The Calendar page has been updated to show the RISC OS events I know about for 2018. If there are any inaccuracies you are aware of, or if you are involved in or know of a user group or event not listed, please let me know.
Read More“Our next meeting is on Monday. Get stuffed!” says ROUGOL*
*They did not actually say this. It’s the group’s informal Christmas meal! The December meeting for the RISC OS User Group of London takes place on Monday, 18th December – a date that necessitates a couple of slight changes to the normal monthly proceedings. The meeting takes place in the usual venue – the Blue-Eyed Maid – but being a so close to Christmas, there is high seasonal demand for space in the restaurant, so the expectation is to meet in the bar downstairs for a more informal meeting.
Read MoreNews nybble: Access Photoshop PSD files
Plus a new version of rRaw. PhShpLyrs is an application from Anton Reiser that makes it possible to pull the image and individual layers from a Photoshop PSD file and save them as a RISC OS-native image format. There are some limitations as to the type of PSD file, but when such a file is loaded into the application it allows the main image and any layers to be saved as sprites (with a full alpha channel). It’s also possible to wrap all of the layers (though not the main…
Read MoreNews nybble: Date revealed for London 2018
It appears that the London Show website was quietly updated a few weeks ago with the date of the 2018 event: 27th October. The venue will again be the St Giles Hotel, Feltham, and the doors will be open to the public from 11:00am until 5:00pm, with an entry fee of £5.00 on the door for adults and £0.00 for under-16s.
Read MoreShow report: Wakefield 2017
The newly established record for how long it takes to publish a show report is broken again! Er… yay?
Read MoreWhat do you get if you cross a two headed Titanium with 256 colours?
An extra wide, 256 colour display! With two DVI-I sockets on board, one of the selling points of Elesar‘s Titanium is the ability to drive two displays side by side. RISC OS doesn’t (properly) support this, but it can be done by fooling the operating system into treating the two screens as though they are one. The software to do this has been available since February 2016. Much more recently, an updated ROM image was released in July of this year that allowed the board to use 256 colour screen…
Read MoreNews nybble: Southampton meeting – 12th December
Mark Tuesday, 12th December in your diaries if you are a RISC OS user within shouting distance of Southampton, because that’s when the next meeting takes place for users in that area. Those who attend the meeting are welcome to bring along any hardware or software to discuss with the group. There will be at least one small network of RISC OS computers, and an internet connection – and it’s a stroke of luck that this is December, the same month in which Christmas falls, because there will be a…
Read MoreNews nybble: AMCOG Games at WROCC – 6th December
Also: There will be mince pies. (Hmm… should this have been the headline?) The December meeting of the Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club takes place on the 6th – that’s this Wednesday – and Tony Bartram of AMCOG Games will be the guest speaker, discussing the art of writing games and producing the necessary audio-visual effects with RISC OS. All of AMCOG’s games to date will be demonstrated, including an in-development first person perspective zombie game, and RDSP – Tony’s sound synthesis engine. WROCC members can attend the meeting for…
Read MoreNews bit: Wakefield Show website has been updated
As previously noted, the 2018 Wakefield Show will take place on 21st April. The show website has now been updated to reflect this. Keep an eye on the site for further news as the date approaches.
Read More20th birthday update for PIC suite
If you are designing or developing a piece of hardware and need to use a microcontroller, you will need a way to program it. There are many tools to do this available for other platforms (x86 in particular) – but there is also a solution for RISC OS users in the form of Rob Sprowson’s PIC suite. PIC Suite is a set of applications that make it possible to develop for Microchip’s range of 8-bit PIC microcontrollers, and it has reached its 20th birthday. To coincide with this, Rob has…
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