Snippets – 13th January, 2018

A round-up of 2017 news that could have been reported on at the time if people had only sent it this way! With 2017 now behind us, looking back over the RISCOSitory posts for the year might leave people thinking there has been very little activity in the RISC OS world – but in fact it merely means there have been very few posts on the site over the course of the year. This, sadly, is a reflection of the amount of news submitted to RISCOSitory by developers etc, more…

Point and click adventure system ScummVM 2.0 released

Now, where are my Simon the Sorcerer discs? And how do I get the contents onto my ARMSX ARMX6? A major new version of ScummVM has been released, including a version for RISC OS. The software is a ‘virtual machine’ that makes it possible to play a raft of classic “point and click” adventure games – including a great many that were never ported to our platform in the first place.

New edition of Doom Trilogy, with some added Wolfenstein 3D

No mention of eye of newt or toe of frog. Fans of first person shooters should have a soft spot for Doom from id Software. While it wasn’t the first game of this type, it’s certainly one of the pioneer titles that helped popularise the genre, and led to a number of follow-ups and expansions. The game  featured texture-mapped surfaces and varying room and level heights – a step up from the simpler Wolfenstein 3D, the previous game from the same company – as well as mood-setting MIDI music, and…

Show report: Southwest 2017

Seven months on? This must be some kind of a record! The RISC OS Southwest Show this year took place on 25th February – so this show report sets quite a record for the time between the event and its appearance at just under seven months. Unfortunately, this is a reflection of the amount of time I’ve had available in that intervening period to sit down and write the report. Which is to say: very little. To make matters slightly worse, I usually refer to the photos I’ve taken at…

R-Comp Interactive puts Titanium into Beeblebrox mode

If it supports two heads, does that mean it’ll soon support three ARMs?1 Users of R-Comp‘s TiMachine computer – and those who are subscribed to their support scheme for Elesar‘s Titanium – can now make use of the two DVI-I outputs found on the motherboard. The company has released DualHead, which makes it easy to drive two separate monitors from the board.

AMCOG Development Kit updated

Hot on the heels of a new release of Cyborg, which was written using the AMCOG Development Kit, AMCOG Games has released an updated version of the Kit itself, with version 1.03 having been made available yesterday. The aim of the package is to make it simpler for people to get into writing games for RISC OS, using BBC BASIC. As such, the central core of the kit is a library of BASIC functions that cover sprite plotting, error handling, screen transitions, MP3 playback, and much more. There is also…

Cyborg gets new implants, making it v2.20

Thankfully, though, that doesn’t turn it into a dodgy 1993 sequel1 Launched earlier this year at Wakefield by AMCOG Games, Cyborg is an arcade action game by Tony Bartram in which you take on the role of a cyborg treasure hunter, seeking out ancient treasure in Castle CyberDroid – and Tony has just pushed out Cyborg Second Edition, an update to the game that brings it up to version 2.20.

Wakefield’s on the horizon – so what’s in store?

This year’s Wakefield Show takes place on 22nd April, so it’s time for a brief look at what’s in store for visitors – and judging by what’s on the show website, along with other factors, it very much looks as though there could be something interesting afoot. The starting point for suggesting that is a 4th April entry in the “latest news” on the show website’s front page, which notes that a short additional slot has been added at the start of the day’s talks in the show theatre. Being…

Free patch available for PhotoDesk 3.14

CJE Micro’s has made a free patch available for photo editing and retouching package PhotoDesk, to address a problem experienced by some users of version 3.14 when using the application’s Special Effects filters. In some cases, use of the filters can cause what Chris Evans described as a “serious crash” – which, judging by a discussion on usenet group comp.sys.acorn.apps (before it veered onto the subject of whether the application should be called PhotoDesk or Photodesk1), looks as though it might specifically affect Iyonix, ARMiniX, and ARMX6.