This is a list of our current products, please do not hesitate to contact us for more information. To order go here.
MovieFS is our revolutionary movie translation system for the Archimedes/RISC PC range. It allows industry standard AVI (Video for Windows), Quicktime, FLI/FLC, WAV, WVE, VOC and ANM movies/samples to be played through Replay, or any replay compliant program (ARPlayer, Cineworks, Empire, Genesis, Magpie, etc).
Films can be played at full speed, in their original format, with the translation happening "on the fly", so there is no need to copy/translate the files beforehand saving valuable harddisc space.
These files are commonly found on a wide range of computers, from PCs and Macs to Unix machines, which means they are readily available from ftp sites, PD libraries, on the WWW and on CD ROMS in far greater quantities than Replay files. Magazines with CD ROMs on the cover often pad out the free space with such movies.
If you are interested in multimedia publishing, then MovieFS is for you. Replay Clipart is non existent, because at £100 pounds a minute compression cost, who can afford to give it away? AVI/Quicktime files on the other hand can be created by PCs and Macs with just a video recorder and a piece of low cost hardware.
Bundled with MovieFS comes our standalone AVI player, offering improved frame rates and memory consumption over Replay on low end machines. The player runs by default within the desktop, (but can be made to singletask for speed), and works on both RISC PC and older Archimedes though RISC OS 3.1 or later is required.
The upgrade to MovieFS from PlayAVI is free for registered customers.
MovieFS has been reviewed in the following magazines:
A free demonstration copy of the latest version is available on receipt of a disc and an SAE. Alternatively, a demo version is available here. The demo version is identical to the full version, except it will only play the first 100 frames of any movie - typically about 10 seconds - and does not support WVEs, VOCs, or AIFFs.
VRview is our new Quicktime VR viewer, with which you will be able to explore virtual worlds, as never before on RISC OS. It has been reported that the current version runs faster on a RISC PC 700 than on a powermac - and we haven't ARM coded the inner loop yet.
VRview has just been given a very nice review by RISC User (March or April 1996).
A free demonstration copy of the latest version is available here. The demo version is identical to the full version, except it will only run the following films, downloaded from http://qtvr.quicktime.apple.com/:
Current Version: 1.41
Price: £15 (no VAT to pay)
6502Em is our BBC emulator. This allows you to run almost any BBC software under RISC OS, far more reliably than with 65Host. For example, our emulator will even run games like Elite, Exile, Fortress and Zalaga that do really nasty things to the hardware.
Models supported are the A, B, Master and Master Compact, with full sideways/shadow RAM.
Software can be loaded either from tape via a printer port interface (requires tape support software), from disc in native BBC format, or using Snapshots.
Unfortunately, we are not allowed to distribute the BBC ROMs, but we supply a program that will extract them from !65Host (which is freely available), so this is not too much of a problem. For the Master 128 and Master Compact ROMs, you will need to run the supplied programs on those machines to get images of ROMs on disc, which can be `plugged in' to our emulator.
If bought with Z80Em, the combined price is reduced to just 25 pounds!
6502Em has been favourably reviewed in both Acorn User and RISC User.
Price: £15 (no VAT to pay)
Z80Em is our Spectrum emulator. This allows you to run almost any Spectrum software under RISC OS. Even full sound support is included.
Currently only 16/48k spectrums are supported, but 128k support is planned.
Software can be loaded from tape via a printer port interface (requires tape support software), or using snapshots in SNA or Z80 formats. Buy it with Speccy Sensation II, and relive your favorite games...
If bought with 6502Em, the combined price is reduced to just 25 pounds!
A free demonstration copy of the latest version is available here. The demo version will only run for a few seconds before it exits, but it should work for long enough for you to get a feel of the product.
Price: If bought with Z80Em, £15 (no VAT to pay), otherwise £18 (no VAT to pay)
3000 Spectrum games on 1 CD ROM, suitable for playing with Z80Em above. Also contains scanned pictures of posters and packaging for many games, file conversion utilities, and emulators to play the Speccy games on PCs, Macs and Amigas. A must for anyone who ever had a Spectrum.
Price: £5 (no VAT to pay)
This software allows you to read BBC and Spectrum tapes into the parallel port of any Acorn RISC OS machine. An interface is required, for which we supply the circuit diagram. You can make the interface yourself (around a fiver from Maplin), or to save burnt fingers, we can supply ready made interfaces for just £15.
Price: £10 (no VAT to pay)
This utility allows DFS discs to be read and written from both within the desktop and within !6502Em. It integrates with !6502Em, so that even protected discs can be accessed, so original software on uncopiable discs will still run. An additional feature of the software is that disc images can be accessed on harddisc exactly as if they were still on floppy - so software that only runs from DFS can still be used even on machines with no appropriate floppy drive.
Dr Smiths C Development Toolkit is an invaluable aid to all developers using C on the Acorn platform. The major components of the toolkit are a heirarchical profiling tool, and a memory access checker.
The Heirarchical profiler, HeirProf, enables developers to see at a glance where their program is spending most of its time, thus enabling them to tune performance critical sections of code. This means that a minimum of time need be spent guessing where the bottlenecks in your program are, thus minimising wasted time tuning unimportant sections.
The Memory Access Checker, MemCheck, when linked with a program, and activated by a single function call in main() will check all writes and reads to memory to ensure that programs do not overwrite themselves. This instantly traps all manner of common C errors including overrunning array bounds and dereferencing null pointers. These bugs are traditionally very hard to spot as they can cause programs not to fall over instantly, but to fall over later in an unrelated section of the program; MemCheck can catch them instantly.
These programs have been extensively beta tested both in house, and with Acorn, ARM, Atomwide and other RISC OS developers. Feedback has been good, and many longstanding bugs in code that was thought to have been stable have been found and irradicated.
Contact Warm Silence for more details and a demo version.
Larger is an enhanced Pinboard replacement offering optional automatic backdrop organisation, multiple heirarchical backdrops, enhanced iconisation and application management facilties, and various other desktop enhancements.
Larger has been reviewed in the following magazines:
A free demonstration copy of the latest version is available here. The demo version is identical to the full version, except it will refuse to run after the end of August. If you don't get around to trying it before that time, give us a ring, and we'll give you a special personalised code that will allow you to try it for longer.
Pricing and availability for the following products are not available at the time of going to press, but are included here anyway. Contact Warm Silence for more information.
This software will incorporate desktop disassemblers and "Multiface" applications for each of the emulators. This software is almost ready for release, but pricing has not yet been decided - contact us for more information.
We are working on a desktop viewer for Adobe Acrobat (Portable Document Format) files. The project is still too far from completion to speculate as to release dates (we do not want to promise vapourware!), but we feel that a viewer for files in this format will be a welcome addition to RISC OS, and will compliment our other cross-platform products nicely.
The following products are not WSS products but are included here in the hopes they will be of interest.
Price: £15 (Shareware, so no VAT to pay)
This is an Amstrad CPC emulator. This allows you to run almost any CPC software under RISC OS. Sound support is included, as is banked RAM (CPC6128) emulation. All popular file formats (DSK, SNA and AMSDOS) are supported.
This emulator is not a WSS product, but is written by Mark RISON, with a registration fee of £15. More details can be found here.
Customers with old versions of software are encouraged to send a blank formatted disc, stamped, self addressed envelope and a covering note back to us to upgrade to the latest versions of software. Typically no charge is made for this service (why should you pay for us to fix bugs?), but in cases where significant improvements in functionality have been made, we reserve the right to charge a small fee.