News nybble: Imagery given kiss of life

Rick Murray has dug out an old graphics application, Imagery, that was originally a commercial package and subsequently released on an Acorn World cover disc in 1993. With some basic – or in this case BASIC – hacking, the application now works again on modern systems. For more details – and a link to download – have a read of this thread on the RISC OS Open forum.

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Mop Tops top speed topped up

And some other game updates from AMCOG, too. A number of titles from AMCOG Games – specifically, those that run in 16 million colour screen modes – have been updated with improved compatibility with the latest ROM updates for ARMSX ARMX6 and Titanium machines. At the same time, the company has seen fit to add some new features to the products, as follows:

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Arriving on the platform now: Train times

TrainTimes is a new application from Kevin Wells. Less astute readers might assume that’s some kind of newspaper for train spotters, but everyone else will surely realise it’s actually for viewing the times that trains are due. The application can display the times for up to the next eight trains that are due at any given UK railway station, with a button for each of those trains that will show you the stations and times for that individual train.

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Voting is now open in the RISC OS Awards for 2017

The annual RISC OS Awards poll undertaken by RISCOSitory on the RISC OS Awards website is now under way – so you can now cast your votes. The poll is running a little later than planned, but between now and late May you will be able to vote for your favourite piece of software, the show you enjoyed the most, the project you find most interesting, and so on. As usual, there are up to six initial suggestions in most categories, along with an option to make an alternative nomination,…

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News nybble: Game development at ROUGOL – 19th March

The last few years have seen a notable upsurge in game development on RISC OS, and this month’s ROUGOL meeting reflects that. Kicking off at 7:45pm, the meeting takes place on Monday, 19th March, at it’s usual venue: The Blue-Eyed Maid (upstairs, in the restaurant), 173 Borough High Street, London, SE1 1HR. The subject matter is Game Development, with a presentation being given jointly by Tony Bartram of AMCOG Games and Tim H-Smith of Square Games. Tony is now a familiar name to RISC OS Users, but Tim is a…

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News nybble: Rick Murray releases KanaTutor

Learning Japanese, I think I’m learning Japanese, I really think so! For a number of years now, Rick Murray has been trying to learn the hiragana and katakana Japanese syllabaries, which are components of the written language. To assist with the process, he has developed an application called KanaTutor, which is now available free of charge from !Store. Rick explains that the program is not a one-stop tool for learning Japanese, the written form of which is very complicated – it’s merely a self-help learning/testing tool. You really need to…

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News nybble: Quake updated

You receive 25 health! Following R-Comp‘s release of a new version of Quake just before this year’s Southwest Show, further work has been carried out on the source code, and there is now a new version available from !Store. The updated version benefits from hardware-accelerated floating point capabilities of modern CPUs, which provides a significant performance boost, with profiles included to offer either smooth 60 frames per second gameplay, or higher resolutions, or aspect-correct widescreen, and so on. The game can now be played on the Raspberry Pi 3, and…

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News nybble: 3D squash game released

And called TENiS. Obviously. Patrick M has released yet another simple game, which he says is “based on tennis but it’s a bit different, so I’ve spelled it TENiS” – well, quite. It’s actually a one player squash game. Squash is indeed a bit like tennis, but you hit the ball against the far wall – exactly like you do in Patrick’s TENiS game. Odd naming aside, the objective of this simple but fun game is to keep the ball in play, bouncing it against the far walls, as well…

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