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Letters Page

It's quite ace and it fills up the space...it's the RISCWorld letters page.

And this months guest host is Cyril Fletcher.....

Dear Sir,

It's no wonder you've only just produced your first letters page - you don't make your email address easy to find! I have a suite of three games (one of) which might be suitable for the StarPROG section. Lawrence Granville says "If you want StarPROG to continue then send in your contributions!" but doesn't suggest where to send them.

I do like RiscWorld and I find the backup of the csa.* newsgroups very useful.
Joyce Haslam

Thank you Ester, fair comment about contacting us, there is an HTML page for contacts, but the link to it was hidden at the bottom of the main contents page, Aaron has now moved it to somewhere a bit more obvious, perhaps in 72 point neon pink letters? (No. Ed). I have passed on the copy of !Mazers to Laurence for inclusion in StarProg. The backup of the UseNet seems to be very popular with readers, now you can read all the misinformed half truths without having to pay for the phone calls!

Dear Sir,
I've enjoyed your articles on using DrawWorks. Keep the ideas coming - I've found them very useful.
Brian Scott

The DrawWorks series is proving very popular, perhaps this would be a good time to ask what people would really like to see in the next few articles, what bits of DrawWorks New Millennium would you like Aaron to cover?

Dear Sir,
The last 2 copies of RISCWorld have failed on my RISC PC running RISCOS 4.03. I had hoped that someone else would have found and investigated it to save my effort, but it seems they haven't got quite my setup. Double clicking on !RWORLD on the CD filer window reports 'Application may have gone wrong...', 'Abort on Data Transfer at &022D6824. This memory location proves to be at offset &000002C0 in the module UnAppComp (v0.023 Oct '96, by Jason Tribbeck) which is loaded on my setup by Choices.Boot.Tasks.!Zip during boot up. If I remove !Zip from the boot up sequence then !RWORLD works OK.
Your RUNIT Abs. file within !RWORLD seems to be there to simply Filer_Run the HTML file INDEX and it is in this RUNIT file that the failure seems to happen, as just double-clicking on INDEX works OK and loads into my version of Fresco(2.13).
Barry Punchard

The little !RUNIT program hidden inside RISCWorld issues 4 and 5 seems to have caused a fair amount of problems, from this issue we are trying a new version which we hope will solve the problems. The author responsible is a Mr D. Holden of No Fixed Abode (number 7a) and has been severely castigated, although he did tell us...

I think you've solved it yourself. RUNIT is necessary to canonicalise the filename before running the HTML, otherwise the browser won't be able to find the links. It does this perfectly legally using OS_FSControl 37. It would appear that you've got a piece of 'rogue' software that's intercepting this call and interfering with it.

For those of you unfamiliar with technical support speak that translates as "it's someone elses fault", and indeed the !RUNIT application is completely legal!. However Aaron has noticed that quitting a ZIP driver (if loaded) will often sort out the problem. If this doesn't work then simply SHIFT Double Clicking on the RISCWorld application and then double click on the INDEX html file. However Mr Punchard was not the only one who had problems....

Dear Sir,
This arises from your rant in the 5th issue. I had some problem with the CD for Issue 3, needing several tries to get it running. I had very severe problems with reading the CD for Issue 4, and got the disc exchanged but with no better result, followed by a series of inconclusive exchanges with David Holden who thought my x24 CD drive might be to blame. Note that these two discs are the only ones of many I have, including the first three issues of RiscWorld, that gave any trouble, so it's clear that the CD discs have changed, not my drive. Since I could eventually manage occasionally to read the Alien version, I left it at that. Now having read your rant in Issue 5, and soft loaded the OS 3.7 version of CDFS as you suggested, I have no problem with starting up these two discs.Nobody ever suggested the need to do this before. However, all is not actually well. On both the Issue 4 and 5 discs, running the application instantly brings up a warning that the application may have gone wrong with "Abort on data transfer etc". I can read the Alien version with no problem. I also discovered that it is still possible to get the "empty tray" message. All you have to do is to click on the disc drive icon before the green LED has been and gone. Nobody ever told me that before either.
John Gibson

Well we are delighted that Aarons rant of the month at least provided some help. The CD's have changed from issue 3 onwards, however any CD-ROM drive will still read them, but the software driver supplied with RISC OS 4 can get things quite badly wrong at times. The problem with the "Abort on data transfer" errors will be caused by something on your computer, but at present we have no idea what, perhaps the new version of !RUNIT will solve the problem. As software developers will testify the only thing that works 100% of the time is the error dialogue box.

And now part of an on-going e-mail exchange between John Cartmell and David Bradforth.

Dear Sir,
The last issue seemed a touch slim - but maybe I haven't had time to explore it all yet.
John Cartmell

Do let Aaron know your views - if you felt it were a touch slim, tell him what you feel could be done to improve it. Strictly speaking, though, the issue of RISC World that's just gone out (number 5) is the largest issue yet, and if you count value by the software on the cover disc, there's really a lot to look at!
David Bradforth

Dear Sir,
It's always very subjective - which is why I wouldn't repeat such stuff on a newsgroup. It's possibly the impression I got because I already had most, if not all of the software. On a second look there are articles that I need to return to; once I've struggled through the programming tutorials I might have a different perspective.
John Cartmell

David was quite correct, issue 5 was the biggest issue so far. We do try and ensure we include a wide range of articles as well as exclusives on the latest developments, witness our review of the RiscStation Osaris last issue. I have been asked to remind readers that RISCWorld is your magazine, if there is something you want use to write about then please do e-mail the editor Aaron Timbrell. .

Well thats it for this issues letters page, and I am indebted to a Mr M from London who sent in this amusing carrot. (you are fired - ED). Next time we hope to have an amusing little man from Cardif who can say sausages but can't add up, back to you Ester.

Cyril Fletcher