Free books and a magazine to download

David Bradforth of Alligata Media has made two books available as free downloads via his Alligata site on MagCloud. BASIC V for the Acorn Archimedes was written by Mike Williams and originally published by Dabs Press in 1989, and was acquired by Alligata Media in 2005. According to the blurb the “book provides a practical guide to programming in BASIC V on the Acorn Archimedes. Assuming a familiarity with the BBC BASIC language in general, it describes the many new commands offered by BASIC V.”

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Snippets – 24th February 2012

Basalt and the Toolbox Steve Drain, prompted by a discussion in the RISC OS Open Ltd forum about AppBasic, has written a document about the using the Toolbox with Basalt which, he explains, has never been very well described. Basalt (“BASic ALTernative keywords”) is a module that extends BASIC by providing “alternative keywords by extending the use of actual keywords and adding new keywords, both of which are used completely as native BASIC keywords.” The document is available online, at the link given above, and it is also included in…

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BASIC libraries galore

Steve Drain has released a number of BASIC libraries, and a new version of the Basalt module. The Strings BASIC library provides routines for handling long strings, referenced by normal string variables. All the standard string keywords are emulated and work with any combination of normal string variables and expressions and long strings. Written to explore a new idea for providing long string support in Basalt, which is yet to be fully written, Steve is releasing the library because it may be of interest.

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TBAFS 26bit version available for download

Alan Peters of TBA Software has announced that the 26bit version of TBAFS is now available for download. In a post on the RISC OS Open Ltd forum, and a similar one on the TBA Blog, he stresses that this is version 1.01 of the software, dating from 1996 and that it has only been tested on versions of RISC OS up to 3.7, and requires the “Acorn” toolbox modules. The software can be found on the TBA downloads page, along with a 32bit beta version of TBAFS, and a…

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Snippets – 9th October 2011

Pi in the sky – or, at least, near Heathrow Airport For those interested in the Raspberry Pi, the RISC OS London Show (29th October, 2011, St Giles Hotel, Feltham) will be well worth a visit, since the tiny, low cost computer is set to make an appearance. It’s not known at this stage if it will be running RISC OS by the time of the show, but it seems likely that it will be on the RISC OS Open Ltd stand, judging by comments in their forum. Speaking of…

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Snippets – 16th July 2011

Chris Gransden has announced the availability of version 3.02.1.24 of PDF, allowing users to view files in the ever prevalent Portable Document File format from Adobe. Changes in this version include better interaction with Paint and better facilities when saving images. PDF can, of course, be used to view Drag ‘n Drop, a PDF based magazine aimed at Acorn 8-bit and RISC OS 32-bit communities – and volume 2 issue 4 is now available to purchase online for £3. Features in this issue include part 9 of Dave Stratford’s series…

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Quick fix for IyonixPC year increase bug

IMPORTANT UPDATE: RISC OS 5.16 is now available from RISC OS Open Ltd. This an official release and, as well as a number of other updates and improvements to RISC OS 5.xx, if programmed into the Iyonix ROM will solve the clock problem described below. This means the program presented below to act as a temporary solution to the problem is now no longer necessary. If you are using it, please remember to remove it from your boot sequence prior to rebooting your updated computer. However, please note that if…

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