VinceH

Wakefield 2013 show report

Apr 262013
 

 A day at the races RISC OS event.

It’s approaching the end of April 2013, and this year’s Wakefield Show has come and gone. This year’s show was the eighteenth, and was once again held at the Cedar Court Hotel, very close to junction 39 of the M1 – the same venue at which it has been held for the last few years, and where the show was originally held all those years ago.

As usual, I was there to demonstrate and discuss my products, and also – in theory – to get a gist of what was happening so that I could report about it on RISCOSitory. Things didn’t go quite as planned, however, and I barely left my stand throughout the entire show for a number of reasons, ranging from still being tired after an extra long drive the day before through to generally being that much busier than usual on the stand itself. Continue reading »

Next stop: Wakefield 2013

Apr 182013
 

 Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to Workakefield we go!

We are once again rapidly approaching the time when the attention of the RISC OS community falls fairly and squarely upon Wakefield, with “the North’s premier RISC OS show” taking place this coming Saturday, April 20th.

The show is now in its 18th year, and once again takes place at The Cedar Court Hotel, Deby Dale Road, Calder Grove, Wakefield, WF4 3QZ – the show’s original venue, before it moved to locations such as Thornes Park Athletics Stadium. Continue reading »

Charm v2.6.4 available

Apr 102013
 

A Charm a day month (and sometimes more) helps you code, rest and, er, code some more.

Peter Nowosad, of Qubit Consultancy Limited, has been steadily releasing new versions of his Charm programming language, which has now reached v2.6.4.

The last release of Charm noted on RISCOSitory was version 2.5.6, which appeared in June of last year, Continue reading »

Programming the LPC1114

Apr 072013
 

It’serial-ly useful thing.

Dave Higton released LPC1114 at the beginning of February, with an update about a week and a half later, for use with a small piece of hardware with the same name – the LPC1114 being one of a family of devices [PDF] from NXP Semiconducters, all of which are ARM Cortex-M0 based and, due to their low cost and power requirements, are ideal for simple embedded applications.

An example application for the LPC1114 device is given by Dave, who explains: Continue reading »

32-bit voice modules made easy with VoiceGen32

Apr 072013
 

Sound as a 32-bit compatible pound.

There are a number of ways to make RISC OS computer play sound samples – perhaps for sound effects in games – and one of these is to turn the sound sample into a voice module, an option often provided by software that works with audio samples. One such example was Armadeus, which came from Clares Micro Supplies – and is the software I used myself for the sound samples used in some of the budget games released by Soft Rock Software in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Continue reading »

Lossless JPEG transformations made easy with TranJPEG

Apr 012013
 

You spin me right round, baby, right round, like a record JPEG baby, right round round round.

Chris Johnson, well known for a number of applications, in particular the likes of Snapper and SyncDiscs, both of which began life with David Pilling and later taken over by Chris, recently announced version 1.00 of TranJPEG (mirror), soon followed by updates to version 1.10 and 1.20, which presents a RISC OS front-end for the Independent JPEG Group command-line utility “jpegtran”, giving the user a friendly and easy way to make use of the features it provides.

Continue reading »

Free “VirtualRPC in Use” e-books

Apr 012013
 

Ee be free, ee be.

Well known to readers of Archive Magazine, the group known as T.O.M.S. – who first appeared in the magazine in volume 13, issue 11 (August 2000) with a review of the Epson Stylus Photo 1200 – had a semi-regular series of articles published in the A5 periodical from volume 17, issue 3 (December 2003) until volume 19, issue 4 (January 2006) . That series was centered around using VirtualRPC, an emulator for Windows and Mac OS X computers that allows those people who need to use those platforms to continue to enjoy using RISC OS without having to have two computers on their desk, and was called “VirtualRPC in Use” Continue reading »

Snapper jumps from version 1.17 to 1.20

Mar 272013
 

One, two, miss a few, ninety-nine, one hundred.

Snapper is a screen-capture program, originally written by David Pilling and supplied with his scanning and image processing software, and now maintained and further developed by Chris Johnson.The software provides an easy way to save areas of the screen as sprites, something that can also be done with Paint, supplied as standard with RISC OS, but with additional options that make Snapper much more versatile. Continue reading »

Murnong 2.32 released

Mar 272013
 

Keeping up with the Joneses YouTube Wget

Murnong, Christopher Martin’s application for downloading YouTube videos, has been updated to version 2.32.

The software is designed to parse web pages fed to it that have been saved from YouTube, Google’s video sharing website, so that the address of the embedded video can be established. Once it’s done that, it launches Wget to download the file so that it can be played with FFplay or converted with FFmpeg – both of which have been ported to RISC OS by Christopher. Continue reading »

German magazine GAG-News CD 5 available

Mar 262013
 

 It’s GAG-News, not bad news!

Back in September, when reporting that Drag ‘n Drop had ceased publication (again), I said:

This leaves RISC OS with only one remaining magazine, Archive. Already the platform’s only remaining printed magazine…

This was incorrect, a fact pointed out to me in the comments on that post. Not only is there another magazine still being published as well as Archive (and Drag ‘n Drop, which was subsequently resurrected by Christopher Dewhurst), but it’s a printed magazine to boot. Continue reading »

 Older Entries