Up periscope! Nemo to navigate Nautilus up the Thames

An obvious reference like that is impossible to resist – sorry! The next meeting of the RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) will take place on Monday, 20th March, and the guest speaker will be telling us how his submarine, Nautilus, is controlled via RISC OS. Wait, what? No, okay, then. The guest speaker will be Nemo20000, rather than Jules Verne’s fictional captain Nemo. ‘Our’ Nemo doesn’t have a submarine, but he does have some interesting RISC OS things to talk about.

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SprEdit by Richard Swetman reviewed

Does anyone remember the excellent bitmap editing program ProArtisan 24 from Clares? Richard Swetman has written a simple bitmap editor program called SprEdit which performs some impressive sprite operations. The application can be installed via Packman, or directly from Richard Swetman’s website, where Richard has also provided some useful 256 colour test sprites – scroll down to section (m) under the Graphics heading.

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News nybble: Another BBC BASIC graphics video

Richard Ashbery has been at it again – ‘it’ being converting graphics programs from other sources (or writing some inspired by them) to run on a Raspberry Pi in BBC BASIC, and chaining them together to produce a video of the output, which he’s uploaded to YouTube. This is part 2 of a selection, and some of the original versions were written in BBC BASIC for Windows, some from the Creative Retro Coding site (aka a gallery of programs that were posted on Twitter to be run by the BBC…

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News nybble: Parametric equations on graphics programming website

Richard Ashbery has added another section to his website on the subject of simple graphics programming in BBC BASIC V on RISC OS. Section 8 (which sounds ominously like some top secret government black ops outfit until you discover that it…) covers parametric (not paramilitary) equations. Ahem. Anyway… According to Richard, these equations can be used to draw standard geometric shapes such as circles, squares, triangles, etc., along with more intricate patterns such as astroids, rose patterns, fish curves, hypo-cycloids, etc. There are twelve example graphic illustrations included at the…

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News nybble: Butterfly screen saver now available on !Store

If you look at Richard Ashbery’s Graphics Programming website, and in particular at the Animated Graphics examples, you’ll notice an animated GIF that isn’t included in the programs that can be downloaded from the site – but if you want to see the program in action, it is now possible to download it via !Store, in the form of a screen saver. That GIF is described as a Butterfly Curve. The shape is formed from parametric equations – in this particular case, discovered by mathematician Telple H. Fay – which…

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News nybble: Animated graphics examples land on Graphics Programming website

Richard Ashbery has updated his Graphic Programming Website, on which he provides a handy introduction to writing graphical ditties in BBC BASIC. This update inserts a section 6, entitled Animated Patterns, on which there is a zip file to download containing over thirty programs to run, edit, and just enjoy. Referring to the page, Richard tells me he’s been “looking at the numerous and sometimes remarkable curves that can be created from parametric equations” – highlighting in particular the Butterfly Curve. Discovered by Overpuddlian mathematician Temple H. Fay, just two…

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News nybble: Hardware graphics acceleration for ARMX6 and mini.m

Having first demonstrated it at this year’s Southwest Show, R-Comp Interactive has now released an upgrade to allow computers based around the i.MX6 CPU/GPU to benefit from hardware graphics acceleration. With it running, scrolling through documents is much faster, redraw is greatly improved when moving windows around, and so on. Priced at £29.99, the upgrade is available via !Store (look for “ARMX6 Turbo Graphics”) or, if you’d prefer, get in touch with R-Comp on 01925 755 043 to  purchase it over the phone, in which case the (quite small) module…

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