Snippets – 12th October, 2014

If news were a hot dog, this would be the ketchup. (Ketchup? Catch-up? Geddit? No? Ho hum – where’s my coat?) Here at the RISCOSitory/Soft Rock Software top secret underground bunker (whose entrance is cunningly disguised as a ramshackle shed) things have become somewhat busy positively hectic over the last couple of months, which has resulted in no news being posted to the site whatsoever for almost a month – not even in the ‘press release’ format whereby an announcement is simply quoted in full. So, in order to catch…

Read More

OS updates from R-Comp

Three! Count ’em! And new micro-SD cards, too! Just prior to the Midlands Show, R-Comp announced that “Super Pack 6” was available for owners of the original ARMini computer, as well as BeagleBoard users who have subscribed to the BeagleBoard Support Scheme, shortly followed by the option to upgrade to 16/32GB micro-SD cards. Later in the same month, the second OS upgrade for members of R-Comp’s PiPlus scheme was made available, that being a similar arrangement as the BeagleBoard Support Scheme, but for Raspberry Pi owners. And, not leaving out…

Read More

Aemulor arrives on BeagleBoard and PandaBoard

Make your 32-bit computer do an Impression (ho-ho) of a 26-bit one! When Castle Technology Ltd launched the IYONIX pc, back in 2002, there was a significant question users needed an answer to before upgrading to the new computer: Would their old software run on the new hardware? The problem was that for all the previous RISC OS computers, the ARM CPUs worked in (or supported in the case of StrongARM) an addressing mode we refer to as ’26-bit’, in which the program counter and processor status flags are contained…

Read More

Pic_Index now BeagleBoard compatible

A is for Application, B is for BeagleBoard, C is for Crikey this is a bit tenuous! Pic_Index is an application developed by John Williams to generate a thumbnail index for a set of JPEG files, in HTML format – ideal for use as gallery pages on websites, CD ROMs, or anywhere else the user might wish to store the images and resulting HTML. During April, it emerged during a discussion on the usenet group comp.sys.acorn.misc that Pic_Index didn’t work on the BeagleBoard.

Read More

Snippets – 24th March 2012

It’s been a busy month again here, which means there have been no posts to RISCOSitory for a while – so here’s a quick round-up of recent goings on in the world of RISC OS. RISC OS 5.18 RISC OS 5 has seen its latest ‘stable’ release in the form of RISC OS 5.18, which features some 340 improvements since the last such release (version 5.16). The full list of improvements can be found on the RISC OS Open website, but this list isn’t written in ‘typical user-speak’. In response…

Read More

Christmas offers from R-Comp

R-Comp have announced that they have a stock of 25 inch LED-backlit monitors. These monitors, from a well-respected brand, offer excellent picture quality, with built-in ISF/image calibration features, and provide HDMI, VGA and older analogue connections, allowing you to use them with older computers such as RiscPCs and IYONIX pcs, as well as digital computers such as the ARMini or RISCube. These screens also have built in freeview, allowing their use as ordinary TVs.

Read More

CD and DVD support comes to ARMini

While RISC OS users have been able to access CDs and DVDs from their computers many years, users of R-Comp Interactive’s ARMini computer (as well as those using BeagleBoards in their own right) have only been able to do so via another computer and a network connection: Accessing the media in CD and DVD drives connected to the computer by USB was not an option. Until recently.

Read More