The next meeting of the RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) takes place on Monday, 16th March (tomorrow), and the guest speaker is Matt Godbolt, who is fitting the group in during a visit to London from his home in Chicago.
Matt started out programming on a Sinclair Spectrum before shifting to the much more powerful (and more relevant to Acorn and RISC OS folk) BBC Master, then the even more powerful Archimedes. He has written for Acorn User magazine, produced games for the BBC, as well as software for the RISC OS world, including things like an Internet Relay Chat client (which saw a lot of use in a previous RISCOSitory bunker in the latter half of the 1990s).
He moved on from the Archimedes to PC, and his programming experience defined his career path, working for companies such as Argonaut Games, Google, and others – but has still found time to develop software that has relevance to (even if it doesn’t directly run on) our platform, with JSbeeb, a BBC Micro emulator written in Javascript, and which powers the (almost)1Complete BBC Micro Games Archive – a particular gem for retro enthusiasts.
Another browser-based project of Matt’s is his Compiler Explorer, which can be interesting for developers, because it allows the output of a number of different compilers to be analysed, to see how they optimise code, and to see what changes can be made to the source to improve those results.
Matt will be visiting the pub in person to talk about these projects and his Acorn computing history, and probably more besides, so the best way to enjoy his talk is to be there yourself, although – as usual – if you can’t make it, there’s always the online option.
If you can make it to the pub, your destination is:
The Duke of Sussex
(Upstairs in the Chichester or Petworth Room)
23 Baylis Road,
London,
SE1 7AY.
There are directions to the venue on the ROUGOL website, and you can expect to find members lurking from around 6:30pm. The meeting proper will commence from around 7:45pm.
If you can’t make it to the pub, but can make it to your own desk, you can use Zoom if you have a device that can run the software. You’ll also need the log-in credentials, which remain the same as previous meetings – so if you’ve already joined one you should have them, but if not you can get them by contacting ROUGOL. The Zoom meeting should be open for people to join from around 7:30pm.
Looking ahead
- 20th April: Paolo Zaino and Martin Eastwood will be talking desktop themes. Paolo will be talking about how theming works, and his software to help make theming more versatile and cohesive, while Martin will be talking about how and why he created his Frosted theme.
- 18th May: Jim Mitchell managed the ARM development team and was head of the Acorn Research Centre in Palo Alto. Jim and his team were developing ARX, which was the original operating system planned for use on the Archimedes, and will be talking to the group about his time there.
!ReadMe
- There is one game that not only isn’t found on the site, but will probably never show up there: The BBC Micro version of Escape from Exeria, which only sold a very small number of copies and is almost certainly lost for good – fewer than the number of fingers on a typical hand – so the site can only ever (to me) be the “(almost) Complete BBC Micro Games Archive”.
