It’s BASIC, Jim, but not as we know it.
Chris Gransden, who has ported a number of emulators and games to RISC OS, has been busy again. In December, he released a test version of XAMOS [direct download], ported to RISC OS after it was suggested on the RISC OS Open forums.
Originally published by Europress Software and developed by François Lionet and Constantin Sotiropoulos, AMOS BASIC was a version of the BASIC language for the Commodore Amiga home computer, Continue reading »
OSLib! OSLib! OSLib! Oi! Oi! Oi!
The release of OSLib 7.00 was announced in December by John Tytgat, who said:
On behalf of the entire OSLib development team, I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of OSLib 7.00, an Open Source API for RISC OS development. Continue reading »
Classy!
Back at the end of November, Alan Buckley released a new version of TBX, his C++ library. The library is designed to help with the development of Toolbox based C++ applications for RISC OS, and comes with a user guide and reference documentation, and examples of its use are available as additional downloads, including a program to help generate simple C++ skeleton projects.
Version 0.6 is an alpha release, for which Alan listed the following as the main features in his announcement: Continue reading »
A better late than never introduction for the RISC OS world to the #RaspberryJam
RISC OS users should by now need no introduction to the Raspberry Pi – but in case there is anyone reading this who has been living as a hermit for the last few years with no access to the internet (or any other news sources) in their cave, it is a very small, incredibly cheap computer based around a Broadcom BCM2835 ‘System on a Chip’ (or SoC). The heart of that SoC is an ARM processor, running at 700Mhz.
The idea behind the computer is to get children programming, to get them interested in computers and understand them – something which had been in an observable decline, with fewer and fewer students with less relevant skills applying to read Computer Science at University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory in recent years. Continue reading »
Not a hack, but a tool for hackers – and sometimes the hacked off
Reporter is an application by Martin Avison that provides a way for Wimp applications (especially those written in BASIC), Obey files, assembler programs, and so on, to easily display text and variable values in a debugging window, and as such can be a very useful tool for programmers – and it can also be used to help diagnose other problems, reporting on what’s happening during the boot process, for example.
Version 2.67 is now available from the Avisoft website, which includes the following changes since version 2.66: Continue reading »
David Bradforth of Alligata Media has made two books available as free downloads via his Alligata site on MagCloud.
BASIC V for the Acorn Archimedes, by Mike Williams
BASIC V for the Acorn Archimedes was written by Mike Williams and originally published by Dabs Press in 1989, and was acquired by Alligata Media in 2005. According to the blurb the “book provides a practical guide to programming in BASIC V on the Acorn Archimedes. Assuming a familiarity with the BBC BASIC language in general, it describes the many new commands offered by BASIC V.” Continue reading »
Steve Drain, prompted by a discussion in the RISC OS Open Ltd forum about AppBasic, has written a document about the using the Toolbox with Basalt which, he explains, has never been very well described. Basalt (“BASic ALTernative keywords”) is a module that extends BASIC by providing “alternative keywords by extending the use of actual keywords and adding new keywords, both of which are used completely as native BASIC keywords.”
The document is available online, at the link given above, and it is also included in the download for the prototype application, BasaltApp.
Steve explains that “a program is event-driven from a machine code wimp poll loop under the keyword POLL. Events and messages are registered against functions called to handle them. Apart from the use of ResEd to design the user interface there is no need for any other development environment.” Continue reading »
Rik Griffin has recently released a “C99″ manual in StrongHelp and HTML formats – which he explains is an ongoing work, and that he’ll be making a new version available soon. This manual was created using what Rik describes as “a ‘documentation generation system’, albeit a very slimline one.” Continue reading »
Call is a newly released (beta) module by Steve Drain, designed to send WIMP messages to an application – and therefore allowing the application to carry out specific functions – after a set period, or at regular intervals.
The RISC OS timing system and call-back mechanism is normally used by way of two SWIs (software interrupts): OS_CallAfter and OS_CallEvery, which are used to set up an interval and point to an address in memory; if OS_CallAfter was used, then after the interval has passed, the code at the specified address is called, and if OS_CallEvery was used, then the code is called regularly, at the specified interval. Continue reading »
Following on from the news that Pipedream is now free to download, Gerald Fitton has announced that Fireworkz for RISC OS is also now free to download. Fireworkz is an integrated word processor and spreadsheet package, with some very powerful and useful facilities, which works in a fundamentally different way to PipeDream. Both are very powerful and useful pieces of software and, if you haven’t used them before, they come highly recommended. A mailing list has also been set up for the software on Google Groups by Stuart Swales, the programmer responsible for updating the software. Continue reading »