Removing the monetary monotony. And all the moaning. I like playing Monopoly – but I don’t like messing around with the money, and the inevitable problems it causes. I find that some people become impatient and carry on with their turns while other players are still sorting out a property purchase, a rent payment, or whatever; the main hold up usually being to count out the money, struggling to find the right notes, and so on. And if the impatient player’s move leads to another transaction, and the next player…
Read MoreCategory: Software
FFmpeg, FFplay, DRenderer updated
Updates that are a bit like buses. Except more frequent. So not like buses at all, then. New versions of FFmpeg and FFplay have been made available by Christopher Martin, bringing them up to version 1.22, along with another update to the Digital Renderer (DRenderer) module, bringing it to version 0.56 (beta release 6). FFmpeg is a versatile, open-source, multi-platform video and audio converter, described on its home site as “the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans…
Read MorePlayIt 1.73 plays more
PlayIt is a tool for playing sound samples, which is used by a number of RISC OS applications, including DigitalCD. Originally written by Rick Hudson, recent updates have been made available by Christopher Martin, who has just released version 1.73. This version is able to recognise more Replay/ARMovie files that contain audio formats that it supports, in addition to which it also includes a RISC OS 4 fast service handler, along with a slight improvement in its overall performance. Christopher recommends that all users upgrade to this version. Offering thanks…
Read MoreFFmpeg and FFmplay performance improvements
New versions of FFmpeg and FFplay have been made available by Christopher Martin, bringing them up to version 1.21, along with another update to the Digital Renderer (DRenderer) module, bringing it to version 0.55. FFmpeg is a versatile, open-source, multi-platform video and audio converter, described on its home site as “the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created.” FFmpeg makes it possible to process a large number of movie formats for which there are…
Read MoreDRenderer audio playback module – provisional update
Christopher Martin has contacted me to let me know that version 0.52-1 of the DRenderer module, which is the version currently found in the package on riscos.info, is obsolete and has a number of problems. He has been working on the module, and has contributed new sources and a build system to the GCCSDK team, so the next GCCSDK release should include version 0.54 (or later) of the module.
Read MoreMore emulation than you can shake a joystick at
Today, it seems, emulators on RISC OS are like buses: You wait for ages for one to come along, then three turn up all at once. Earlier today, Chris Gransden announced a port of Mednafen, a multi game system emulator – and he’s followed that up with two more: Snes9x and MAME.
Read MoreMednafen – multi game system emulator comes to RISC OS
Following the release of his port of Fuse, the Spectrum emulator, Chris Gransden has busied himself with porting another emulator to RISC OS. This time, it’s a port from the Unix version of Mednafen, a command line driven multiple system emulator that provides support for OpenGL and SDL graphics, network play, re-mappable input configuration, joystick and keyboard support, save states, game rewinding, GSF playback, and screenshots.
Read MoreSnapper 1.14 released
Snapper is a screen capture program, originally written by David Pilling and supplied with his scanning and image processing software, and now maintained and further developed by Chris Johnson. The application allows the user to save areas of the screen as sprites – much as can be done using Paint, supplied with all RISC OS machines, but with added bells and whistles.
Read MorePlayIt 1.72
PlayIt is a tool for playing sound samples, which is used by a number of RISC OS applications, including DigitalCD. Originally written by Rick Hudson, recent updates have been made available by Christopher Martin. The latest update, version 1.72, improves reliability, especially on 26bit systems, due to several bugs being dealt with in the software’s interrupt handling, and Christopher recommends that all users upgrade to this new version. Offering thanks to Rick Hudson and Andrew Rawnsley for making the sources available, and to Willi Theiss and Jeffrey Lee for their…
Read MoreMoreKeys than you can shake a finger at (updated 31st March, 2012)
Everyone knows the standard ways of entering ‘extended’ characters in RISC OS – those characters that aren’t readily available from a standard keyboard by just pressing a key, or shift and a key – but the approach is arguably not as user-friendly as it might be, since it either means knowing which key combination or sequence will produce which characters (get it wrong, and you have to delete and try again), or it involves switching from keyboard to mouse in order to call up an app like Chars to find…
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