Hang on, have I written the Southwest Show report yet? Ah, yes. What about Wakefield? Er…
The countdown until the end of the Long Gap, when the RISC OS London Show takes place, has now ticked down to twenty days. It takes place on Saturday, 26th October at the St Giles Hotel, Feltham – so I hope everyone has their travel (and if necessary hotel) arrangements made, and that the show will be busy with plenty of visitors.
On the other side of the coin, it’ll certainly have plenty of exhibitors – the show website currently has twenty four listed, and as well as many of the usual names there are some that will be there for the very first time.
Glancing down through the regulars first, the larger and/or more important companies that will be present include CJE Micro’s and R-Comp, both of whom tend to make their pre-show announcements that tell us what to expect from them in the week running up to the event. This list of exhibitors also includes RISC OS Open Ltd, who administer the RISC OS source code on everyone’s behalf, and RISC OS Developments Ltd, who own the OS.
Amongst the more regular exhibitors, expect to see new products from some, such as the PiROmid from RISCOSbits (which I must say is a truly excellent name; the person who thought that up is a genius), a new game from AMCOG called Star Mine, which is a first person perspective space game, built using digitally enhanced physical models.
Adrian Lees will be demonstrating Aemulor and Geminus, but he also plans to show off a major new application – though, as yet, he hasn’t revealed what it is. Hopefully, he’ll make an announcement before the show, but in case he doesn’t you know where you need to be on 26th October!
Other regular exhibitors include Organizer, 3rd Event Technologies, Soft Rock Software, RPCEmu, the RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) – aka the show’s organisers – Tricky Gaming, BBC Media Preservation, and others, and of those that have products available, either to buy or to download free of charge, many of them will have the latest versions on show.
And allowing me to neatly segue between regular and new exhibitors is Tom Williamson. Regular show visitors will recognise Tom, who has previously exhibited at London as Ident Computer with the company’s Micro One and Risc CE cases for the Raspberry Pi – but this will be his first appearance at London representing WiFi Sheep, his rapidly growing podcast and YouTube channel through which he explores and discusses the world of tech.
An interesting exhibit will have a sort of retro feel to it, in that Jim Russell – one of the new exhibitors – will be showing off his BBC Microcomputer. Why is a BBC Micro only ‘sort of retro’? Well, it runs a little operating system that you might have heard of, called RISC OS. (Something small, such as a Raspberry Pi, might very well be assisting it in that task!)
(Picture taken, I believe, by Bryan Hogan at the recent Acorn World event in Cambridge)
Another new exhibitor is Daryl Dudey, a returning user who has developed a 3D graphics engine in the form of a module, so it can be used from C, BASIC, or any other language capable of issuing SWI calls. He says it currently sports around ten SWIs that provide fast 2D primitives, all designed for 24-bit colour, and all much quicker than using the operating system’s own OS_Plot calls.
The University of Cantabria, which is in Santander in Northern Spain, will also be a first-time exhibitor with UCDebug. The software is an ARM debugger that runs in the desktop, and was first spotted on GitHub late last year – and this will also form one of the day’s theatre presentations, along with four others from R-Comp, RISC OS Developments, RISC OS Open Ltd, and WiFi Sheep.
With tickets costing £5.00 on the door (free for under-16s), the show will run from 11:00am until 5:00pm, at:
St Giles Hotel,
Hounslow Road,
Feltham,
TW14 9AD.
The location has excellent transport links, with Feltham Railway Station just a few minutes along the road, a number of buses running along the road and stopping at the station, Heathrow airport just a short bus trip away, and Junction three of the M4 just three and a half miles away.
See you there!
