In January, Elesar‘s Rob Sprowson paid a visit to the RISC OS User Group of London to talk about CloudFS, and another ‘mystery’ product, later revealed to be font management system Font Directory Pro, originally from LOOKsystems. At that point, a new version of the software was ready, and the only remaining task before it could be released was converting the large user manual. The last release from LOOKsystems was all the way back in 2003, and the new version (3.20) sees the software updated to work on newer ARM…
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News nybble: RDSP beta receives a tune up
AMCOG Games’ Tony Bartram has released an updated beta [zip] version of his Wavebox-inspired synthesiser module, RDSP. The module provides modern RISC OS computer systems with the means to both synthesise sounds, and play back sound samples with various effects applied to them. The latest version – the second beta release – adds support for modulating samples via BASIC’s ENVELOPE command, support for sample looping (which means a simple drum loop, for example, can be made to play indefinitely), increases the number of channels to sixteen, and much more. For…
Read MoreMiniTime waits for no man – version 1.06 released
Fred Graute has released another new version of MiniTime, an application that displays the date and time in an icon or a small, unobtrusive window, allowing the user to see the information at a glance, but without the application or its window getting in the way. The headline features of version 1.06 are:
Read MoreMop Tops gains new levels and sounds in version 1.20
AMCOG games has released a new version of Mop Tops, the company’s most recent game, with more levels, more music tracks, new sound effects, and improved graphics. Launched at London 2016, the game was inspired by Lemmings and involves the player placing various tools and objects on the play area for the titular Mop Tops to interact with, the aim being to guide them to the exit on each level. As such, each level is a puzzle that needs to be solved, and the player is given the building blocks…
Read MoreNews nybble: StrongMen 1.27 released
Originally developed by Guttorm Vik in the late 1990s as part of his editor project – which today we all know and love (Zap users excepted) as StrongED – StrongMen can display a hierarchical menu structure based on the contents of a text file. The menu entries can be used to run applications, launch URLs in the default web browser, provide a list of open files, and more. Fred Graute, the application’s current maintainer, has just released version 1.27, which offers full Choices support, three new commands for use in…
Read MoreNews nybble: Asteroid-clone SpaceShip game released
Having first appeared on the RISC OS Open forum in February of last year, Patrick M – who at that point said he was new to programming – has had a bash at turning what he’s learnt since that point into a simple Asteroid-clone called SpaceShip [zip]. Tony Bartram of Amcog Games has since modified SpaceShip to use sound effects produced by his RDSP sound module – making it the first game to use the module for sound effects. RDSP is currently only at an alpha release, but the results…
Read MoreNews nybble: Experimental multi-core ROM in the wild
Cor Cor, blimey! In the 483rd post to a thread on the RISC OS Open forum that was started over six years ago and runs to twenty pages, Jeffrey Lee has made available a new toy for those users that want to try it out – a ROM build for the Raspberry Pi that includes support for those versions of the board that feature multiple cores (i.e. the version 2 and 3 Pis). The release includes the source for the current HAL and kernel changes and SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) module,…
Read MoreStrongHelp given a leg-up to version 2.89
Eigen see why a new version was needed. Fred Graute has released a new version of StrongHelp, the simple hypertext system for designing and reading on-screen manuals, help texts, etc. The software dates back to a time when the world wide web, and HTML, was largely unknown1, and provided a neat way for software developers – particularly small companies and hobby programmers, who might not have had the resources to produce full-blown manuals – to include manuals with their software that were something more than just text files.
Read MoreNews nybble: Start 2017 with a bang!
And a drum loop, and some chords… If you’ve not yet had a chance to look at this year’s RISC OS Awards poll, or simply have yet to decide what to choose in some categories, Tony Bartram of Amcog Games has released something to help you make that decision in at least one category. Tony is one of the nominations in the Most innovative or interesting project category for a Wavebox-inspired synthesizer project which, amongst other things, should result in a simple to use sound capability on modern hardware –…
Read MoreMiniTime ticks up to version 1.05
Fred Graute has brought out another new version of MiniTime, his application for displaying the date and time in a small icon or window, without taking up too much space or generally getting in the way of your day to day use of the computer. With version 1.05, Fred has increased the configurability of MiniTime in a couple of ways:
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