Get in a flap, but don’t pipe down (updated 23rd June)

I mean, don’t HIT a pipe, or you’ll GO down! Almost a decade ago, a very simple game was hatched from the mind of Vietnamese programmer Dong Nguyen. The game, Flappy Bird, was a very simple sideways scrolling game with only one control requirement – to tap the screen. This caused Faby, the flappy bird in question, to flap its wings and gain some height, otherwise it’d descend – all the while flying to the right. Update, 23rd June, 2022: The RISC OS version of this game has now been…

Snippets – 9th January, 2022

A roundup of 2021 news and releases not already covered on RISCOSitory With 2021 now behind us, the time has come for one final round up of news that hasn’t already found its way onto onto these pages – although this time, in fact, it’s the only round up of such news for 2021; for 2020, a snippets post appeared half way through the year and then another just after the year ended – but no earlier post has been compiled for 2021.

RISC OS Awards results 2020 now online

Open for approximately three months, the 2020 RISC OS Awards poll covering 2020 ran from April until June of this year, and received 141 valid votes. The results were calculated a little later than planned, but making a change from the normal approach of publishing them on Twitter and then the Awards website, this time around they were presented live at the RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) meeting on 16th August.

Cavern pops its way into !Store

I’m forever blowing bubbles orbs… A popular game from yesteryear was Bubble Bobble, which was available for a number of 8-bit home computer platforms and consoles – a platform game in which the player moved around each level, firing bubbles at the monsters in order to eliminate them. It’s also one of the games featured in the Code the Classics book from the Raspberry Pi folk – and the ‘type in listing’ from that book, written in Python, is called Cavern.

Tutorials and documentation

New users – getting started with RISC OS If you are a new RISC OS user, the way the system works may seem a little confusing compared to other operating systems that you might be accustomed to – such as the touch interfaces found on phones and tablets, or even other systems that use a keyboard and mouse, like Windows, MacOS, and Linux-based platforms. A good starting point to learning how the operating system works might be the RISC OS User Guide, a printed manual that covers everything from the…