU) will take place on Wednesday, 8th March, at the Hope and Anchor pub in Bristol – and, as ever, anyone with an interest in RISC OS who is in the area is welcome to come along; there are no membership or entry fees.
Running from around 7:30pm until closing time, the meetings are generally informal in nature, and consist of a group of like-minded people meeting up for a chat over a pie1 and a pint2. Continue reading »
And possibly – just possibly – some gaming fun, too1.
The next meeting of Bristol RISC OS Users (BRU) will take place on Wednesday, 11th January, and this month Chris Hall will be showing off a £6.00 OLED display, sporting a whopping 128×64 pixel resolution and connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero.
This is the latest evolution of Chris’ GPS project, with the display showing the Ordnance Survey grid reference, milepost mileage (which will generally show zero unless you are on or very near the Severn Valley Railway, since this part of the software relates to that), and the time. Continue reading »
Er, that’s ‘pi ess ess dee’ – and note the ‘a’ before it!
First shown at off at the London Show on Saturday, the ‘never before seen’ thing hinted at on the RISCOSbits Twitter account was the PiSSD – and it is now available to buy.
Deserving of more than a news nybble, which unfortunately is all I can do at the moment, the PiSSD is a Raspberry Pi in a rather nice 11.8cm x 11.8cm x 5.5cm case, with a 128GB mSATA SSD installed and filecore formatted, and including a standard RISC OS disc image. It can be supplied with or without a Raspberry Pi, and will cost £199 with one (a 2B while stocks last, after which it will be a 3B), or £169 without – in which case you fit your own.
It turns out that the sneak peak picture published yesterday on the RISCOSbits Twitter account was, in fact, not the PiPOD that I speculated it might be. Another picture has been posted, with the text “Another sneak preview of that #pi related #neverbeforeseen thing for the @rougol @RISCOS_London show. It is NOT the #PiPOD, Sherlock!”
This second picture shows the edge of a case with a number of ports visible, so perhaps the mystery new product is a case for a Raspberry Pi, or a complete system with a Pi at its heart. Either way, I say we nuke the site from orbit you come along to the show tomorrow – it’s the only way to be sure!
Andy Marks has posted a sneak peak picture to the RISCOSBits Twitter account, along with the hashtag #neverbeforeseen – but what the picture clearly shows is the box that the humble Raspberry Pi is usually supplied in, which is something that just about everyone interested in these things has seen. The picture, he says, is only a clue, and this is something else for the London Show on Saturday. So what gives?
The answer is probably a hitherto unannounced product called the PiPOD – a means to allow the Raspberry Pi to be mounted in a podule slot in either a RiscPC or A7000, with both the old and new systems able to be run simultaneously, with one running in a window on the other – presumably using VNC.
A new version of leading bitmap graphics editor PhotoDesk will be available at the London Show on Saturday from 4D, the sister company of CJE Micro’s. The new version brings a number of changes, including better JPEG support and improved compatibility for a number of modern RISC OS platforms (with support for the Raspberry Pi 3 added) – but perhaps most importantly, it now supports those platforms on which the order of colour components are swapped, such as IGEPv5 and Titanium.
Upgrades – which start at £12.00 if upgrading from 3.12 – will be available at the show if customers bring their PhotoDesk CDs with them. For new customers, the software is priced at £84.00.
RISC OS Open Ltd have announced a new edition of Nut Pi – a collection of commercial software, all provided on an SD-card for the Raspberry Pi. The latest version, which will be available at the London Show on Saturday brings ARMv8 compatibility to the software, which means it is now compatible with the Raspberry Pi 3 – and some of the titles included in the collection have been updated to the latest versions.
The collection costs £35 plus shipping and VAT, which gets you a bundle of software that would normally cost around £600 – so represents excellent value for money. However, that low price means it’s not possible to offer discounted upgrade prices.