News nybble: Raspberry Pi 3B+ launched

Yesterday was Pi Day, a name reflecting that if you write your dates in either Overpuddlian form (mm-dd-yyyy) or as specified by ISO 8601 (yyyy-mm-dd) – in both cases ignoring the year – you get 3-14, which sort of looks like Pi to two decimal places if you squint a bit so that the dash looks like a decimal point. A fitting day, then, for the Raspberry Pi Foundation to release another version of its credit card-sized computer: A ‘+’ version of the Raspberry Pi 3 model B. The most…

PackMan now compatible with Raspberry Pi 3

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.

Show report: Wakefield 2023

No London Show again? Read about the last Wakefield one instead! Due to circumstances beyond the control of the organisers, last year’s Wakefield Show morphed into the Wradfold show – Wakefield, but in Bradford – and this year, the show carried on in the same location, for much the same reason. It took place on 22nd April at the Cedar Court Hotel in – well, yes – Bradford.

Snippets – 31st December, 2022

A collection of news for 2022 not already covered on RISCOSitory 2022 is about to draw to a close, so it’s time to cast one last eye over the various forums etc., to look for things that haven’t found their way onto these pages already.

Christmas offers from CJE Micro’s on RapidO Ti and RaspberryRO

If you’re in the market for some new RISC OS computing goodness, the little shop with a lot of stock, CJE Micro’s (who are now a slightly bigger shop – or rather industrial unit) with a lot of stock) may be able to help. Chris Evans has announced a couple of price reductions on their RapidO Ti and RaspberryRO computers that will run from now until the end of January.

Pining for a PineBook Pro running RISC OS? Check out the next ROUGOL meeting!

With some notable exceptions, the history of RISC OS on laptops has never been great. Acorn themselves only ever launched one RISC OS laptop – the 24MHz, ARM3-based A4 – in 1992. Its name was based on its size, taking up about the same amount of space on a desk (or indeed a lap) as a piece of A4 paper, it sported a 640×480, greyscale screen, had 2 or 4MB of RAM, and needed an external mouse. The company also later announced the Stork notepad and NewsPAD ‘tablet’, but they…

Get in a flap, but don’t pipe down (updated 23rd June)

I mean, don’t HIT a pipe, or you’ll GO down! Almost a decade ago, a very simple game was hatched from the mind of Vietnamese programmer Dong Nguyen. The game, Flappy Bird, was a very simple sideways scrolling game with only one control requirement – to tap the screen. This caused Faby, the flappy bird in question, to flap its wings and gain some height, otherwise it’d descend – all the while flying to the right. Update, 23rd June, 2022: The RISC OS version of this game has now been…