Show report: London 2018

Just in time for Wakefield! With half of a year having passed since the London Show (and the Wakefield Show almost upon us), the RISCOSitory report is more than a little overdue – again! The usual main excuse applies, which is that it’s always busy here in the bunker, and some things have to be put off in favour of other, more important tasks. However, it is now the turn of that task to be used to put off other less important things – so here, at long last, is…

Prophet rises again

While in the world of Windows there is a great deal of software for businesses to choose from to look after their accounts, the choices on RISC OS are very limited in comparison. In recent years, the choices have become even more limited as the operating system (and underlying hardware) has moved on, and older software has become unsupported and is no longer updated by the original developers. One such package, however, has been given a new lease of life – Prophet, originally written by Quentin Pain of Apricote Studios…

Show report: Southwest 2018

Better late than never, but not as late as last year – so that’s something, right? This year’s Southwest Show took place on Saturday, 24th February, at the Webbington Hotel and Spa – the same venue at which it has been held every year since its inception. This year’s show was therefore the 21st, marking twenty years since the very first one, held in February 1998. There was therefore cake – which you missed out on if you didn’t come to the show, and which everyone who was present enjoyed.…

RISC OS Awards 2017 results

The latest RISC OS Awards poll, covering 2017, came to a close a on Saturday, 26th May – and the results are now known. The Awards website has been updated to show the results, and the winners (for whom I have contact details) will be notified by email later today, with direct links to the results so that they can be referred to on the their own websites. The results have already been announced on the RISCOSitory Twitter feed, but for anyone not using Twitter they are below.

News nybble: Wolf3D and Doom Trilogy updates

A new version of the Doom Trilogy is available from R-Comp through !Store – priced at £14.99, or available in ‘My Software’ as a free update if you have already purchased. If you have an aversion to purchasing through !Store, ‘over the counter’ at Wakefield is also an option. There  have been some small improvements to Doom, the main game in the pack, but the headline feature is the inclusion of an updated and enhanced copy of Wolfenstein 3D, thanks to work done by Jon Abbott and internal RCI staff.…

New edition of Doom Trilogy, with some added Wolfenstein 3D

No mention of eye of newt or toe of frog. Fans of first person shooters should have a soft spot for Doom from id Software. While it wasn’t the first game of this type, it’s certainly one of the pioneer titles that helped popularise the genre, and led to a number of follow-ups and expansions. The game  featured texture-mapped surfaces and varying room and level heights – a step up from the simpler Wolfenstein 3D, the previous game from the same company – as well as mood-setting MIDI music, and…

RISC OS Awards 2016 results

The RISC OS Awards poll for 2016 was brought to a close on 29th February. As before, the results were processed and counted on a RISC OS computer (using a home-brewed program to turn the votes into a file for each category, ready to be loaded into Fireworkz), and initially announced on the @RISCOSitory Twitter feed. Those results are now online on the RISC OS Awards website and the various winners have been notified – where possible – by email.

RISC OS Awards 2016: Alternative options revisited

If you have yet to vote, here are even more options for you – so why not get voting NOW? The RISC OS Awards 2016 voting form was put online on 18th December, and while the number of votes looked promising compared to last year the first time the alternative options were published, this is no longer the case. When the second round of alternative options were posted last year, approximately seven weeks after the polls were opened, the voting form had been completed approximately 140 times. Today – also…

MiniTime gains access to bigger units of time

Micro moment monitor manages massive months! Once upon a time there was an application called SmallTime, which sprouted from the programming hands of James Freeman. That application, however, has never been updated to run on 32-bit hardware such as the Iyonix, let alone modern ARMv7-based platforms. Aemulor can save the day, but that’s hardly ideal, and the licence under which SmallTime was released meant newer versions updated by third parties couldn’t be distributed. Fred Graute therefore took SmallTime as his inspiration, and developed a completely new application that achieved the…