The guest speaker at the next RISC OS User Group of London the World (ROUGOL) meeting will be ex-Acorn and Pace programmer Mike Stephens, who will be talking to the group about his time at the two companies, and ‘RISC OS in those StrongARM days’.
Along with an updated look at the alternative votes
The 2020 RISC OS Awards poll has now underway for more than a couple of months, which means it’s about time a final deadline for votes was issued so that the hundreds hundred or so votes that have been cast can be counted up and the results published. That deadline, therefore, is the end of this month – 30th June. If you haven’t yet voted, please ensure you do so by then.
If you’ve looked at the options and decided one or more of them aren’t what you’d like to vote for, you can always opt for something else and pop what you’re voting for in the text field for that category – just as many others have done. With that in mind, then, here is a final round up of what other people have voted for in case it’ll help you make up your own mind.
Continue readingJeroen Vermeulen, who has already ported two games to RISC OS from the Raspberry Pi Code the Classics book – Infinite Bunner and Cavern – has now given the same treatment to two more games found in the book – Boing and Myriapod.
Continue readingAnd a new ‘case study’ game thrown into the mix
BASIC games programmers who use the AMCOG Development Kit to make the process easier can now fetch a new version of the kit, which has been updated to v1.09.1. Features added to this version include:
Continue readingCovering a trio of subjects, Chris Hall will be the guest speaker at the next Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club (WROCC) meeting, which will take place on Wednesday, 2nd June, at 7:45pm, and will once again be held online, so anyone with an interest can join.
Continue readingIf you have a Raspberry Pi and wish to attach a camera to it there are a number of options available to you – including from the Raspberry Pi Foundation themselves – but if you wish to use one with RISC OS, your options are considerably more limited. So limited, in fact, that until very recently I don’t think there was a working option.
As of mid-May, however, that changed thanks to Rick Murray.
Continue readingKevin Wells has released a new version of his application for turning small amounts of textual information into two dimensional bar codes, aka ‘Quick Response’ codes. These can provide a quick way for people to transfer information into devices that can read them – for example smart phones using a bar code scanner application – such as URLs, contact details, WiFi keys, and so on.
Continue readingBack in 2005, Simon Wilson – already well known for releasing driver software for a PCI TV card for use on the Iyonix, and responsible for Soundblaster drivers – released a 3D graphics driver for the computer, called IyonixMesa. With this installed, it became possible to make use of the 3D facilities provided by the graphics card used in the Iyonix, providing an OpenGL API.
Stefan Fröhling has been in touch to say that Simon has agreed to work with RISC OS Cloverleaf (whose Kickstarter has now reached £7,421 or €8,622) to create a modern equivalent for the RockChip RK3399 – a platform that Cloverleaf has in its sights, with work already well underway to get RISC OS itself working on it. The RK3399 features a Mali-T860 GPU, and the goal is to create a ‘Mesa 3D GPU’ driver for it, based on the Panfrost Mesa driver.
Continue readingAnd pumps out a PiAno, and a Pi 4 upgrade scheme.
A number of systems on which RISC OS can be run also have Linux distros available for them, which means it’s very easy for RISC OS users to have a hardware platform for running our operating system natively, and a hardware platform for running a more widely supported OS – while only having a single hardware platform on the desk. With the Raspberry Pi, for example, it’s just a matter of changing the SD card to the OS you want before switching on, and for Titanium users, it’s possible to launch into Linux from RISC OS.
Not to be outdone, RISCOSbits have now launched their equivalent solution called EDOS – Easy Dual Operating Systems – which is available for all machines in the PiHard range (i.e. those available from the PiHard website, so that’s the PiHard, FOURtress, and PiAno systems – see below for more information about those).
Continue readingRichard Ashbery has been at it again – ‘it’ being converting graphics programs from other sources (or writing some inspired by them) to run on a Raspberry Pi in BBC BASIC, and chaining them together to produce a video of the output, which he’s uploaded to YouTube.
This is part 2 of a selection, and some of the original versions were written in BBC BASIC for Windows, some from the Creative Retro Coding site (aka a gallery of programs that were posted on Twitter to be run by the BBC Micro bot emulation.
