Sound as a 32-bit compatible pound. There are a number of ways to make RISC OS computer play sound samples – perhaps for sound effects in games – and one of these is to turn the sound sample into a voice module, an option often provided by software that works with audio samples. One such example was Armadeus, which came from Clares Micro Supplies – and is the software I used myself for the sound samples used in some of the budget games released by Soft Rock Software in the…
Read MoreLossless JPEG transformations made easy with TranJPEG
You spin me right round, baby, right round, like a record JPEG baby, right round round round. Chris Johnson, well known for a number of applications, in particular the likes of Snapper and SyncDiscs, both of which began life with David Pilling and later taken over by Chris, recently announced version 1.00 of TranJPEG (mirror), soon followed by updates to version 1.10 and 1.20, which presents a RISC OS front-end for the Independent JPEG Group command-line utility “jpegtran”, giving the user a friendly and easy way to make use of…
Read MoreFree “VirtualRPC in Use” e-books
Ee be free, ee be. Well known to readers of Archive Magazine, the group known as T.O.M.S. – who first appeared in the magazine in volume 13, issue 11 (August 2000) with a review of the Epson Stylus Photo 1200 – had a semi-regular series of articles published in the A5 periodical from volume 17, issue 3 (December 2003) until volume 19, issue 4 (January 2006) . That series was centered around using VirtualRPC, an emulator for Windows and Mac OS X computers that allows those people who need to…
Read MoreExclusive: A new interface for a new era – introducing RISC OS Rainbow
Paint the whole RISC OS world with a rainbow! There can’t be many RISC OS users who haven’t encountered a modern touchscreen device, such as a smartphone or a tablet computer – indeed, R-Comp have been selling a tablet now for a couple of years, and have made quite a big thing about it, so it’s difficult to imagine how any RISC OS user could have missed the technology. Smartphones and tablets are often very powerful computers in their own right, but – surely everyone knows – they’re designed to…
Read MoreSnapper jumps from version 1.17 to 1.20
One, two, miss a few, ninety-nine, one hundred. 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 software provides an easy way to save areas of the screen as sprites, something that can also be done with Paint, supplied as standard with RISC OS, but with additional options that make Snapper much more versatile.
Read MoreMurnong 2.32 released
Keeping up with the Joneses YouTube Wget Murnong, Christopher Martin’s application for downloading YouTube videos, has been updated to version 2.32. The software is designed to parse web pages fed to it that have been saved from YouTube, Google’s video sharing website, so that the address of the embedded video can be established. Once it’s done that, it launches Wget to download the file so that it can be played with FFplay or converted with FFmpeg – both of which have been ported to RISC OS by Christopher.
Read MoreGerman magazine GAG-News CD 5 available
It’s GAG-News, not bad news! Back in September, when reporting that Drag ‘n Drop had ceased publication (again), I said: This leaves RISC OS with only one remaining magazine, Archive. Already the platform’s only remaining printed magazine… This was incorrect, a fact pointed out to me in the comments on that post. Not only is there another magazine still being published as well as Archive (and Drag ‘n Drop, which was subsequently resurrected by Christopher Dewhurst), but it’s a printed magazine to boot.
Read MoreNetSurf gains experimental Javascript support
I blinked and I missed it. Isn’t it just typical that something particularly notable would happen during the period in which I was less able to devote any time to RISCOSitory? That something was Javascript support coming to RISC OS NetSurf, in the form of test/experimental builds, which was announced in mid-December on the NetSurf users mailing list by Vincent Sanders, who said:
Read MoreAMOS BASIC comes to RISC OS
It’s BASIC, Jim, but not as we know it. Chris Gransden, who has ported a number of emulators and games to RISC OS, has been busy again. In December, he released a test version of XAMOS [direct download], ported to RISC OS after it was suggested on the RISC OS Open forums. Originally published by Europress Software and developed by François Lionet and Constantin Sotiropoulos, AMOS BASIC was a version of the BASIC language for the Commodore Amiga home computer,
Read MoreOSLib 7.00 released
OSLib! OSLib! OSLib! Oi! Oi! Oi! The release of OSLib 7.00 was announced in December by John Tytgat, who said: On behalf of the entire OSLib development team, I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of OSLib 7.00, an Open Source API for RISC OS development.
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