ÿÿÿÿISSUE1/BLAST10/INDEX.HTM Issue 1, The RISC OS Time Machine
The RISC OS Time Machine
Richard Hallas interviews Dave Walker
In early 1998 Richard Hallas, then editor of RISC User, interviewed Acorn's Dave Walker about the future of Acorn and Acorn machines. A cut down version of this review was published in RISC User volume 11 issue 4. This is the full text of the original interview. Just a few short months after this interview Acorn collapsed. This article provides a fascinating insight into what could have been, as Dave Walker himself admitted, a year is a long time in computing...
Dave Walker photographed in 1998
Acorn's Future Technologies
Risc PC II and the future of desktop machines The specifications of the Risc PC II have changed quite a lot since it was first announced. For the sake of accuracy, would you please give a brief summary of what its most important features are? Also, how much faster in real terms will it be than the current StrongARM Risc PC?
Well, it's still to be determined precisely which components are going into the system; everything hinges on the support which can be squeezed into IOMD2 before we freeze the design. The processor you get at the moment is a StrongARM 110 Revision T, which is slightly different in the memory management area to what's in the Risc PC: DEC have done a few modifications, but it's still clocked at 233MHz. If you were to put a Revision T in a Risc PC, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between it and what we're currently shipping, which is a Revision S.
The video system has had a major overhaul; a new iteration of VIDC20, designated VIDC20R, is to be used as standard. VIDC20R is essentially the VIDC2L cell as used in the ARM7500 and 7500FE, with the components which were originally removed from the 2 cell to make the 2L cell added back in. The reason for taking this route is that VIDC20 was fabricated with a feature size of about 1.0 to 1.1 micron, whereas VIDC2L was relaid to make it fabricatable on a 0.6 micron process. This feature shrink results in a significant pixel clock speed increase; in fact, it's a doubling to 200MHz from the original 100MHz. When coupled with 4Mb of fast VRAM soldered to the motherboard, this will give you 1600x1200x32K colours at 75Hz; we've actually tried this on a test harness we built when we received the first VIDC20R samples, and we had to borrow the monitor from our top-end CAD workstation to track the results as it was the only monitor in the building which would keep up!
The audio system has also had a significant rework. VIDC won't be providing the bulk of sound output; instead there is a new codec chip going on the motherboard which emulates a SoundBlaster card. I don't believe it supports wavetable synthesis, but it does have a microphone feed (which you'll find on the front panel, along with the headphone jack, power switch and reset button). Also connected with the codec chip is a couple of sockets on the back panel; you'll find a PC-style game port which will double as a MIDI port (in and out, not thru); as part of the main I/O system you'll also find two serial port sockets, each of which should be able to move data at least as quickly as the serial port on the current Risc PC. You'll also find a parallel port, as per current Risc PC, and PS/2 mouse and joystick ports; it's expected that the current Risc PC will be the last Acorn machine to support the quadrature mouse interface.
Finishing off the I/O side, there are three slots on a backplane to take existing podule-style expansion cards, and four PCI slots. The Risc PC/A7000(+)-style NIC slot has been done away with. There will be a single 1600K floppy drive fitted, it's looking like all machines will ship with a 24x-speed CD-ROM drive as standard, and hard drives are catered for with EIDE Mode 4 support which will handle two master-slave device pairs.
Other than the video performance, the biggest difference the user will spot in use is the machine's speed; raising a wet finger in the air, I'd reckon that, using a 233MHz StrongARM, Phoebe will be somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 times faster than a current 233MHz StrongARM Risc PC.
On a standard Risc PC, the address and data buses are clocked at 16MHz; on the new machine, you're looking at a bus speed of 66MHz. There are two reasons why it's 66MHz: the first is that things get ugly at speeds above that; you get signals jumping off PCB tracks at corners (no kidding!) and you have problems with sockets involving massively increased radio frequency (RF) emission and the fast transients reflecting from the physical track-to-pin interface back down the track. The second reason is that 66MHz is the fastest external clock speed which StrongARM can synchronise to; hence there is little point in producing a PCB which is clocked at a higher rate.
To keep up with this bus speed, RAM is moving from being 70ns refresh on 72-pin SIMMs to significantly quicker SDRAM on DIMMs; the box will ship with a single 16Mb DIMM as standard, and a second DIMM socket left vacant.
The StrongARM Risc PC is still a powerful machine, and the need for a replacement for it is much less urgent than it was when the Risc PC replaced the A5000. If the StrongARM Risc PC is adequate for most users' needs, then who is going to buy the expensive new machine?
People who need Even More Power(TM). For example, StrongARM Risc PCs still only have the same screen rendering capability as ARM610 Risc PCs, and owing to the speed constraints of the podule bus which any network card is currently hung off, don't make particularly wonderful network servers. VIDC20R sorts out the first problem, PCI support fixes the second, and the accelerated main bus, SRAM and SDRAM makes everything happen significantly quicker. If the current StrongARM Risc PC can be likened to an Archimedes 440/1, Risc PC II is the spiritual successor to the 540 (and then some).
What will happen to the existing Risc PC? Will it continue to be made, and for how long?
We're expecting to continue to produce the StrongARM Risc PC, in J233 hardware spec, at least, for the foreseeable future. It'll still be more than adequate for a large number of users.
Many users have expressed disappointment that the Risc PC's modular case design has been dropped. Why have you taken this decision?
Two reasons. First of all, once you push the speed of a board up, it starts radiating more and more radio frequency interference. If you were to take the existing Risc PC case, which is made of plastic, with a metal-spray layer to cut RF from its board down to acceptable levels, and try to shoehorn the Risc PC II board into it, not only would you have enough RF coming out of the case to violate both CE and FCC regulations, but the picture on your monitor wouldn't be exactly free from interference!
Second, producing a case design from scratch and running a smallish-volume production line to make them costs an absolute fortune, and that's not taking into account the overheads of the safety compliance testing. It's far more cost-effective to take an existing case which is large and well-shielded enough for our needs, and then make whatever cosmetic and minor functional changes to it we need to. We're taking an NLX tower case, having an extra cut-out tooled into the back panel to accommodate the three podules, and replacing the remarkably dull and boring standard plastic fascia with something a little more distinctive!
What's your position regarding compatibility with other platforms, particularly DOS/Windows and Unix? Does Acorn have any plans to provide support for the use of other operating systems on the new machine itself?
Unix is something very close to my heart, and I'm certainly going to do my utmost to enable Causality (RiscBSD) and Russell King (ARM Linux) to have access to docs and prototype hardware at the same time as other registered developers. While Galileo is closing out development, Unix is likely to be the only way to get multiple ARMs doing symmetric multiprocessing in one of these machines, and I'm up for extended testing if they're up for writing the code. Put it this way: I don't expect the Risc PC II I'll be buying for home use to be spending most of its time running RISC OS!
As far as DOS/Windows compatibility is concerned, this is of vastly less importance to me personally since I don't use either; however, it seems to be something which a lot of users want. The idea for supporting this is to interface to PCI-based PC cards, which are already available; you'll find ads in the back of Byte which advertise cards comprising an IAPX86 CPU (everything from a P90 upwards), local DRAM, a bus-mastering PCI controller and often a 2D graphics controller. Video output from the RISC OS side of the system would be looped through such a card to a monitor; you'd probably lose the capacity to have both displays on screen simultaneously without some cunning scaling and blitting, but we tend to find that users tend to use their systems wholly within one environment of the other anyway.
We don't have any plans ourselves to support other operating systems; however, that's never stopped developers in the past!
RISC OS and Galileo
What significant improvements will be apparent in the next version of RISC OS, and how will it take advantage of the improvements in the Risc PC II?
The first improvement you're going to see isn't necessarily an improvement; it's a requirement, which is that it runs on the new hardware, and is also capable of doing things like addressing the PCI bus that we're going to get on the Risc PC II. As far as actual improvements are concerned, Mike Stephens, who's Mr Kernel-God, has made some interesting enhancements when it comes to memory management (he's actually implemented a few new algorithms that he's come up with), so this means the kernel's going to run quicker. Also, as far as filing systems are concerned, there's a few limitations that the existing Filecore has which have got on quite a few people's nerves for the last ten years. Fundamentally, the 77-objects-per-directory limit is gone. We have the software running in the office now (still very much alpha-test, but appearing stable) and we've found empirically that directory opening slows down somewhat once you start trying to open a directory containing 3000 or more objects. The maximum size of directory that we've built so far, and which has been tested to retain its integrity, has 80,000 objects in it, but that's just on the test bench; I'm not sure whether a high-water mark will be imposed for the final OS build. Also, filenames have had some restrictions removed: we're retaining case insensitivity, and we're also keeping the existing filetyping system, but filename length in theory goes up to 255 characters. This may, for various reasons, be shortened to 191 for the production build.
So you're not extending the existing filetype system?
There are still plenty of unregistered filetypes out there. If all goes to plan, the typing system will also be a bit smarter about translating DOS-type extensions to RISC OS filetypes.
There's going to be a little bit of a facelift to the desktop. It's more a matter of bells and whistles than a fundamental rework, but some things are going to have to have a rework. For instance, the finding system in the filer is not going to be of much use if you highlight a load of directories, go 'find whatever the filename is', go 'OK, there's my file', hit Open and you're presented with a directory with 3000 files in it, so I expect that'll get some rework.
!Configure is going to get reworked so that it becomes modular and can effectively have plug-ins registering with it. It'll still be familiar to Risc PC users; it'll just do more. .
Can you do anything about the Large File Allocation Unit (LFAU) that makes writing files to large discs so wasteful of disc space?
Yes; indeed we have done. The situation as it stands is that you hit a point of diminishing returns at about 8Gb. Your LFAU winds up so big that there's not much point in having extra disc space considering the average size of a file and the amount of space which has to be wasted owing to LFAU granularity. With the new system, you still have the issue that as discs get bigger LFAUs have to grow with them, but now there's a lot more file allocation blocks on a disc, so for a given size of disc, the LFAU is sixteen times smaller. This means that the point of diminishing returns is deferred until you get to 128Gb partitions, when you start hitting trouble again.
People will still be able to use their standard podules. While we were looking at the standard podule bus, and which bits we needed to implement, we constructed a questionnaire, which I sent out to all the developers, along the lines of, "OK, you guys develop hardware; please list the lines that all your cards use." When we added it all together, it turned out that there weren't any lines unused, so what you get is a completely equivalent-to-Risc PC, as-it-always-has-been podule bus. It is basically DMA on the first two slots, and a three-slot backplane (three slots primarily because of case size).
Do you have any plans to incorporate any third party enhancements?
That's currently being determined. This time we are talking about getting hold of demo versions of commercial things from developers, or indeed taking the best of the freeware off the Net (with authors' agreement, of course). Certainly I for one, in addition to Edit, would like to see every machine bundled with a copy of Zap. But StrongEd also has a big following; the editor wars inside Acorn do go on! Therefore I will disclaim that by saying that just because I use Zap does not mean that it's Acorn policy!
How is work progressing on Galileo? When will we be able to use it instead of RISC OS in desktop machines?
Work's progressing rather well, actually. The principal engineer on Galileo is a very, very knowledgeable chap called Sunil Kittur. He's not come from an Acorn background, and is not versed in RISC OS, so we can be certain that we're taking a completely clean approach. He's very much a computer scientist, who has done operating system design and implementation before already (he has a track record of that), and fundamentally the guy knows his onions and has his head screwed on! Indeed, he did that much work on Galileo to start with that for a while it was known within Acorn as Sunil OS! (Of course, that was just a leg-pull.).
We have a stripped-down kernel. It will do multi-threading and process scheduling, and people are now working on slightly higher-level things like the graphics libraries. The kernel will boot; compilers and tools have started porting, but I don't know whether Galileo's capable of building itself yet. There's also a simple command line executive being done. I would like (whether I'll be able to, I don't know yet) to be able to pull some of the wraps off Galileo to the developers at the developer conference which is scheduled for slightly pre-Wakefield. When it's actually going to ship is, right now, someone else's guess, but certainly the world will have seen it by this time next year; whether the world will be able to buy it by then is another matter.
What language is Galileo being written in?
A combination of C and C++.
Given that Galileo is highly modular and scalable, where do you envisage it being used?
Fundamentally, anywhere that requires an operating system rather than just hardware. It could end up running on your Psion; it could end up running on your mobile phone; you could find it running on your video recorder. It's scalable right up to your desktop system, from the point of view of being able to do multitasking processing eventually, and it could go even higher.
Is it the case that you will able to release the kernel to licensees initially, and then finish up writing things like the desktop later?
Exactly. Galileo is primarily intended for portability and embedding, but just because it's intended for embedding doesn't mean that we can't go all the way up to building a desktop on it. Certainly most of the people we expect to be licensing it to won't be needing a lot of really, really high-level stuff like a desktop, so as long as we implement the right things in the order that they're likely to be needed for licensing, then we can just go on with development transparently. But it's looking good. It's looking very good. Another thing that's needed for an embedded technology is a reasonable degree of fault tolerance. It can't crash! Or should it crash fatally, for one reason or another, it's got to be able to recover itself far enough to reboot itself to its previous state.
Will Galileo be able to run existing RISC OS applications and, if so, how?
Fundamentally there's no reason why not, but it would mean having to implement most of a virtual RISC OS machine on top of the Galileo OS. To write a full RISC OS emulator is about the only way you could be absolutely certain to do it, as I don't have details yet on how Galileo would take to having a RISC OS SWI layer veneered on top of it. In fact, a virtual RISC OS box has already been done, but not by us: there exists a thing called XArc (which I have seen), which takes the freeware Architectur 2 ARMulator, that was written by ARM Ltd, and runs a RISC OS ROM image on it. It's slow, and that's partly because ARMs don't actually virtualise well, but if we can do something like that on Galileo OS without sacrificing QoS, we would be running on a real ARM (and hopefully be able to tunnel down to it) rather than a simulated one. Whether we're going to do it this way, or what Galileo is to support in terms of veneering, is still to be determined!
Can you outline how the Guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) concept works?
OK, I can have a go at it anyway! I'll be liberally quoting from a paper written by Andy Hopper, who's head of formerly Olivetti, now Oracle, Research Labs in Cambridge. He's the guy who invented ATM, and he's also one of the nicest multi-millionaires that you could hope to meet! ATM was the first implementation, really, of the QoS concept. What QoS means is that signals and processes are scheduled to happen within a time limit that they specify according to their declared level of importance. Once you start hitting the top end of your CPU limit, then you wind up actually saying to things that are of low importance, and don't actually need to claim a lot of bandwidth, "No, I'm not going to do this," and so you can continue guaranteed service to the things of highest priority. Fundamentally, the whole idea of ATM is that you deliver guaranteed service to as many processes for as long as you can within the performance limits of your system until you hit the top end of the CPU or I/O, but then you cease having service at all for very low-priority things, and continue guaranteed service as much as possible for higher-priority things.
Andy Hopper's idea, to take it to extremes (which is his way when illustrating things), is: imagine, if you will, that you entire house is plumbed with ATM, including your door bell! Now, let's say that someone presses your door bell. It will send a signal to your house's operating system, saying, "Hi, I'm your door bell. My QoS is 30 seconds and I'm pretty important." Your house then thinks, "Right, I've got this signal from my door bell. I'm going to have enough CPU and I/O spare for a process of this priority at some point in the next 30 seconds to ring the bell, so that's OK." So the basic idea is that if something is to happen, it has to happen within a certain time limit; this time limit is the QoS. When it happens within that time limit is up to the scheduler, and if it isn't going to happen for some reason (such as a more important process needing sufficient CPU at the same time that the new process can't coexist comfortably), the scheduler should tell the calling device about this.
A lot of attention is being focused on Windows CE version 2 at present, which is aimed at some of the markets at which Galileo could be targeted. What can you offer that will persuade licensees to choose Galileo instead of another system such as this?
CE isn't the only other fish in the pond, nor the most significant from the point of view of competition for Galileo; there's a lot of stuff (such as VxWorks) which is built from the ground up to be easily portable, easily embeddable and (most importantly) fault tolerant, while also providing something which calls itself 'real-time processing'.
Real-time processing, and the whole concept of a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS), is deceptively easy to define; the idea behind it is simple enough, in that a system running an RTOS should be able to gather data from its inputs, process this data, and send appropriate signals based on the data to its outputs 'in real time'. The problem arises when you sit back and try to think of what 'real time' actually is from the point of view of response times and tolerances within the system to their variation, and how you're going to guarantee that your embedded system will always have enough bandwidth spare to process that extra important signal when it comes in, even though it may be working on something else; currently, this means that embedded control systems are often over-spec'ed in terms of CPU power. Add a QoS model, and at least half of this uncertainty gets rationalised immediately; you get to specify the maximum tolerable response times directly, rather than as a function of the load that's already on the system.
Bear this in mind, along with the facts that RTOS appears to be one of the current crop of fashionable buzzwords (some systems which claim to be 'real-time' are probably stretching the point a bit), that it's a de facto requirement for any embedded OS to be fault-tolerant, and that it's extremely useful for an RTOS to be modular and scalable as well as small, and you'll realise why Galileo is set to go places.
NCs
Oracle was quick to announce the NC, but then appeared to waste a year while NCI wrote NC OS 2 as a Unix derivative. Why did they feel the need to do this, and have their actions damaged Acorn's chances as a technological innovator in the NC market?
Well, NC OS versus NC OS 2: really, you're looking at two different sides of the same coin. At the end of the day, an NC is, simplistically, a disc-less box with a dedicated network link, some software in ROM and an HTML/Java front-end. NC OS 1 runs on a small, cheap, moderately powerful NC 1 whereas NC OS 2 was originally intended to run on the hardware resulting from the DEC Shark project, which unfortunately has now been canned. As far as running Unix on NC 1 hardware is concerned, being something of a Risc BSD fan, I don't see a great deal of trouble in doing it; 7500FE kernels have just about been done, so you should be able to arrange network booting and NFS-mountable root and swap filesystems just like we did for the R225 or like Sun did for the 3/60. Probably the reason why Shark was canned was that it cost a lot: you're looking at a StrongARM; you're looking at the footbridge chip (which admittedly was reasonably cheap, and enabled you to use nice commodity components for the rest of the board), but then you're looking at a wedge of SRAM in there, for cache flushing, so if I remember rightly, the bill of materials cost for Shark was significantly higher than it was for the NC model 1. NC model 1, running Acorn NC OS 1, is a thinner client than a Shark is, running NC OS 2; however, once you add an X server to an NC Model 1, you're looking at much the same functionality only it's the server which is doing the application executing.
But this NC OS 2 is what appears to be being pushed now by NCI, and they seem to have dropped the Acorn NC OS 1; is that correct?
I don't know whether NCI are actually pushing that at the moment; certainly it's a great solution for intranet-type stuff (businesses especially), but then again, it's a case of where you want to split the thinness of your client. As we have X capability now on the NC, we can effectively run everything that the NC OS 2 box would be able to run; it's just a matter of where it actually runs, whether it's client- or server-execute. Admittedly, of course, the NC OS 2 box is significantly quicker at Java, but we are addressing that; we are ourselves designing a StrongARM-based NC. If you remember the coNCord prototype, we're coming up with something that uses that technology. So you've got the StrongARM; you've got the IOMD in there; you've got all the necessary other bits in there.
It just seems at the moment that there are two distinct bands of NCs: the consumer ones, which are based on Acorn technology, and the corporate ones which aren't. Are you hoping to change that situation?
That's entirely so at the moment, as far as it seems, although corporates are looking very hard at our stuff as well. We're having all sorts of talks with some interesting corporates regarding their possible deployment of NCs: lots and lots and lots of NCs. It looks like hopefully it won't be that long (say year-end, maybe) where we'll be looking at two bands of NCs, whereby you've got the 'not especially Java' NC OS 1.06 box currently, which is the NC as you know and love it with the 7500FE in it, and where you also have a higher-end (ideally corporate) NC, optimised for Java with a StrongARM in, that's also running NC OS (our flavour); so things are really fun on the NC front.
How would you say your design is faring against other similar things that are coming out from other people?
Well, in a lot of cases the other similar things that are coming out from other people are so similar that they've actually licensed them from us! The NetProducts NC is a straight licence; the Proton NC is a straight licence, and I think there's another couple cooking as well. It's no great secret that the RCA/Thompson box is almost a straight licence, although it's something bespoke that we did for them, and Boca, now, are manufacturing standard NC OS 1.06 NCs. So a lot of the NCs that are out there are actually ours under the hood, and the only other NCs really are Sun's JavaStation (which of course is significantly more expensive but significantly more potent) and IBM's offering (again, significantly more potent from the point of view of processor, but significantly more expensive).
How do you see something like the WebTV from Microsoft as impacting on the consumer market for the Acorn-type NCs?
Well, the thing is that WebTV isn't an NC; it's an STB. So it's more like WebTV going up against our STB22, and developments thereof.
But these things will be perceived as being pretty similar by the general public.
Well, the whole thing is that when you get into the specs, it transpires that STB22 actually has (today, and has had for the last six months) a lot of the features that are only promised for WebTV Plus, and aren't in WebTV. We sent a couple of our guys over to CES in Vegas a couple of months back, to see what everyone's getting up to, and admittedly there are some people who have got things going that we haven't necessarily got sorted out yet (things like multiple levels of transparency on overlays), but basically the STB22 still acquits itself very well against those, and indeed development on the 22 is progressing well.
Other things worth bearing in mind about the STB22: we're getting very friendly with Oracle on the STB side of things when it comes to partnering our kit with their latest OVS3 video server. We've also struck up partnerships with Silicon Graphics for their MediaBase servers, so we're shipping them STBs to play with, and they're shipping us O2s with MediaBase on to play with, and everything's getting all nice and pally, and of course we've always had a long-standing relationship with Sun on video servers, among other things.
It's worth getting in at this point a little bit about the Acorn reorganisation. We reckon that all this digital interactive TV (and STBs) is going to be a massive thing; it's just a case that with Online Media we were ahead of the herd (or so it seems in retrospect), but one of the reorganisations within Acorn is actually to have a dedicated business unit that does nothing but DITV, so we're going to be pushing that hard.
When does that start?
It already has. We're actually in the middle of shuffling people around between different divisions and different new business areas so that everything can be kicked into serious life.
How will your NC Reference Profile version 2 differ from version 1?
Fundamentally, if you imagine an NC as being analogous to an A7000+ without a hard drive and some OS changes, the new one will be almost analogous to a Risc PC without a hard drive and with a few OS changes; quite a few OS enhancements over NC OS 1.06 as well, you'll find.
So you're talking about something which is basically faster but much of the same?
That's right. The whole point about the new reference NC, and the ethos behind it, is to enable it to run Java quickly, which by all accounts and testing on Risc PCs it's going to do.
Does Profile 2 replace Profile 1? Are they effectively two different classes of product?
I think they'll probably wind up living side by side. If you don't actually need to run much in Java, an NC OS 1.06 box will do you pretty nicely.
What sort of extra software enhancements are you going to get into the new version 2 other than Java?
Java is going to be the big thing. It's a moot point currently as to whether any of the Director or Shockwave renderers are going to make it into ROM. There's certainly going to be more network encoding there so that you don't necessarily have to boot the NC from Unix, because quite a lot of people, although they may realise eventually that serving from Unix is the right thing to do, currently want to do it off something else! But it's still a little bit up in the air about what the changes are actually going to be; I'm in the team which will be tying all this down, so I'm going to be in for some major fun over the next few months.
You licensed various third party things, like the word processor and the Web browser, in version 1. Will there be more in version 2, or will it be much of the same?
It's going to be much of the same, with enhancements.
The future
How important do you see Java as being in Acorn's future plans?
Central.
How are you going to attract new software developers, then, or is that less of an issue if Java is so central?
Interesting question. The thing about Java (and this is me rambling rather than official Acorn policy, because I don't make official Acorn policy!), is that Java is going to polarise things; huge companies like Corel and Lotus will develop Java-based office applications which run on everything, so you have to ask "if you've got a big machine that runs Java well, are people going to run the big things from Claris or Lotus or whoever, or are they going to run a RISC OS package on it?"
On the other hand, there are certain things that our developers do better than any other people in the world, so if they start writing in Java, they have a real good chance of taking on the world and winning. Java is important, and actually a lot of the developers are sitting down with their books and learning it. Many of them have already asked me for book references for useful Java tutorials!
On the subject of your Internet software, you already have a couple of plug-ins already, like Shockwave and Java; are you working on others?
There is a plug-in that already exists that most people seem to have been overlooked, which is actually in the NC ROM to play µ-law audio and .WAV files. RealAudio is also very much on the cards; there's a bit of a problem getting it running on NC OS 1.06, but it runs well enough on RISC OS. There's also a couple of deals going on regarding plugins for other common media types, but I can't talk about these yet.
It needs floating point, though, doesn't it?
Yes. Currently it actually runs much better on an A7000+ than on a StrongARM for that reason!
Are you working on further plug-ins, such as JavaScript, or are you leaving such things to third parties?
Well, obviously there's a lot of media types out there, so making existing things plug-in compliant is a good idea. JavaScript is something we've recognised as being an important thing that we're currently missing; we intend to implement it. You will see JavaScript support from Acorn at some point. I can't say when, but the networking group is looking a little interesting at the moment, in that resources are starting to free up to work on new projects as existing projects are completed (for instance, Java 1.0.2), which is actually quite good, because JavaScript needs people who know compilers well.
Is Acorn licensing any other common technologies for use within its other products, be they NCs or desktop machines?
Well, we've got the Java licence; we've done Director 4; we're doing Director 6: the stand-alone (as opposed to plugin-compliant) Director player is in alpha right now. I've got it and played some movies on it, and there are still some areas that aren't implemented at all and some problems in other areas, but that's what you'd expect in alpha code; it plays Director 4 and 5 movies very well. JavaScript isn't really a licensable thing, because the specs are actually out there, but it will be implemented. There are strange possibilities involving Indeo codecs and Replay. Java 1.2: we're building it, which will give you Java 1.x backward compatibility. I'm expecting to see alpha code this month [February] if I'm lucky.
The source code to Netscape Navigator is now available; is that of any interest to Acorn directly?
Our network guys are having a think, basically. There's actually a lot of Netscape Navigator that isn't being released, for obvious reasons; things like the Java VM. But I would expect, if nothing else, that we'll take a copy of the code and look through it to see if we can find anything useful.
When you announced the relaunch of Acornsoft last year, it caused a lot of excitement among users who remembered the excellent Acornsoft games from the BBC Micro days. Is Acornsoft going to be licensing games in a big way for today's Acorn platform?
We hope so. Strange things are afoot regarding the number of games projects we're actually involved in. Also, of course, the whole games thing seems to have woken up recently anyway; witness the final sorting out and bringing to commercial sale of Doom by R-Comp.
Is this to some extent at least riding off the NC? We've heard about distributed games across the network.
Yes, I'm in the middle of writing a paper to come up with some solid network protocols for doing this kind of thing! The idea is that network gaming is really going to take off. Custom graphics engines, like you get in the N64 from SGI, notwithstanding, an NC can be viewed in one light as a games console with a network interface. I can see that online gaming is going to become a big thing; well, a bigger thing than it is already! And it's growing: it started from nothing when Quake came out, and is now getting colossal.
Do you think there's much of an argument against it because of phone bill considerations? Is it actually realistic for UK users, who don't have free local calls?
Well, there's lots of pressure being put on BT to look into making local calls free, so you never know, but what you have to bear in mind is that, although Acorn is UK-centric in that the English you get in RISC OS is English and not American, we're not UK-centric regarding who we sell to and there are other countries who have free local calls. We've just opened our Palo Alto office: as of last month, Acorn Palo Alto is back, and it'll be a sales office this time rather than an OS development centre.
What are your plans for other countries at present?
We have agencies in Korea and a distributor in Japan. These people are principally licensing technologies: certainly it appears that just about every high-tech manufacturer in Korea now has an ARM licence and a partnership with us. There may be a few that haven't (just a few that we've missed), but all the big ones have. Certainly ETRI, who were at Acorn World, are very influential people. If you were to think of an analogy for this country, well, there isn't really an ETRI equivalent in this country, but if there were to be, they would probably be defined as being the commercial wing of the Ministry of Technology. So, this is long-term good news for getting Acorn lots of money, and getting Acorn lots of money is long-term good news for making RISC OS boxes! ETRI's HandyComBi uses RISC OS as an embedded solution.
Is Acorn able to feed back from technologies, such as handwriting recognition, produced by such licensees?
Well, the thing about handwriting recognition, although we're doing no work on it ourselves, is that you have to bear in mind that the first iteration of the Newton operating system was written on an Archimedes A540! That doesn't mean anything significant; it's just a little trivia!
Are you able to say anything about what Acorn has been working on for other licensees?
There's the new little fax box which was launched last week [NaxPort 100]. The company launched last week; they're called NetFax (they're American), and what this box does principally is: imagine your fax machine, which is sitting there spewing out 9K6 or 14K4 run-length encoded fax data. (This is actually where the dual serial port technology for the Risc PC II came from!) You take your serial stream out of your fax, plug it into your NetFax, have that take the data and recompress it more efficiently, and then you have it spit the data out of the other end. Now it can spit the data out of the other end in two forms: one, you can just do it as a more highly compressed fax at a higher data rate, which is going to save money anyway, but you can also actually use the top model as a fax-to-IP gateway, so if the guy at the other end has one of these boxes, you both just dial your local ISP rather than doing international faxing. Speed improvement with the IP gateway version, of course, isn't the main factor: it's cost. Instead of sending a mega-fax internationally, you're sending a mega-email locally! This device is a RISC OS-based box which effectively sits, almost like a dongle, in the chain that is the phone line.
Where is Acorn going? Where do you see your business and your computers in a year's time?
A year is a long time in computing! I think the thing that's going to get big very shortly is NC deployment. The idea of NCs has actually been around for a long time (even before Larry Ellison started kicking up a fuss). At the end of the day, the ultimate expression of a thin client is an X terminal, which is, ironically enough, what I use my NC as when I'm not developing on it. When I use my NC for use's sake, I just use it to connect to our Solaris boxes. So, NC deployment into education and corporates; NetFax hitting the roof and going through it; desktop systems continuing to be desktop systems (sold to the kinds of people who buy Acorn desktop systems, and maybe a few more now that they're getting more powerful); value-added resellers embedding our boards and our technology in things; and by that point Galileo will be coming online, at which point we'll get even deeper into embedding.
What's your opinion of PCs?
PCs have their place. They make nice, cheap Unix boxes!
Richard Hallas interviews Dave Walker
ÿÿÿÿISSUE1/BLAST20/INDEX.HTM Issue 1, The RISC OS Time Machine
The RISC OS Time Machine
Lee Calcraft reviews the A440...
This review was originally published in the March 1988 edition of RISC User.
The entry price of the Archimedes 440 is around £2600. This is almost three times the cost of a 310, so what extra features do you get for your money? Externally the difference between the the 440 and the 300 series machines is minimal. All make use of identical system boxes, and the only difference in the keyboards is that the 440 has grey coloured function keys instead of the distinctive red colour used on the 300 series. At the rear of the machine there is again very little difference. All plugs, sockets and panels are identical except that the phono video socket on the 300 series has been replaced on the 440 by a pair of BNC sockets used for the attachment of a special high frequency mono monitor (video and sync).
Internally of course the machine looks quite different. It has a completely new PCB designed to accommodate 4 Mbytes of RAM. The strict upper limit for the 300 series is 1 Mbyte. There are three other obvious differences in the internal hardware. The machine houses a 20 Mbyte hard disc (of which more later), a small cooling fan, and a four-slot backplane, A backplane is essentially a board extension socket. The 300 series machines may be upgraded to take a two-slot backplane at a cost of around £40, but the 400 series machines provide four as standard. Of the four, slot number 2 may be used to hold a co- processor, and Acorn plan to have a floating- point co-processor board on the market by the last quarter of 1988. The 300 series machines by contrast, have no co-processor interface and may not be upgraded to take one.
The manuals and firmware of the 440 are again identical to those supplied with 300 series machines. The 440 is currently supplied with Arthur 1.2, and with Basic V version 1.02. Its processor runs at the same speed as that of the 300 series machines, and although the RAM chips in 400 series machines are somewhat faster, they are not clocked at a faster rate. The machines therefore perform identically, except where storage operations are involved.
Hard disc
The 440's internally mounted 20 Mbyte Tandon hard disc provides a welcome increase in both storage speed and capacity. It is a delight to use, and runs more quietly than many hard disc machines. The accompanying speed tests give some idea of its performance on 3 different types of test: saving and loading 80K screens using the *ScreenSave and *ScreenLoad commands, saving and loading an 80K block of RAM using *SAVE and *LOAD, and finally the PCW "Store" benchmark, which involves writing a 20 byte string to a file 1000 times in succession. I have given comparison timings for both 600K and 800K floppies. And you may well be more surprised by the relatively slow speeds attained with the 600K format ADFS floppy than with the high speed the Winchester. I should add that the 300 and 400 series machines give identical timings- all floppy disc tests.
FloppyHard
Test600K800KDisc
ScreenSave (80K)85.725.310.0
ScreenLoad (80K)40.818,05.6
SAVE (80K)5.53.50.4
LOAD (80K)5.23.20.3
Store Benchmark18.96.43.1
Fig 1. A440 Timings (times in seconds)
New screen modes
Archimedes 300 series machines boast 21 screen modes, of which the top three (i.e. modes 18, 19 and 20) require a special multi- sync monitor. The 440 has two extra screen modes, labelled 22 and 23 (number 21 is "reserved for future expansion"). The two new modes are mono only, and require a further "special" monitor (in this case, one with a 96MHz line scan). Of the two, mode 23 is a text only mode, giving 144 characters on 54 lines (though you need a special 8x16 font for this). Mode 22 more usefully combines text (at 160 characters by 122 lines) with graphics, where it provides a resolution of 1280x976. This is very close to the 1280x1024 graphics units used on all versions of the BBC micro. The 48 missing vertical lines are taken equally from the top and bottom of the screen. As you will appreciate this is a very impressive resolution, and will be ideal for CAD and other graphics use, though lack of a special monitor prevented me from testing it out.
RAM configuring
When you enter Basic on a default- configured 440 you are presented with the message:
Starting with 3698940 bytes free
There is obviously room here for some quite long programs! Exactly how much RAM is allocated depends, as it does with the 300 series, on the *CONFIGURE options. On the 300 series these allocations are all made in page units of 8K (except for FontSpace, which uses 4K pages). In 400 series machines, the size of page used for the *CONFIGURE command is four times as large (except for FontSpace which remains at 4K). Thus if you execute:
*CONFIGURE ScreenSize 10
you will allocate 320K of RAM to screen use on a 440.
The default *CONFIGURE options on the 440 are adjusted accordingly, and are given in the accompanying table. Software designed to run on the full range of Archimedes machines will need to take account of the new configured page sizes. Unfortunately there is no very easy way of distinguishing between the various members of the Archimedes range. The normally useful INKEY(-256) call gives the same result for all members, and is only useful for distinguishing between an Archimedes and earlier BBC micros. To use this test, type:
PRINT INKEY(-256)
All Archimedes machines give the result 160. The test given in listing 1 will however distinguish between the two Archimedes machine series. It reads the MEMC status register, and prints out the machine series number by checking whether the memory page size is 8K (300 series) or 32K (400 series).
10 REM Tests 300 or 400 serie
20 PRINT300-100*FNfour;" Series machin
30 EN
40
50 DEFFNfou
60 SYS &1A ,0,0 TO re
70 =(reg AND 8) =8
Function Config Allocation
Font Size 6 24K
ScreenSize 0 160K
RAM Filing 0 0
System Size 0 32K
RMA Size 2 64K*
Sprite Size 1 32K
*RMA Size 64K nominal. With all resident modules engaged, the actual space allocated to the RMA is 192K.
Fig 2. A440 default RAM allocations
Conclusion
The added RAM, hard disc, ultra high resolution modes and the potential offered by the co-processor interface make the 440 a highly desirable piece of kit. Its high price will of course mean that only educational and business establishments will in general be able to justify its purchase. Home users who feel the need for the 4 Mbytes of RAM and high resolution offered by the 400 series machines will need to wait for the emergence of the 410 in the spring. This has no hard disc, and has 1 Mbyte of RAM upgradable to 4 Mbytes, but costs just £1608.85 for the entry level system.
Foundation RISCWorld
ÿÿÿÿISSUE1/BOBW/INDEX.HTM Issue 1, The Best of Both Worlds
The Best of both Worlds
T.O.M.S.
In the final part of the series of articles on PC Survival & Maintenance, we mentioned the most satisfying, 'Best of Both Worlds' experience afforded by the combination of a PC running both Windows and RISC OS (under VirtualRPC) and offered to lead on to an article on this topic.
The response was not exactly overwhelming (!); however, the mixed feedback we did receive included a number of fiendishly good ideas, some of which were new to us, so this was the trigger to go ahead. Although we'll deal primarily with the Windows + VirtualRPC combo, some of the topics can apply equally in principle to other combinations such as VirtualRPC running on a Mac, an ARM-powered machine networked with a PC or Mac, or to two networked, ARM-powered machines.
Performance and compatibility
We purposely won't discuss RISC OS performance and software compatibility under VirtualRPC in any detail as these topics have been covered at length elsewhere. Suffice to say that comparative performance tests of typical VirtualRPC installations demonstrate that they show ARM-powered machines a very clean pair of heels in almost every respect. This is especially the case if the host PC is running a recommended Intel Core 2 Duo processor (e.g. the 2.2GHz E4500) and even more so with the faster variants. (Should you require a comparative performance report, please email us for a copy). With the exception of those RISC OS application software titles which specifically require proprietary hardware such as a podule or dongle, virtually all others will run under VirtualRPC, and via the ultra-fast HostFS disc filing system.
Some may require to be installed on the ADFS partition provided, but they're limited typically to "ye olde" software which, say, has anti-piracy protection. Other dated titles may object to running in 32K or 16M screen modes, and/or handling deep sprites, but dropping into a 256-colour screen mode may well resolve that. Display performance has also greatly improved, with VirtualRPC now running at up to 1600×1200 pixels in 16M colours without hesitation and, if you need even more, the ARM7500 option within the StrongARM variants will support screen modes up to 2048×1536 pixels, again in 16M colours. (Note: In this ARM7500 configuration, 'SA-compatible' software will still run, but the very few titles which specifically require StrongARM emulation will not).
File and document exchange
A significant advantage of having both operating systems running 'under the same bonnet' (and generally displayed on the same monitor) is the ease and speed with which files and documents can be moved between the two, in either direction; we'll put this facility to good use later on. However, the topic comes up regularly and, although it's very easy to set up, nevertheless seems to cause some problems, so let's first have a look at this basic feature.
We used to use and advocate TempDir for RISC OS but, having heard of the occasional problem with that arrangement from other users (which we've seen ourselves but only very rarely), we've since opted to use the simplest possible solution, i.e. a standard directory folder which can be 'seen' by both operating systems and into which you can drop files etc for ease of access from both ends.
To organise that, firstly, under RISC OS, generate a standard directory with a suitable name and decide on a convenient place to put it on a HostFS hard disc (not the ADFS partition). We opted to name ours 'Exchange' − sounds logical − and put it as a sub-directory in the Support folder on all our machines. (It may be safer not to put it within the main !Boot folder as we suspect this might be at the root of at least some of the reported hiccups.) That's the RISC OS side sorted. Now nip across to Windows and track down this newly-generated 'Exchange' directory which, as far as Windows is concerned, is just a standard folder (as indeed are all directories within the RISC OS installation, including '!' applications etc, so there's no need to press <Shift> to open the latter). To find the Exchange folder, open My Computer and keep double-clicking in turn on HDD (C:), Program Files, VirtualAcorn, VirtualRPC-xxx (for the version you have installed) and HardDisc4. You'll now see the familiar contents of your main RISC OS hard disc 'drive' (!Boot, Apps, etc) so, from there, keep double-clicking down the directory tree to locate the new Exchange folder.
Next, right-click over its icon and select the Create Shortcut option; this will generate a duplicate folder, called 'Shortcut to Exchange'. Drag-and-drop (i.e. move) the shortcut folder onto the Windows desktop (leaving the original in the HardDisc4 folder) and, if you wish, rename it, e.g. 'Exchange'.
Now when you open the 'Exchange' directory(ies), via the Windows desktop shortcut and/or on HardDisc4 within VirtualRPC, the related contents should be identical and you can access them directly, under either operating system.
Retaining filetypes
In principle, if you drop an object into the Windows Exchange folder, and then view it in the RISC OS folder, it should have retained its associated RISC OS filetype (assuming there is one) and the object icon will appear as normal; e.g. a JPEG. Very occasionally this doesn't work, but using TypeFind should quickly restore it. If it's a repetitive hiccup however, you'll need to check the relevant filetype is included in the Tools−Options−Hostfs Extensions list, or add the requisite data (see the user guide).
Going from RISC OS to Windows, again in principle the filetype will be retained and the object appears with its related Windows extension automatically attached, e.g. "<filename>.jpg". (This also applies with purely RISC OS filetypes − a sprite will appear in Windows in the form "<filename>.spr", a drawfile as "<filename>.aff", and so on. We'll look at using these in Windows in Part 2.) There's a cunning way to doubly ensure filetypes are retained, going from Windows to RISC OS, and that is to place the file(s) in a compressed folder. For simplicity, we suggest using SparkFS under RISC OS as this is compatible with the Windows 'Zip' format.
If you don't have SparkFS, you can use Zippee or, alternatively, generate a compressed, 'zipped' folder under Windows. To do this simply right-click anywhere on the desktop and select the New−Compressed (zipped) Folder option. This can then be accessed under RISC OS using SparkPlug. Many files may already be in a compatible, zipped folder anyway; e.g. most objects downloaded from the net. It's also a fool-proof method of retaining filetypes when moving objects from one stand-alone machine to another, using a floppy disc, CD, USB pen drive or what have you.
To summarise so far, we've spent just a few minutes setting up a simple, direct exchange feature to allow objects to be moved very quickly and easily between Windows and RISC OS and back, accessing a single, standard directory/folder from either end. And we've ensured that filetypes are retained under RISC OS and that file extensions are added under Windows.
Exporting from RISC OS
One reason for having the Exchange folder is to be able to conveniently export documents or whatever from RISC OS but, before consigning them to the outside world, e.g. for commercial printing, first giving them a good checkout in a suitable Windows application. So what you see is what (they) get, which sadly isn't necessarily the case if you send work out direct from RISC OS (been there, done that; quality assurance [QA] and all that).
We've already discussed this in a previous article so, to recap, it really does pay dividends if, say, you export your TechWriter masterpiece in 'Word' format and do the QA bit under Windows. 'Word' is intentionally accentuated because, as we discussed, the document doesn't necessarily have to be checked using Microsoft's Word application; a compatible, freeware alternative such as OpenOffice (Writer) invariably will do just as good a job. An alternative export method which has become favoured over, say, PostScript is the Portable Document Format (PDF) as this can solve all sorts of problems, especially as PDF document production is so well supported under RISC OS and there's a very competent, freeware Windows PDF reader in Adobe's Acrobat which is invaluable for QA checking.
We find this especially convenient where, for example, you wish to include and export RISC OS-specific object(s) in your masterpiece and which, from experience, we find can often be troublesome. Draw objects such as dashed lines and arrows are good examples and it's heartening to find these sometimes tricky things routinely appearing perfectly in Acrobat running under Windows.
That said, we've recently heard of some RISC OS users finding their document recipients have problems reading them in Acrobat. Much has been written elsewhere about the choice of outline fonts and so on, but we've only lately become aware of an unfortunate and evidently little-known 'feature' of Acrobat. This is that, when first installed, or (we think) when it is upgraded, Acrobat's text-smoothing and related features are switched off by default.
This catches people out as, for some reason, it is quite independent of the excellent ClearType feature built into Windows and which (especially if fine-tuned for your monitor using the Tuning feature) is considered by many to be pretty close to the superb standard of the RISC OS font antialiasing we all know and have loved from very early days.
Now we appreciate it might not be politic to ask your document recipient to fiddle with their PDF reader settings but, if that's not the case and you know they're having problems reading your masterpieces, you might like to suggest they double-check that Acrobat's text smoothing isn't switched off. To turn it on, they should first select the Edit−Preferences option and, if it says 'None' in the Rendering−Smooth Text: menu (Fig 1), they need to select For Monitor (for CRTs) or For Laptop/LCD screens, as applicable, and click on OK.
Fig 1 : Switching on Smooth Text in Acrobat
Fig 1 Switching on Smooth Text (Acrobat) While they're there, ticking the Smooth line box will also greatly improve the look of vector graphics and, in effect, replicate the visible differences when viewing them in various RISC OS applications. For comparison, Fig 2 attempts to show the difference between a drawfile displayed in Draw (2a) and nicely antialiased in Artworks (2b); also the equivalent differences between Acrobat's Smooth line art being selected Off (2c) and On (2d). Note also the significant difference between Acrobat's Smooth Text being switched Off (2c) and On (2d)
Fig 2 : Viewing vector graphics in RISC OS and Windows
However, all these features affect only what you see on your display and have no effect on, for example, print quality. (How this figure comes out on your display will also depend on the monitor, screen resolution and scale, so please make allowances for all that).
High-speed printing
Although we've mentioned exporting from RISC OS for QA checking and maybe commercial printing, we can of course also use the excellent features of the built-in Windows printing system which can hugely benefit getting our masterpieces onto paper in-house.
VirtualRPC-users are especially well catered for. In the simplest case, you will have a RISC OS printer definition file (another "PDF" ...) for your printer and, having set that up, printing is then every bit as straightforward as it is under ARM-power (don't worry if the printer has a parallel port and the PC doesn't; USB adaptor cables work just as they do with Iyonix). An interesting performance aside arises here though; how does VirtualRPC compare with the TurboDriver system for real machines? Comparative performance tests conducted in 2004 demonstrated the excellence of TurboDrivers running on, say, a Kinetic RiscPC. Not only did they print some three times faster than a stand-alone Iyonix could achieve (using a standard RISC OS PDF), but even VirtualRPC running on fast, Pentium 4 processor PCs couldn't quite keep up with them!
This bizarre situation was reversed only when the more powerful Athlon and Intel dual-core processors became available, but even now the latter are only some 30-50% faster than TurboDrivers, while Iyonix users have to resort to networking with, say, a 'spare' RiscPC to get back the lost performance (using Ray Favre's DirPrint programme available on
But of course the main problem for ARM-powered users (until recently) has been in trying to source a printer for which a RISC OS PDF or proprietary driver such as PhotoReal exists. Given the massive range of printers, plus the speed with which any one model is invariably replaced, it is hardly surprising that the position got worse by the year.
That was until the splendid GimpPrint and then Gutenprint arrived. GutenPrint is available from Martin Wuerthner at
However, there's a considerable limitation (which is fully acknowledged on the Gutenprint website) and this is in the very long times taken to handle the more demanding print jobs. To put a number to that, the website quotes "more than an hour" to print an A4 photograph to full, photo-real standards.
We've not seen anything as long as that and, in any event, reducing print resolution can limit the time accordingly, sometimes without significant degradation in print quality (in our experience this depends very much on the subject matter). But nevertheless it can be a general problem if you really don't want the computer to be tied up for perhaps very long periods.
This limitation simply doesn't exist with VirtualRPC running on even a very modest PC. Print times using either a RISC OS PDF, or the more universal and excellent UniPrint, are a very small fraction of what a stand-alone ARM-powered machine can achieve. Furthermore, contemporary Core 2 Duo machines will hand back full control of the computer typically from within just a few seconds for laser printing, up to no more than 60-90 seconds for a full A4 photo-real print job. And usually there's then sufficient spare 'oomph' to allow continued use of the computer (including VirtualRPC) while, in the background, the Windows-driven printer gets on with the physical printing.
Ultra-high-speed printing
But there's even an ultra-fast(er) method. If you first move the document across into Windows (e.g. as a PDF) and then print it directly, the sheer speed of response is quite extraordinary. Even with an A4 page sent for maximum-resolution, photo-real printing, the hourglass appears typically for only 1-3 seconds (!) before full computer control is returned, after which the physical printing takes place in the background.
Just think about that: To print an A4 page to full photo-real standards using Gutenprint ties up even Iyonix for an hour or so. The same page printed directly under Windows, to exactly the same standard, takes a mere 1-3 seconds before full computer control is returned to Windows or VirtualRPC. Ooer...
We find this to be an incredible bonus in use, both for business and domestic purposes. To give a recent example, one of us was required (by SWMBO) to produce three copies of a 30-page, A4 sized booklet of much-loved family photographs for doting grandparents etc. You know the sort of thing.
He prepared the job using OPro under VirtualRPC and 'printed' it in PDF (the Adobe Acrobat one) using GhostScript and Ray Favre's (I thought it was by Steve Fryatt - ED) PrintPDF. The booklet was checked for QA under Windows and printed. Full computer control was returned in under two minutes, following which the printer printed off the 3×30 pages, entirely in the background, in under two hours (including replacement of various ink cartridges!) How long would printing the OPro file tie up a stand-alone Iyonix? On the face of it, around 30 hours continuous running to produce just one copy. So is it currently feasible to produce such a document using ARM-power? Frankly debatable. And does this demonstrate the 'Best of Both Worlds'? No contest? You decide.
And in Part 2...
Next time we'll continue with this theme, looking at functional control of Windows printers from the RISC OS desktop, further Windows applications which can accept documents produced under RISC OS (e.g. for third-party editing), font-mapping considerations, enhanced graphics thumbnailing, plus anything else we − or you − can think of (feedback and more ideas will be welcomed!)
ÿÿÿÿISSUE1/CEDGE/INDEX.HTM Issue 1, From The Cutting Edge
From The Cutting Edge
Paul Middleton
From the Cutting Edge 22
When Acorn announced the replacement for the RiscPC in the winter of 1997 it seemed like there was a bight future ahead as an Acorn / Xemplar dealer. The Acorn World show was going to be at the new Xcel exhibition centre in the East of London and there was a competition running to give a name to the new creation. At the Wakefield Show Acorn had taken a large area to set up a marquee to show off the Risc PC 2 and developers were getting to grips with the new opportunities for video editing, multiple hard drives, video playback, loads of memory and ultra fast networking that was on offer.
At the hardware developers conference in Cambridge there were over 200 companies present. Acorn honcho Peter Bondar presented speaker after speaker who extolled the virtues of the new machine. The hype continued with a dealers conference at the Officers Mess at RAF Duxford, but from friends who worked at Acorn I was hearing the first rumours that all was not well. Was the Phoebe going to work? Could Acorn sell enough to recover the development costs?
Then came that fateful Thursday in September 1998. At about 11.30 a.m I had a call from my brother to say that I should sit down. Acorn were closing down the workstations division, cancelling the Acorn World Show and most importantly cancelling the Phoebe project. Within minutes I was phoning Steve Turnbull who was about to sit down for his first staff meeting at Acorn User magazine, which he had just bought from Redwood Publishing. I said "Steve, you'd better sit down!" The rest is history.
With the 10th anniversary of Acorn's closure rapidly approaching, now is the time for a bit of reorganisation at RISCOS Ltd. The RISC OS Foundation was the first public undertaking by RISCOS Ltd, it was set up at the ARM Club Midlands Show in 1999 to provide a focus for activities to promote the continuation of the Acorn community. At that time we didn't have a deal with Acorn, and many people were still hoping that someone would be able to take over the manufacture of Phoebe. Richard Hallas was then brought on board - hot from his editorship of RISC User magazine - to produce the new Foundation RISC User CD magazine. He produced 20 editions of the CD, along with 2 compilation DVDs (which were the first RISC OS DVDs), before retiring to go back to university to do a PhD on the History of Acorn computers.
Anyway let's return to 1998. After Acorn's collapse it became clear that regrettably Phoebe was not in a state to go into manufacture, at least not without a considerable cash being injected - which no-one had. So the focus was placed on completing the development of RISC OS 4, and getting it to work on as wide a range of machines as possible. Looking back there was no way, all those years ago, to predict the developments that have happened since. Who in 1998 could have imagined the X-Scale based Iyonix or the launch of a software only Virtual RiscPC.
In the intervening years RISCOS Ltd has carried on with it's core goal of developing RISC OS. Initially releases are made as part of the Select scheme. Once we are happy with a particular version of RISC OS it is committed to a physical ROM that is plugged into the computer. What possibly needs some explanation is the status of the various versions of RISC OS 4 / 6. RISC OS 4.39 in ROM is the version that we recommend is used for the basis of any softload versions of RISC OS Six. The reasons for this are primarily that RISC OS 4.39 contains valuable features such as built-in DHCP networking for use with broadband internet connections, as well as the Boot configuration system which can be accessed by holding down the Shift key during boot up.
Select versions can be loaded on top of any version of RISC OS 4 (from 4.02 onwards), but without the benefit of the new features being available until the softload has been completed.
In terms of RISCOS Ltd's development a huge amount of effort has been put into the development of RISC OS Six, the preview of which was first shown publically in 2006. At the Wakefield 2007 show we launched the first full version of RISC OS Six, via the Select scheme and also as a Single User, Single computer version. The single user version was aimed at providing a trial version for users who may either have lapsed from the Select scheme and wanted to try out RISC OS Six on their computer before rejoining the full Select scheme, or else for people who hadn't previously been in the scheme and wanted to try it out. The RISC OS 6.06 Single User version is available for £49, but does NOT include future updates or bug fixes. There is not a Single User version of the latest RISC OS 6.10 available at present, but users who previously purchased a Single User version of Select can obtain the latest version by paying an additional £49 to effectively upgrade to a full Select subscription. So I hope you will enjoy the new Foundation Risc World CDs and if you are not a Select subscriber, I hope you will consider joining, especially as it is now fully compatible with the latest Virtual Risc PC products.
Select 4i4
The release of Select4i4 has seen many significant new features added to RISC OS Six. As RISC OS Six is very much based on new code, there is still the potential for niggles to occur. This is where the Select subscribers still come in. We can't possibly test RISC OS 6 with every combination of hardware and software and as such we hope that Select subscribers can let us know of any problems that are encountered. The best approach is to use the RISC OS Select Google Group at
The Select scheme provides softload versions of RISC OS that are at the cutting edge of development. If you are interested in the latest versions of RISC OS then the Select scheme, offering a years worth of RISC OS upgrades should be worthy of your investigation. You can find out more from
So what is RISCOS Ltd up to next?
What's next?
Earlier in this article I said that the aim of RISCOS Ltd was to get RISC OS 4 running on as many machines as possible. This goal still applies to RISC OS Six. Our roadmap is well defined, in the shorter term we intend to release a version of RISC OS 6 for all owners of the A9Home. Following on from this we are still committed to getting RISC OS 6 to run on the Iyonix (which currently uses the 32bit Pace derived RISC OS 5). This is no easy task, despite what some may claim, given that we have a limited budget to work with and a lack of information. The recently announced releases from RISC OS Open may prove useful and provide some of the information that we don't have about the low level operation of the Iyonix hardware. We hope to start making some RISC OS 6 derived components available for Iyonix users later this year. We can use these components as building blocks to add more RISC OS 6 features with the eventual aim of a full RISC OS 6 release at some future date. If this project was easy, or we had huge resources, then we would have done it by now. But we are a small company and we need to ensure that we have a realistic chance of recovering the development budgets on any projects we undertake.
So what else is being worked on? To put it simply I cannot tell you at this time as too much is still in the planning stage. We are not resting on our laurels and are looking years ahead to a bright future for RISC OS.
Foundation RISCWorld
Since Richard Hallas left as editor of Foundation RISC User we have been quietly looking for a suitably qualified replacement. Regrettably the search has not been successful and it's not been possible for myself, or the others who work for RISCOS Ltd, to have the time to produce the issues required. As such we have decided that the most sensible option is to combine Foundation RISC User and RISCWorld. Both magazines have more similarities than differences and we all feel that this is the best approach. From the 1st of May 2008 all subscriptions to the RISC OS Foundation will be transferred to the new magazine, suitably called Foundation RISCWorld.
As a final present to subscribers from RISCOS Ltd, there will be a DVD and CD, featuring a compilation of Acorn promotional videos and Acorn Replay movies, for all current Foundation subscribers and those whose subscriptions expired after May 2007. (If you are lucky enough to be using RISC OS on a modern PC or Mac based VirtualAcorn product then you will be able to enjoy the original Acorn Replay movies at far better quality than previously possible).
Paul Middleton (Managing Director RISCOS Ltd)
ÿÿÿÿISSUE1/DISC/INDEX.HTM Issue 1, DiscWorld
DiscWorld
Aaron Timbrell rounds up the software directory
Welcome to the first DiscWorld of volume 9. As you have no doubt seen by now, RISCWorld and Foundation RISC User have merged to create Foundation RISCworld. This means that we know have the opportunity to plunder the RISC User casket of goodies, accumulated over nearly 20 years. Our first dive into the box of delights reveals a full version of Wolfenstein 3D...
Wolfenstein 3D
Wolfenstein 3D was the game that kickstarted modern 3D gaming. Way back in 1992 ID Software released this amazing (for the time) first person shooter. Although Wolfenstein was far from the first 3D game, Atari's Night Driver from 1978 is generally deemed to be the holder of that honour, Wolf3D had many of the elements that we still see in games today. Enemies that attack mercilessly, special end of level bosses, such as the syringe throwing doctor, different weapons to pick up on the way, health packs and more.
Although the graphics have aged, especially when compared to Doom, that arrived a mere 2 years later, the gameplay is as good as ever. The RISC OS version of Wolfenstein was developed by PowerSlave software's Eddie Edwards and was released in 1994. Unlike ports for other systems the RISC OS version was based on the full PC release and also included extra bonus levels, including the 2 level Christmas version and a host of other add-ons.
For the full instructions see the article in this issue, then fire it up and give those Nazi's what for...
The complete DiscWorld line up
As per usual we have our collections of the latest RISC OS applications, as well as support files for this issues articles:
A440
A PDF of the original Acorn A440 product brochure.
FLYSLT100
Sample photos from the Fly SLT100 mobile phone.
Iyonix
Software featured in the Iyonix column.
Letters
Software covered in the letters column.
PD
All the latest PD, shareware and freeware releases from the PD column.
Wake2008
Wakefield show photos.
Widescreen
Widescreen monitor MDF files.
Wolf3D
Complete version of Wolfenstein 3D.
ToolBox
This contains two sets of Toolbox Modules. The Castle archive contains the latest 26/32 bit neutral system components, required if you want to run a lot of new software releases on 26bit machines. The RISCOS Ltd archive contains later and improved versions of a number of modules and is suitable for all versions of RISC OS from 3.1 onwards. We have also included copies of SharedUnixLib and UnixHome as these are needed by some programs.
Do you know that come this September it's the 10th anniversary of the great Acorn Fire Sale. As you no doubt recall Acorn was artificially collapsed by a well known firm of bankers (that's not rhyming slang, although it could be) to get hold of the ARM shares it held. These ARM shares were worth more than Acorn itself. So, in the great spirit of capitalism, someone decided to make a fast buck by buying up enough Acorn shares to control the company. Having got control of Acorn it was deliberately scuttled so that the ARM shares could be grabbed and sold, netting a nice fat profit for some faceless bankers and putting the Acorn market into turmoil.
Well, although it's hard to believe, it's nearly ten years on and we are still here. In the post-Acorn chaos things really didn't look promising. I remember attending a developer conference at a venue in Cambridge where rescue plans were discussed. My impression was that there was too much panic and not enough clear thought. I pretty soon reached the conclusion that with the number of people involved (nearly a hundred) and all the different plans put forward nothing would be achieved and it would soon be Game Over. I was wrong. RISCOS Ltd was formed out of the ashes of this meeting and within a few months had negotiated the rights to RISC OS and amazingly come up with the £100,000 from the RISC OS community that was needed. This was much to the annoyance of one recently formed RISC OS company, Castle Technology Ltd, who had been quietly going around behind the scenes trying to sabotage the efforts to set up RISCOS Ltd, or Pheonix, as the idea was known in the early days.
This behind the scenes activity set the seed for the future of RISC OS and ever since there have been factions inside RISC OS hell bent on smashing everyone else. Things reached a head in 2004 when Castle decided to launch their solicitors at myself, RISCOS Ltd, R-Comp, CJE, Advantage6 and others. It seems that the original plan had been to serve notice on all these companies just before the Wakefield 2004 show opened. This would have prevented a number of the big players from exhibiting and would have effectively killed the show. It seems as though it was only the fear of the backlash from the user base that prevented Castle following this through. What followed was long and complicated. It involved lots of meetings and a great deal of time and money. The end result was that a new agreement was drafted between RISCOS Ltd and Castle Technology Ltd. RISCOS Ltd was prepared to give up some of its rights in order to stop the damaging "war" that was going on. This agreement was thrashed through in one mammoth 13 hour meeting at Castle's Solicitors in Cambridge.
Part of this agreement was for the porting of the RISCOS Ltd versions of RISC OS to the Iyonix. Impressively, despite having pretty much everything they had wanted, Castle Technology Ltd broke the agreement before the ink was dry. I won't go into details but despite the best efforts of RISCOS Ltd to patch it back together the new agreement was declared null and void and everything reverted back to how it had been before. With one important change. Castle Technology Ltd were a spent force. Had they used the money on developing new products, rather than an ill advised and ultimately doomed legal action, then maybe we would have an Iyonix II and heaven knows what else.
So why am I recapping all this. Well it's following a recent thread on the newsgroups started by one of several Castle Technology Ltd "fan boys". Put simply the thread was about Select for the Iyonix and was another attempt to blame RISCOS Ltd for not producing it. Some of these who knew the facts, including myself and Dave Holden tried to correct the misinformation, but to little avail. As of today the thread has died out. Why? Because our claims that Castle had blocked Select for the Iyonix was accidentally backed up by another Castle Technology Ltd fan, David Ruck. He later tried to backtrack and claim he hadn't said it, but it was too late. The whole "it's all RISCOS Ltd's fault" argument collapsed on its back side. So if you have an Iyonix and would like to get RISC OS 6 running on it then you need to kick Castle Technology Ltd. They know the information that RISCOS Ltd doesn't have. With that information RISC OS 6 on Iyonix hardware is possible, without it then it's very unlikely.
So what's my point? Well near the start I said it was heard to believe that we are still here. Now you know one of the reasons why. RISC OS hasn't survived because of the different factions, it's survived despite them. I am please that it has, but I am also very surprised.
The following is about the vehicular faith, not specifically about computing.
For the last few issues I haven't had a great deal to write about. Well for this issue things certainly improved, but not for the better. Lets us start this saga of woe and bruised knuckles, and ego, with the little Daewoo Matiz...
About three weeks before the Wakefield show the Matiz needed to come off the road as the MOT was about to expire. I wasn't sure what would be required for an MOT as we bought the car with a "fresh ticket" last year. Anyway I was a little short of time with preparing for Wakefield. The transport situation wasn't a problem as I just out the Matiz on the drive and put the 4x4 (the "Truck") on the road. I decided that I would sort the Matiz out after the show, when I hoped to have some spare time. So I started driving the 4x4 around. The cost of putting fuel in it was rather eye watering, but never mind it would only be for 3 weeks or so. Anyway let us fast forward to 8 days before the show, a Friday....
We went shopping in Swadlincote and Hayley noticed a little patch of oil under the truck. I wasn't overly worried as it's often done this for reasons that I have never discovered. Anyway later that day when we were parked somewhere else there was a small puddle. Oh well. That evening I had to go out and when I returned to the truck there was no puddle in evidence, instead there was a small lake. Bugger. I started it up and decided to try to drive it home as it was only a couple of miles. I rapidly discovered that it wouldn't shift out of first gear, so it was a reasonable conclusion that the oil was from the automatic gearbox. I drove home slowly and noisily. Having got home I dumped the truck outside and decided to leave it till the morning.
Next morning I stuck my head underneath. I then unstuck my head. Yes, the whole underside was covered in oil. What to do? Well we now had no usable vehicles, but which to fix? I had a think and decided that as the Matiz was already on the drive I should fix that first. Or, at least, take a look and see what needed doing for the MOT. I went round and checked everything. It needed a new wiper blade on the rear and a new front sidelight bulb on the passenger side. it also needed me to "fix" the exhaust to stop it banging on the bodywork. So, the first job, I decided, was the exhaust. It was the work of a moment to jack it up and put axle stands under the back. I could then examine the problem. The exhaust was actually banging on a heat shield. I dug out my tyre levers and banged and prodded for a few minutes. I then noticed something obvious. I could shift the exhaust over on it's rubber hanging mounts. Ah. I moved it over to one side and checked. Yes it didn't hit the heat shield anymore. As long as it didn't move itself back before or during the MOT I would get away with it.
Since the Matiz was jacked up I decided I might as well check the handbrake while I was there. It wasn't working on the driver's side and was binding a little on the passenger side. Well that's easy enough, now where are the adjusters. Yes, where are they? Half an hour later I decided that although I was under the car the adjusters weren't. Were they under the handbrake? Would this mean removing an entire landfill of interior trim? Luckily no. In the rear footwell I had noticed a small plastic plate. I loosened the single screw and levered the plate of. Underneath were the handbrake adjusters. Success. Now where had that screw gone? I found it down the back of the seat. The adjusters were of the normal double lock nut variety. This should be easy. It wasn't. In the end it took me an hour and a half to get the handbrake balanced correctly. The process works like this....
Repeat
Climb into rear footwell
Loosen nuts
Adjust nuts
Tighten nuts
Climb out of rear footwell
Check wheels
Until completely mad = tru
Having sorted this I had to take a rest and gave up for day. I would start again on Sunday....
Sunday dawned clear and bright, unlike me. Still it was ideal car swearing weather. Now the sidelight bulb, how difficult can that be? Well I won't go into the full details of the ordeal, but for future reference to get at the bulb all one has to do is:
Disconnect battery
Remove battery
Remove two bolts holding top of lamp assembly
Disconnect indicators
Remove four bolts holding on panel between headlights and bumper
Lever off panel between headlights and bumper
Touch in damaged paint, between headlights and bumper
Remove bottom bolt holding headlight
Loosen headlight
Remove electrical connector from headlight
Remove rubber seal from back of headlight
Lever out sidelight bulb holder
Remove bulb
At this point I discovered that it was a type of bulb I didn't have in my box of spares. Never mind, the local autofactors is only 10 minutes walk away. It was closed. Of course it's a Sunday, why would you need an autofactors on a Sunday? I now spent 45 minutes walking to Halfords.
Having finally got to Halfords, 20 minutes before they shut I couldn't find the right bulb. I still couldn't find the right bulb 5 minutes before they shut. Luckily I found one in an emergency bulb pack. It was nearly £10 for the pack, but sod it. It was nearly 5 o'clock by the time I got home. Luckily the bulb fitted and worked and putting things back together was much easier than taking them apart. So that should be it, I went to have a bath and some dinner.
At exactly 8:30 the next morning I rung our local MOT centre. Could they do an MOT today? No. Tomorrow? No. Wednesday? No. Please? In the end I was given the option of dumping the Matiz with them at 8am on Tuesday and they would do their best. That was good enough for me. So Tuesday morning dawned and I took the dogs out extra early. I the took one final walk round the Matiz. Swore loudly and disappeared into the roof to find my parts boxes. Why? Well do you remember the knackered wiper blade? I hadn't.
I got the car to the MOT centre just after 8:30. I explained my plight and they kindly tested it over lunch, instead of taking lunch I suspect. I sat in the office at home like an expectant father, would it pass? Every phone call made me jump. Phone calls lasting more than 2 minutes made me desperate. I am sorry I need to go now I said to one customer who, after 3 minutes, still hadn't got to the point. I still hadn't heard by 2 in the afternoon. So I rung...
It passed! Wayyyy, there weren't even any advisory notes. Excellent. I went to pay and pick it up. Having come back home I went to file the MOT in the Matiz paperwork file. Out fell the insurance certificate. It ran out the day before Wakefield....argghhhhh!
Printing Foundation RISCWorld
The new look of Foundation RISCWorld means that you will no longer get the yellow background when printing articles. However you will still get the blue border on the left unless you turn off the printing of background images. The example below shows the print dialogue box from Fresco.
As you can see the option "No Background" is ticked. If you want to print out any of the RISCWorld pages and don't want to waste ink on a blue border then make sure you have clicked a similar option in your browser.
Aaron Timbrell
ÿÿÿÿISSUE1/FIRSTBASIC/INDEX.HTM Issue 1, First Steps in Programming RISC OS Computers
First Steps in Programming RISC OS Computers
A RISCWorld reprint of the updated second edition
Introduction to the RISCWorld edition
When we started planning RISCWorld back in the late 1990's we approached a number of authors to see if they would be interested in writing for this new magazine. We also approached a couple of authors who had written books about RISC OS that were now out of print. We wondered if we would be able to serialise these books in RISCWorld. One of those we approached was Martyn Fox. He had written a couple of books on BASIC programming that had been published by Sigma press in the early 1990's. Martyn had, or was in the process, of making sure that the rights to the books were his before he could confirm that we could re-print one or both of them. As an aside I had known Martyn for a number of years as he had been one of my early customers when I had set up ISV Products so I knew him quite well and was sure that he would get back to us when he had things tidied up.
In the meantime we had heard back from several other book authors and we had obtained the rights to serialise quite a number of titles in RISCWorld. Our quick calculations showed that we now had enough books to last us for nearly 10 years.
Shortly afterwards we heard back from Martyn who said that we could serialise his books in RISCWorld whenever we liked. We thanked Martyn and said that we would definitely want to include them in RISCWorld, but that we had made agreements with other authors for their books and that we needed to fulfil those agreements first. Martyn said that this wasn't a problem and that he was going to update this book and make it available on his website. This he subsequently did late in 2001, a copy was bundled with issue 6 of Foundation RISC User, two years before Martyn's tragic death in 2003.
Fast forward 5 years and we are finally going to serialise the first of Martyn's books as we agreed almost 8 years ago. The recent merger of Foundation RISC User and RISCWorld, to create Foundation RISCWorld means that we now have access to the improved HTML versions of the books produced by Richard Hallas. So here for everyone who has always wanted to learn to program under RISC OS we present part one of First Steps in Programming RISC OS Computers...
Aaron
Index to Part One
Preface to the second edition : Introduction to this book : Chapter 1 : Chapter 2 : Chapter 2 :
Please note that the Second Edition of this book was prepared before the launch of the IYONIX and RISC OS 5. As a consequence some of the information relating to graphics is already out of date. In particular, the graphics card supplied in the IYONIX pc does not support the use of 16-colour screen modes.
Several of the programs in this book make use of 16-colour screen modes: these programs will run on an IYONIX pc, but will switch to a 256-colour mode instead, with the result that the colours shown on the screen will not match those described in the book. Other graphical problems may also appear in individual programs. Readers who work their way through the book may like to try converting the programs to work well in 256 colours as an exercise to test their newly-acquired skills.
The worst-affected of the programs is Munchie, which is the subject of Chapter 11 and later chapters. A special 256-colour version of this program, Munchie_28, is therefore supplied for the benefit of IYONIX pc users.
Copyright Notice for First Steps in Programming RISC OS Computers
This DTP document and associated software files are copyright Martyn Fox 1993, 2001, but may be freely copied and distributed in digital form, including distribution via the Internet or by magazine discs, PD libraries,email, bulletin boards etc., provided the following conditions are adhered to:
No charge is made other than to cover the reasonable cost of duplication and distribution
No alteration is made to either the DTP document or the software files
The DTP document may be printed in either monochrome or colour. Limited distribution of individual printed copies is permitted provided that copies are accompanied by the software files on a suitable medium (e.g. a floppy disc) and that no alteration is made to either the DTP document (including its layout) or the software files.
Organised distribution of printed copies, other than of single copies, may only be carried out by prior agreement with the copyright holder. For further details, email to
RISCWorld
ÿÿÿÿISSUE1/FRW/INDEX.HTM Issue 1, Foundation RISCWorld
Foundation RISCWorld
RISCWorld has changed, Aaron explains why...
You may have noticed a change to this issue of RISCWorld. If you haven't then may I suggest you take a quick look at the RISCWorld title logo at the top of this article. It's different - but why? Well as you can see the logo now includes the word Foundation. What does this mean? Well to put it simply RISCWorld and the Foundation RISC User magazine, as formerly published by RISCOS Ltd, have merged.
Why the change?
The idea to merge the two magazines came about some time ago. After all RW (RISCWorld) and FRU (Foundation RISC User) have more similarities than differences. They are both published on CD only, rather than being printed like the other RISC OS magazines. Both include software on each issue and neither are monthly. RISCWorld is bimonthly and FRU was published quarterly. FRU was, until recently edited by Richard Hallas who had a lot of experience with RISC OS magazine having previously edited RISC User and written for most of the others, including Qercus and Archive. Richard decided to leave to pursue other interests last year and since then RISCOS Ltd has been looking for a new editor, without success.
As you can imagine, not having a regular appointed editor has meant that FRU has been missing its publication dates and is now a couple of issues behind. There was also the matter of the declining RISC OS market meaning that FRU was reaching the point where a small drop in subscribers would have had a large impact. Merging RU and RISCWorld to create Foundation RISCWorld seemed, to all of us, to be a sensible solution.
What's the benefit?
There are a number of benefits. Firstly FRW gets more subscribers. More subscribers means I get a bigger budget for each issue. A bugger budget means that subscribers gets more articles to read. Well, that's the plan. It also means that we now have access to the thousands of articles published in RISC User and FRU over nearly 20 years. I will be cherry picking some interesting and related articles and re-printing them over time. In particular I hope to be taking a historical snapshot of things as they were both 20 and 10 years ago. This will make for an interesting comparison.
Another benefit is that we now have access to all the applications published by RISC User over the years. These have only previously been available on the RISC user Nutshells CD, but if there is something that relates to the content of a particular issue we will be publishing it.
We also hope to be including some of the FRU regular series into FRW in the near future. These changes will happen gradually. This is because I tend to work three issues ahead. so this issue had already been planned some time before the merger took place. So even though I am writing this in early May, I am already working on the content for the next two issues.
I would be very interested to read any feedback readers have on the alterations we are making and on the merger of the two magazines. We would also be interested to hear from any authors who used to write for RISC User, or Foundation RISC Users and who would be interested in joining the Foundation RISCworld team. In the meantime I hope you enjoy this issue. Now head over to my editorial for some good old fashioned whinging...
Aaron
ÿÿÿÿISSUE1/HUGHJ/INDEX.HTM Issue 1, The Hugh Jampton Experience
The Hugh Jampton Experience
There won't be a rhyme, as we don't have the time...
Well I didn't see that coming. What you may ask? Well the strange joining of Foundation RISC User and RISCWorld. I'm not sure about the name though and if any other magazines get joined in the name could start getting really silly ... does "Foundation RISCWorld Now Archive" suit anybody? No, I didn't think so. Still now that we seem to have some RISCOS Ltd people on-board I had better start behaving myself, or not, as the case may be.
As an aside did you know that unlike some publications, RISCWorld, sorry Foundation RISCWorld, only pays by the article and not the word. This gave me an idea to make writing this article easier, ending it now.
Dah!!! That got you didnt it? No. Oh well I suspect that the truly dreadful and ever unpopular craption (I couldn't tell if this was a typo or not - ED) competition might drive you away...
The caption competition
You all now how it goes, so why not sing along..."Last time I published a picture, and asked you to write the caption, you need to use your brain, but only a tiny fraction."
Well I usually complain about the response, but thus time I have nothing to complain about, because nothing was submitted. Since I work my fingers to the skin on writing this column I would hope, nay expect, some form of response from readers (even if it's the two fingered variety? - ED). Still that's how things go so in order to fill up the space I asked various RISCWorld (Foundation RISCWorld - ED) contributors to write a quick caption...
"What do you mean you've filled it with lead!"
Aaron
"John Cartmell finally realises he's running out of hot air"
Paul Brett (with apologies)
"Am I really paying £50 for this crap?"
Dave Holden
Hugh's Caption Competition
So with the misplaced confidence of youth lets see if anyone can come up with a suitable caption, and win a £20 software voucher, for this:
Send me your entries by the 14th of June and don't forget to read the following naughty small print...
The Small Print: The Foundation RISCWorld caption competition is open to all RISCWorld subscribers. The prize for each issue is a £10 software voucher. This voucher can be used to purchase any product from the APDL, ProAction or iSV Products software ranges, up to a value of £10. or can be used as part payment towards an item of greater value cost. Decisions are made at the discretion of the RISCWorld editorial staff and are final. If the voucher is not won then it can roll over to the next issue entirely at the discretion of APDL.
Hugh's Customer Service Award
Last time I picked on Castle Technology for having a broken website. OK, lets be honest, a website that hadn't worked for months. As I am sure you remember that problem seemed to be related to the shop system. It appeared as though Castle hadn't been keeping up with the payments. Well the people who matter must have been listening as something's finally been done about it. OK, the shop system still isn't working but at least now there is a message on each product page referring the viewer to Iyonix.com. It's just a shame that most of the products one might have wanted to buy from the Castle site aren't actually on Iyonix.com.
In the spirit of fair play this issue's target for poor service was going to be RISCOS Ltd. The reason was the rather obvious lack of Foundation RISC User magazines being delivered to subscribers. I've been contacted by a couple of readers who haven't seen an issue for months. Indeed the last issue, number 18, appeared at some point last year. From what I've been told this was the only issue that appeared after Richard Hallas had left as editor. Not being a subscriber myself I can't be sure on the dates, but I suspect that it's getting close to a year since the last issue was actually delivered to those that had paid for it.
So I wrote a nicely subjective and carefully balanced article that "put the boot in", but having now just been told by Aaron that the problem is being resolved by the merger, I've had to remove it and write some eleventh hour waffle to fill up the space in this article. So RISCOS Ltd narrowly escape an award by the skin of their teeth. If there is some RISC OS company you think needs a big kick up the arse to sort themselves out then why not drop me a line at Hugh's Customer Service Award and I shall be happy to investigate and then spill the beans...
Finally, on a lighter note; as they say at the end of the news...
Hugh's photo corner
Mobile phone manufacturers finally come up with yet another gadget to add to their phones:
However not all engineers are that clever...
As submitted by Chris Newman we have the ultimate in female body modification...
Now for those who have spent too long coding in HTML...
Scientists finally quantify the difference between male and female brains..
APDL open day a great success..
Worries over computer addiction in children unfounded claims expert..
And finally a use is discovered for second hand PCs..
If you have any complaints about this column then please take them elsewhere...
Here we are again with another column. As there was a recent show, at Wakefield, there has been quite a few new releases, so without further a-do, let's see what was released.
RISC OS 5 Source Code
Another show, and another batch of the RISC OS 5 source code was made available, this is the fourth batch of code, and it includes amongst other things, the source code for:
The RISC OS Kerne
Hardware abstraction laye
Shared C Librar
I'm not quite sure how much more code there is left to be released but there is now a significant amount of RISC OS 5 code available to developers. Hopefully over time we will see improvements to RISC OS 5, which, when compared to RISC OS 6, is starting to be left behind with development and enhancements. Perhaps the Select features could appear, who knows what will happen over the next couple of years?
Hopefully with all this source code now available, it will help RISC OS Ltd to get Select running on the Iyonix, and if they do that would surely give them a considerable boost to their bank balance with returning Select subscribers who now use the Iyonix as their main machine and have let their Select subscription expire.
At the time of writing the source code of Batch 4 was not available to download from RISC OS Open's website, but hopefully by the time you are reading this, it will be. For more details, information and source code visit
R-Comp updates
In what seems now a tradition with RISC OS shows, the Wakefield show saw the release of a number of brand new products from R-Comp. First up we have !PDFsuite, which is a new collection of programs that allow you to create, view, print and generally handle PDF files. The suite seems to include everything you could possibly need for using PDF files on RISC OS.
PDF files are very popular so it is good to see RISC OS being kept up to date with this format. The PDF suite costs £19.00. For more details click on the following link
Although it is not an R-Comp product this is a good place to mention the fact that ArtWorks 2 can now import PDF documents. Version 2.8 is scheduled for a release in May, and this could already be available by the time you read this. For more details see www.mw-software.com.
Also new from R-Comp is Complete Animator and Touch Type. Both these programs were previously released by Iota Software many years ago. However Iota left the RISC OS market a while back, choosing to move development over to Windows platform (sadly an all too familiar story). They have since ceased trading, and so R-Comp have taken over development of these two programs.
Complete Animator is a program which allows you to produce animations. Touch Type is keyboard tutor program which is the default standard in some establishments. At the time of writing I don't think these have been fully released but by the time you are reading this they should have been released (which seems to be a familiar theme this issue!).
These new updated versions will be 32bit compatible versions so will now work on the Iyonix (and A9 Home) and I would imagine as with many other R-Comp products, they will be updated and improved over time. For more information contact R-Comp at
MP3 Player
It appears that the MP3 player I mentioned last month turned out not to be that good. Well it was only a cheap one, so I wasn't too surprised that it didn't last that long. the Play and On/Off button did not seem to work properly, maybe I was unlucky or maybe not, but I found a really good replacement, a PB 1GM MP3/WMA Player, with voice recorder.
This is a very good little player. It works simply by plugging it into the USB port and dragging your MP3 files across into the filer window which appears. If you want a good quality MP3 player that is not too expensive and definitely works on the Iyonix (and probably other USB RISC OS machines) then this is certainly worth considering.
I bought mine from Amazon and the product link is
Digital Camera
I recently bought myself a digital camera. After looking at a number of models and hoping that they would work fine with the Iyonix, I opted for the Nikon Coolpix L11 (6.0MP, 3X Optical Zoom) 2.4" LCD.
I am pleased to say that it is an excellent little camera which works perfectly with the Iyonix and it was even easier to connect to the computer than I thought it would be. This is because you don't actually connect the camera to the Iyonix, what you do is remove the camera's memory card, and put it into a USB card reader, you then plug the reader into a USB port on the Iyonix and, with a bit of luck, the USB icon will appear, of which there may be many, this is due to the number of ports on the USB card reader.
Click on the relevant USB Icon for the port on the card reader, and hourglass will appear - then all being well a filer window will open and you will be able to get at your pictures from there. I find it best to drag everything to the hard disc and then view the pictures from there, nice and easy or what? Below are a few pictures taken using the camera.
A Snowman which was built during the recent-ish snow that we had.
A Cyberman, taken at the Doctor Exhibition currently at Earl's Court in London.
The hotel that I stayed in on a recent holiday in Cyprus.
This camera can be bought from a number of retailers, so prices may vary, I bought mine from Amazon and paid about £80.00 for it, and think it is well worth the money.
Blu-Ray Discs
Steffen Huber, of Hubersn Software, has successfully managed to create a Blu-Ray disc using his CD and DVD writing program CDVDburn on his Iyonix. This is a significant development for RISC OS and means that in the near future we will be able to use Blu-Ray discs to write data onto.
The disc used was a Blu-Ray rewritable discs (BD-RE) and a LG GGW-H20L drive was used, along with the program CDVDburn, this new version is currently in development at the moment and will be released as and when it is finished, although no release date has been given.
In addition to the Blu-Ray development, Steffen has also been looking at CDFS on RISC OS 5, thanks in no small part to the source being made available by the RISC OS Open shared source scheme. He is looking to fix issues with the CDFSSoftATAP soft-loadable CDFS driver. For further information on CDVDburn, the CDFS and Blu-Ray development see Steffen's website at
Starfighter 3000
Last months RISCWorld included the surprise appearance of a brand new updated version of Star Fighter 3000. Whilst the menus and options screens within the game were not as good as they were in previous releases, the actual game itself has been significantly improved.
I always thought that Starfighter 3000 was in desperate need of a makeover as the graphics were beginning to show their age, but this is no longer a problem and then new version looks excellent as you can see from the screenshots below. Not quite the greatest quality screenshots ever, but the best I could get, maybe it is due to the letterbox mode on my LCD. And for comparison I have included a picture of the original release. As you can see there is more than a bit of a difference.
How Starfighter 3000 looks now:
And how it used to look:
There were a number of problems getting StarFighter 3000 running on the Iyonix, mainly due to differences with RISC OS 5 CDFS. The main problem was that a directory had special characters in the filenames, which work fine on RISC OS 4 and it's many variations, but these characters are displayed differently under RISC OS 5, and so it becomes a different filename, which the program then cannot find and problems then begin.
There were a number of solutions posted in csa.acorn.games newsgroups, however the easiest solution I found was using !CDROMFS. If you run Starfighter 3000 from the RISC World CD through !CDROMFS instead of the normal CDFS, and then transfer it to your hard disc, it should overcome this problem.
However this was not the only problem, at first my Iyonix could not find the Shared Source file, it kept giving an error saying that the "Shared Sound module could not be found" upon some investigation, I discovered the file was there, in it's correct directory !Boot.Resources.!System310.Modules - but was called "SSound" so I made a copy of the module, and called that one "SharedSound" put it the correct directory and the problem went away. Whether this is a RISC OS 5 variation of module names or just my Iyonix being weird I don't know, but if you get that error message give it a try.
With those two problems out the way the game worked for me, sadly only in a letterbox squashed mode on my LCD screen but never mind, it works and it's very good too. Maybe it's worth trying it on my Virtual Risc PC, and see how what it's like on there. A very welcome update to one of the legendary RISC OS games. A big well done and many thanks indeed to all involved, I look forward to playing this one lots!
Netsurf
This was a very welcome piece of news that web browser NetSurf has received a major cash boost from website Google (that's www.google.co.uk in case anyone doesn't know) as Netsurf has been selected as one of it's 'Summer of code 2008' projects.
Google's summer of code is an annual event which offers students the opportunity to work on open source projects over the summer (funnily enough!!). This year the Netsurf development team are participating and a number of programmers will work on Netsurf - with the current NetSurf development team members acting as mentors.
They will be paid around $4500 each on completion of the work and the NetSurf team will receive $500 each to act as mentors. Overall the project is likely to receive a cash injection of £10,000 which is superb news and is certainly money well spent. Before anyone asks, no they aren't doing Javascript. However what will be worked on is PDF Export, an up to date HTML engine, user interface plus a number of other things.
For more information on the Google - Summer of Code 2008 Netsurf project visit
Talking of improving NetSurf, I have discovered recently - more by accident than anything else, that the problems with using PayPal on NetSurf seem to be getting resolved, I haven't been able to test it when paying for an item from Ebay as I haven't bought anything on there for ages.
But when you want to make a payment directly to someone though Paypal, through the "Send Money" option, this actually does work now, you add the persons email address, and the amount and when the process is complete you click on "Pay" and it works perfectly. So there is a way of using PayPal on RISC OS using NetSurf. I am using V1.2 for this and I am very pleased that it works, so many thanks to the development team.
Finally Paul Vigay has released a new version of MiscSetup, his Iyonix configuration program, now at V1.13 this release only has one new feature which is the option of having a big mouse point on your desktop, something which could be useful, or classed as a desktop silly (those who used to collect PD demos and sillies will remember many a program which did things like this) MiscSetup can de downloaded from
And so we reach the end of another column, it's good to be reporting on many new developments, some of whish are already available with the others following shortly (if not already) and long may it continue. The Foundation RISCWorld Iyonix column can be contacted, should anyone wish to, for whatever reason they might have, at
The page is the same, but the name is new, there's lot of letters, from some of you...
Wow, we have had a lot of letters coming in over the last few weeks. A goodly number of these concerned the new StarFighter that was featured on last issue. However before we start on those, lets have a quick submission from Martin Carrudus...
Hi Aaron,
Attached please find a zipped Persian Carpet Pattern Generator program. Just a bit of Fun. Better than being on LSD, (I suppose)! Oh, the colours, man! NB. Should be in 256 colour screen mode for this
Regards,
Martin Carradus
Thanks very much. I have included a copy of this in the letters section of the software directory on this issue.
Funnily enough it reminds me very much of the sorts of submissions that used to go into StarInfo in Acorn User all those years ago. Regular readers may remember that I tried, briefly, to revive this feature in RISCWorld many moons ago. Not wishing to mince words but it died on its arse and from memory only ran for two issues. Perhaps we should try again? Does anyone have any other graphical ditties they would like to submit?
It's no good. I can't wait any longer, here's the first letter about the new Starfighter...
Hi Aaron,
Firstly may I say thanks for the welcomed free version of SF3000NG and now I have it going it looks great. There does seem a couple of issues with the software one generic in that it has a hardwired !Run file and the other specific to the Iyonix , or might just be mine?
The generic I got around by altering the !Run to match the harddisc location as thus , though I suspect that there is a better way I'm sure.
The other one is Iyonix specific in that some files with * in the name copy over with a _ on a Iyonix as an example I found that in the SF-Resources some files on the Kinetic machine had a star in the name like Animations.Chemical*anim but on the Iyonix these had been copied as Animations.Chemical_anim.
So I copied the Kinetic RISCPC version of SF3000NG over to the Iyonix, amended the !Run file and run it and it worked. So it looks like a case of the old CDFS in the Iyonix doesn't like the naming convention.
Finally on the Iyonix again: The voice message at the start is a bit quick and sounds like Donald Duck on speed! The Kinetic 4.39 enabled RISCPC plays it OK.
Anyway thanks for another super edition of RISCWorld and I will be renewing at Wakefield.
Thanks
Doug Webb
Blimey, first LSD and now Speed, what is RISC OS coming to? Being serious we've had a number of letters on a similar subject. On my master copy of the last issue StarFighter was inside an X-File archive. For reasons that currently escape up, we decided at the last minute to out it directly onto the CD. This is what's caused most of the problems that have been reported, which are pretty much Iyonix specific.
Firstly with regard to CDFS on the Iyonix I am sorry to say but the implementation with some older copies of RISC OS 5 is rather poor. Warm Silence used to sell a product called CDROMFS that addressed these issues and let pretty much any CD be read without problems. I am not sure if this is still available, CJE will probably have a copy or two tucked away and certainly have it advertised at £36 per copy on their website (note that the original rrp was £30). However this doesn't explain why you needed to edit the !Run file for the Resources path as it should have worked out of the box. Perhaps something else went wrong when it was copied?
Anyway we have now put the new StarFighter back into an X-File for any new RISCWorld CDs or DVDs that are duplicated. So anyone getting hold of a copy from now on will not have the same problems.
As a final note I did get an e-mail from someone complaining that the new StarFighter didn't work under Aemulor on the Iyonix. Unfortunately their e-mail address bounced so I couldn't reply in person. Instead I shall reply here, that's assuming they have renewed their subscription. You don't need Aeumulor to run the new SF3000, it's 32bit neutral and will run directly on the Iyonix. So stop making your life hard and just run it directly.
Meanwhile whilst we have been talking Martin Carrudus has been busy updating his Persian carpet generator...
Hi Aaron,
Reattaching !Persian. Further bugs cured + Added a 'Start Up' banner panel. Funnily the !RunImage is now exactly 40,111 bytes when !Squeezed. A portent?
Sorry,
Martin Carradus
Thanks for the update. I have made sure that the new version, with the title banner, is included on this issue.
Now another in a series of CD cockups...
Hi Aaron,
Well, my Vol. 8 Iss. 1-6 of RISCWorld CD turned up in the post all right, but what a reluctant beastie it is! It takes ages to load anything, and as often or not the CD drive declares itself to be empty. Just to check my drive, I put in my Iss. 5 CD, and that's fine, stuff pops up straight away.
What can cause a CD to be reluctant to load? It doesn't look dirty or anything. I did give it a surreptitious wipe, just in case, but it doesn't help.
RO 4.39 on RPC700, using Netsurf 1.1, which as often as not declares the server to have provided it with an empty file.
Regards
Michael Poole
RISCWorld is provided on recordable CDs, rather than mass produced CDs. This is because the numbers involved only start making sense at several thousand CDs per issue. We always try and obtain the same brand of printable silver CDs for each issue. Typically we buy then in units of 1000+ so that we always have plenty in stock. However the brand we have been using for the last few months seem to be in short supply and we have had to change to a different brand. Well, you may well say, a CD is a CD, what's that got to do with it?
For modern drives it will make little difference, however if you have an older drive in your machine it simply might not be able to read the particular make of CDR that we have used. It's still quite common to find RiscPC's with 12 speed or less drives fitted and these really are very old hat. Getting hold of a new drive that will work in a RiscPC isn't necessarily very easy as plain CD readers are hard to come by these days. Most people using PCs will expect a DVD Writer at the very least. Since you have RISC OS 4.39 then you might be able to fit a DVD reader that will be able to read CD Roms and Data DVDs (such as the excellent value RISCWorld DVD).
However this is speculation. Check your drive. If it's 24 speed or less then it probably will need replacing to read modern CD recordable discs.
Finally here's a word or two from Matt Thompson...
Hi Aaron,
Got the new Risc World today, I see your rant section is what you mentioned on a recent email about companies being useless. Maybe you should just be the sole supplier for Virtual RISC OS ? might be easier.
Wow what a surprise with Starfighter 3000, a step back to the good old days of picking up a magazine to find some exciting new game exclusive or something, however it won't work.
First problem is that the Sharedsound module doesn't appear to be in the !System.modules directory where the program expects to find it, luckily I did have this module elsewhere in !System but called SShare instead, a rename and file move solved this problem. Is this an Iyonix change or me losing files ?
Secondly it now works nearly I get the introduction sequence, then press Space to start and then it crashes because it wants to run from the CD ROM drive, this is coming from the !Run file , I have transferred the program to hard disc, will it run from there without he need for the CD-ROM in the drive or does it have to be present like in Wizards Apprentice, maybe the !Run file needs editing?
Don't want to sound like this is moaning, this is very exciting exclusive and one which should hopefully generate some more sales, any more exclusives out there
Matt Thompson
You have raised an interesting point. I don't want to be the sole supplier of VirtualAcorn products as, in some ways, this defeats part of the object. When we set everything up we decided that we would only supply the VirtualAcorn's themselves, we wouldn't bundle them with machines. This gave RISC OS dealers a way "in" to VirtualAcorn. For RISC OS to keep afloat there needs to be a complete market with a number of suppliers. In the short term we could have made money by selling machines ourselves, but in the mid to long term it would have been counter productive. RISCOS needs a vibrant market, it needs people to be operating in this market and it needs those supplying goods to make a sensible profit.
So we decided that anyone who wanted to buy just the VirtualAcorn should come to us. Anyone who wanted one bundled and pre-installed on a machine should go to a RISC OS dealer, who would already be equipped to deal with orders for "RISC OS machines". This also had the benefit that it gave the dealers much better control over what they sold and their prices, rather then these being determined by a small number of "real" RISC OS hardware manufacturers. Given the feedback from dealers that we have had over the years this was the correct approach.
Moving on to StarFighter. As far as I know the SharedSound module has always been called SharedSound and I have never heard of it being called SShare. That's unless you have a copy of the module meant for older machines that only have 10 character file names. Of course those machines would be 26bit and it's unlikely that a module that old would run on the Iyonix, or the A9 for that matter. The game should be able to run from the harddisc with no problems. I suggest taking a look at Doug Webb's letter for information on modifying the !Run file to get round the problem, which, so far, has only shown up on the Iyonix and could be caused by the version of CDFS in your copy of RISC OS 5.
I am very pleased that we finally got StarFighter included with RISCWorld as we have been planning this for some time. As a quick note it's worth pointing out that you can only get the new StarFighter with RISCWorld. The version of StarFighter sold by APDL on the "Other Worlds" CD is the original Acorn version (despite what you might have read in Archive and other places).
That's it for this issue. To contact the RISCWorld letters page please e-mail us using the following
For over three years I've been using a Dell 2100 monitor. This is a 20" 1200 x 1600 TFT monitor which has given extremely good service, but a few weeks ago it started showing an intermittent fault. A vertical band, about 2 cm. wide, at the right hand side of the screen would suddenly begin to display random pixels. At first this would appear for a few minutes and than vanish, but it was obvious that this was a serious fault so I started looking for another monitor before the Dell became unusable.
What screen resolution?
My starting point as the Dell's 1600 x 1200 resolution. Space considerations meant that I needed something that was not significantly bigger physically. The monitor had to work with my RiscPC, both with and without Viewfinder, and also with an Iyonix and A9 via a KVM switch.
A lot of searching revealed three possible types of monitor:
1600 x 1200 20"
1680 x 1050 22"
1920 x 1200 24
I was very tempted by the larger of the three; I liked the idea of a larger desktop, but practical considerations ruled it out. The size of these monitors makes them quite a bit bulkier than either of the others, and, more importantly, at its natural resolution it simply had too many pixels to be used without a Viewfinder.
The remaining contenders were therefore 1600 x 1200 and 1680 x 1050.
It didn't take long to discover that there was a very large price disparity between these two sizes. Although they have a similar number of pixels the 1600 x 1200 monitors were at least double the price of 1680 x 1050. In fact, the 1600 x 1200 monitors were quite a bit more expensive than 1920 x 1200. The reason for this is that these resolutions correspond to the two main High Definition widescreen TV sizes. Since the LCD panels are already in high volume production for TVs this obviously reduces costs whereas 1600 x 1200 panels are only used for computer monitors.
This combination pretty much made the decision for me. The 1680 x 1050 22" was physically the right size and was very much cheaper than the 1600 x 1200 alternative.
Incidentally, for anyone who has the space for a 24" monitor, prices for these now start at less than £200. On a RiscPC without Viewfinder you will not be able to use it at its natural resolution, but as my experience shows (see below) this might not be an insurmountable problem.
What to buy?
Having decided on a 1680 x 1050 22" monitor the next question was which to buy?
There was quite a wide range of prices, mostly in the £150-£200 range. Eventually I found the GNR TS2200W at Oyyy.co.uk for the extremely attractive price of just £129 including VAT and carriage. This seemed too good to miss, so I ordered one.
The 'standard delivery', which was the free option, quoted 2-4 working days with an extra charge for next day. Since I wasn't in a great hurry (I did have a spare 17" monitor that I could live with for a few days if necessary) I chose not to pay the extra. As it happened it would have been superfluous as the monitor arrived at 10 am. the next day anyway.
First Impressions
I must admit I hadn't examined the spec too closely when I purchased. I bought mainly on price since I wasn't sure if I would like a 1680 x 1050 monitor with RISC OS. I checked that it it had the necessary inputs, both 15 pin VGA and DVI, and that the contrast and brightness were reasonable. However I did find the same monitor at various other online stores at prices close to £200 including VAT and carriage and didn't find any negative reviews so I assumed it would be reasonable quality.
One thing that I did like was the narrow bezel. This is only about 2 cm. wide all round and makes sure that the physical size of the monitor is as small as possible. I also like the built-in power supply. This means that there is no external lump cluttering up the place. Another plus is that the mains input socket uses a standard IEC connector. A minor point but so many monitors use some sort of non standard connector and an IEC connector allows me to use the right type and length of mains lead to suit my installation and keep leads tidy.
The GNR TS2200W monitor. Note the narrow bezel around the screen, even at the bottom, and the slim design.
Also very useful are the built-in speakers. Admittedly these aren't particularly brilliant but, for me, a plus point is that they're actually on the back of the monitor so they don't increase the overall size. For someone who uses their computer to play music, which is something I don't do, these speakers probably wouldn't be good enough, but for me they're fine as they take up no space and enable me to use the KVM switch (which can also switch audio) to route sound to the speakers from whatever machine controls the screen display.
I was anticipating problems since all the MDFs I had to hand were 'normal' 4:3 type, rather than the 14:9 aspect ratio of the new monitor. There was only one way to find out, so I plugged it in to my RiscPC with the same MDF I used for the Dell monitor and switched on. To my surprise I ended up with a perfectly centered and sized 1600 x 1200 desktop which, despite not being the 'natural' size of the panel, was remarkably clear. I tried the other main standard screen sizes, 1280 x 1024, 1024 x 768, 800 x 600, and, apart from the need to bring up the menu and select 'Auto' the first time I used 1024 x 768 (it was about an inch too narrow but resized itself without problems) they all worked perfectly.
As the screen dimensions weren't correct for these 4:3 screen modes everything was a bit distorted, but it seems the electronics in the monitor were designed to give the best possible extrapolation with these modes since the picture was always very clear and usable.
The next step was to add a 1680 x 1050 definition to my MDF. When this was done I could see the monitor working in its natural screen resolution. Once again it went without hitch and the monitor correctly centered and sized the screen. I then tried it with the A9 and Iyonix using the modified MDF. Again there were absolutely no problems.
So far it had all gone with surprisingly little hassle. The only remaining thing to try was how well it worked without Viewfinder.
It took a bit of 'tweaking' with !MakeModes to get a suitable 1680 x 1050 mode but once this was done I found the monitor worked perfectly in 256 colours at this resolution with 2 MB of VRAM. I'd deliberately reduced the frequency to 56 Hz to see if that would work OK since I know that some RiscPCs have problems with high bandwidth screen modes but even at 56 Hz the display was clear and solid. Of course, most RiscPCs would have no difficulty in running a 1680 x 1050 screen at 60 Hz, which is the standard frequency for TFT monitors.
In order to use 32,000 colours without a Viewfinder you would need to drop the screen resolution to 1024 x 768. This is the largest standard screen resolution that permits 16 bpp. but it would, of course, be possible to create a larger screen mode, say 1248 x 780. I haven't tried this but experimenting with a couple of other 'odd sized' screen modes that I had to hand wasn't too successful. There was no problem getting a good, solid display, but in each case there was some vertical banding. This is quite common with TFT monitors when used with screen resolutions outside their natural size and where there is no inbuilt compensation in the monitor's firmware to balance this as there is with the more common sizes.
While I had the Viewfinder disconnected I tried it with a few older games, since many of these don't like the Viewfinder. The monitor seemed willing to display the low res screens used by the games, the only problem was that the widescreen format exaggerates the 'letterbox' effect. All LCD monitors exhibit this effect, but obviously it's more pronounced on a widescreen display than a 4:3 screen. For a serious games player this could be improved by customising the required screen modes or there are utilities that can double each horizontal line thereby doubling the height of the display.
In conclusion
I've been using this monitor for several days now and I'm definitely sold on the 'widescreen' format. The biggest advantage is that when editing a document there's more unused desktop for directory displays, other documents etc. The two pictures below illustrate this. In either case click on the picture to see it full size.
Editing a pamphlet in Impression at 1600 x 1200
The same pamphlet as above but this time in 1680 x 1050
As you can see with the document sized to fit the vertical confines of the 'working' area of the desktop the 1680 x 1050 screen gives a lot more unused space for other things.
Since I don't do a lot of graphics work I can't offer a definitive opinion on the colour reproduction. However colours do seem very good with the graphics files I've looked at, although for the serious user some fiddling with the colour balance on the monitor's menu would probably be required. The display is uniformly bright and even over a wide viewing angle; it doesn't exhibit the darkening when viewed off centre of some TFT monitors.
All in all a very worthwhile purchase, even if I hadn't been able to buy it at the special offer price.
The most gratifying thing is that it demonstrates that, even without a Viewfinder, a RiscPC can still use a modern low cost TFT widescreen monitor. This is an important consideration when so many RiscPC users now have a PC as well and use a common monitor for the two machines via a KVM switch.
I have included the 1680 x 1050 resolutions in the software directory, so that anyone else who is considering this size of monitor will not have to do the same messing around as I had to.
Product details
Product:
TS2200W widescreen monito
Supplier:
Purchased from www.oyyy.co.u
Price:
£129.00 (inc VAT and Carriage
Address:
Tel:
0870 608552
Dave Holden
ÿÿÿÿISSUE1/NEWS/INDEX.HTM Issue 1, News
News
The latest news to land on the RISCWorld editorial desk...
RISCWorld's pick of the news from the last couple of months...
Proposed Developer Conference
RISC OS Connect are pleased to announce the proposed reinstatement of the Developer Conference (a developer is classed as a person or persons writing software for the RISC OS platform). The conference is aimed at both those developers returning to the platform and those with many years of experience.
To that end we are seeking to gauge the level of interest in such a conference. We are looking to ascertain:
To that end we are seeking to gauge the level of interest in such a conference. We are hoping to find out:
The number of developers interested
Whereabouts in the country they live (to enable a centralised venue to be chosen)
Topics delegates would like on the floor for discussion/demonstration/training
It is expected this will take place on a Saturday. The actual format of the conference is still to be decided, however the suggested topics may largely dictate this.
If you are interested in attending the developer conference, please visit the "Expression of interest" page and register both your interest and the type of topics you would like to be covered:
In addition to completing the "Expression of interest" form, if you have further comments on any aspect of this please
If there is enough interest in this an you would like to become more involved in either it's organisation or as a participant (we are open to ideas on both), please get in touch with your thoughts.
RISC OS Connect
RISCOS Open release 4th batch of code
One year on from the first shared source code release, Castle Technology Ltd (Castle) and RISC OS Open Ltd (ROOL) were pleased to release Batch Four of the RISC OS source code on CD at the Wakefield RISC OS show. Batch 4 includes long-awaited low level components such as the RISC OS kernel, hardware abstraction layer and the Shared C Library. Batch 4 will be released on the RISC OS Open Limited web site soon.
The release follows on from the three previous batches:
Batch 1
Batch 2
Batch 3
The Batch 4 CD release consists of a self-contained source archive which, for the first time ever, can be used to build a RISC OS ROM image entirely from
shared source. Due to missing components such as a graphics driver or complete Risc PC HAL the ROM has no practical use, but is landmark proof of concept achievement.
In addition, in order to make the results of the shared source project more accessible to end users, ROOL has updated the downloads pages to include categorised ZIP files holding individual applications, modules or other such discrete components. ROOL is consulting with the RISC OS Packaging Project to find other ways of making binary components more accessible to end users, particularly when complex external dependencies are involved. More information will be released on the ROOL web site in due course.
RISC OS Open
SELECT4i4 featuring RISC OS 6.10 released at the Wakefield Show 2008
RISCOS Ltd are delighted to announce that the latest version of RISC OS 6 will be launched at the Wakefield Show 2008.
RISC OS 6 is available to members of the RISC OS Select scheme and this release is the fourth in the series. Currently RISC OS 6 is suitable for A7000 , A7000+, RiscPC, Kinetic and VirtualRPC products.
Visitors to the Wakefield show will be able to see the new version of the OS being demonstrated on a range of machines, including Risc PC with Viewfinder
running on 22" LCD monitor at 1680 x 1050 x 16M. Virtual Risc PC running on PC with output to 32" LCD via HDMI at 1360 x 768 x 16M. Virtual Risc PC running on Apple Intel Duo-Core 24" iMac at 1920 x 1200 x 16M and Virtual Risc PC running on Apple Intel Mac-Mini at 1440 x 900 x 16M.
Existing Select subscribers who visit the show will be able to take home a Select 4i4 CD at no charge. New subscribers will also be able to take home a copy of Select 4i4 on CD.
A downloadable version of Select4i4 will be available as soon as possible after the show.
The RISC OS developers have made over three thousand changes and improvements since the RISC OS 6.06 ROM was released at Wakefield 2007. The key improvements and changes in this release are:
Tunable automatic switching between standard and thumbnail filer views.
Support for 8MB of VRAM when running on VirtualRPC.
New filer layout options: vertical display and reverse sort order.
A number of WIMP optimisations to speed up the desktop.
Faster filer thumbnailing with optimised image generation.
Improved bandwidth for the RISC OS video system.
Enhanced keyboard shortcut support in Filer windows.
Improved Filer configuration options.
Support for DrawWorks XL and DrawWorks Select.
Search filer windows using the keyboard.
Option to enable Filer view inheritance.
Massive speed improvements to Pinboard.
Powerful new rename/copy/move features in Filer.
Optional and configurable 'lazy' thumbnailing.
Improved and configurable focus handling in Filer.
Many bug fixes to FontEd.
Image number indicators on thumbnail icon display for files with more than one image.
Updated FontEd user interface.
Filer user interface update, e.g. new filetype menu.
Thumbnail cache now configurable.
Improved support for font file variants and preserving additional data such as kerning.
New state indicators on thumbnail icon display (processing etc.)
User selectable font for the Alarm iconbar time display.
Updated User Guide.
Improved 'working week' handling within Alarm.
Iconbar, Filer and Pinboard cooperate on exchanging pinned items.
Video Welcome Guide to Select 4i4.
Faster filer viewer redraws and improved formatting.
Pinboard includes support for removable media.
Improved alpha-sprite support in thumbnails.
Mouse scroll support in filer viewers has been improved.
Configurable drag onto sub-directories to copy/move/save.
Alarm notification position now configurable.
Dynamic selections on Pinboard.
Filer status (sort order etc.) indicated in title bars.
Improved multi-user support in Alarm.
Updated configuration plugins to support all these new features.
Improved SVG export from Draw.
Increased accuracy when scaling objects in Draw.
Smoother mouse scroll wheel.
Updated Toolbox components.
Numerous other improvements to the Application suite (Paint, Draw...
A years subscription to the Select scheme costs from ukp99. Full details can be found on the RISC OS Select website at:
Details on RISC OS Six itself can be found on the RISC OS Six website at:
RISCOS Ltd
R-Comp announce PDF Suite
Time and again we hear people saying that they use Windows machines for making/viewing PDF files (electronic documents), in the belief that RISC OS is fundamentally deficient in this area. To counter this, we're launching PDFsuite - an affordable CD containing everything you need to view, print and create PDF files on RISC OS machines (RISC OS 3.5+).
PDF files have become the standard for cross-platform "DTP-style" documents (ie. with all your fonts, pictures and formatting retained). They are ideal for sending to colleagues or friends running on different platforms, and for distributing documents on the web. PDF is, in many ways, essential for RISC OS users, because we use programs like Ovation Pro or Impression, which have their own file formats, not recognised in the world at large. If you could go directly from Impression, Ovation, Draw, FireWorkz, or any number of other programs, straight into PDF, then your documents would be accessible on any other platform.
Enter PDFmaker, a major part of the Suite, developed in-house here at R-Comp. This software allows you to create PDF files from almost any application in just a couple of clicks. Attractively presented, and a doddle to use, PDFmaker lets you drag a PDF straight out to your hard disc, or fine tune quality settings if you wish.
The Suite also includes PDF viewing software, capable of running on all machines 3.5+ without the need for updated C libraries or any other hassles. You can quickly proof your PDF files, or view/print downloaded documents.
But surely setting all this is complicated? Amazingly, PDFsuite (including PDFmaker) can be installed in just four clicks... Click on the CD icon on the iconbar, 2 clicks on the installation program, and finally one click on "Install". Your computer will be set up to view and create PDFs.
PDFsuite combines software developed in-house here at R-Comp with products from Colin Granville (author of our popular Messenger Pro) and Martin Wuerthner, with permission.
The software costs just 19ukp on CD including a printed instruction booklet. It will be available at the show this weekend, and orders are being accepted now (it will be posted next week to postal customers). Screenshots and a sample at
R-Comp
RISCWorld
ÿÿÿÿISSUE1/PD/INDEX.HTM Issue 1, PD World
PD World
Paul Brett with the latest freeware and PD releases for RISC OS.
Welcome to our latest stroll through the wonders of RISC OS application development. The RISC OS market continues to surprise and since we last met there have been some interesting releases. So let us start with what might be one of the most significant, although perhaps for not the right reasons.
RISCOS 5 Source Code Batch 4 - RISCOS Open Ltd
Due to a previous commitment I was unable to attend the recent Wakefield show. This was unfortunate as if I had been able to attend I would have made the ROOL (RISCOS Open Ltd) stand my first port of call. Then I would have been able to obtain a CD with the latest RISC OS 5 source code release. This apparently contained the sources to the RISC OS HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) as well as the Shared C Library and others. One would normally expect a downloadable version of this to follow on the
I am, along with a lot of the RISC OS community, a great supporter of the work being done by RISCOS Open and I am desperately keen to take a look at the Batch 4 releases, but I am getting a little worried. I am sure you noticed the use of the word "apparently" in the first paragraph when discussing the source code CDs released at Wakefield. I have used this with some trepidation as ROOL announced shortly after the show that some of the CDs that had been duplicated on one of their machines might be corrupted. This was apparently due to the ISO image used to copy them on the fly becoming damaged. This can happen, so why am I expressing some concern? Well in the first case I cannot seem to find anyone who has a CD, as if I could them they could simply make a copy and then send it to me. (If anyone does have a copy I would like to take butchers myself, so forward it to me and I will pass it on - ED). Secondly, why the delay? If the code was available at Wakefield why could it not be released on the website? Whilst I am no advocate of conspiracy theories and I am sure that there is an innocent explanation for the delay I am concerned.
Let us hope that the release will have appeared by the time you are reading this in which case enjoy it and disregard my ramblings above.
Calibre V 2.0 - Ray Favre
We have featured Ray's excellent calendar generating application in previous issues, but we are returning to it as there have been some significant improvements in the latest release:
For a start there is a new print preview facility, which allows the printed output to be stepped through sheet by sheet. This makes it very easy to check, the calendar for any errors and to preview the pictures for each page. The handling of "Red Letter Days" has been completely re-worked and the option to automatically insert English Bank Holidays, as well as other key dates, has been added.
Ray has said that there are also other improvements. As an example the main colour pickers can now be opened using any mouse button and that there has been considerable rationalisation of much of the code to make future development and support easier. Users of earlier versions should consult the supplied ReadMe file before upgrading their copies.
Calibre
As with all of Ray's applications a helpful and comprehensive manual is provided in a number of formats, including HTML.
DrawPrint V 1.12 - Hillary Phillips
DrawPrint is an application designed to allow and image to be printed across a number of sheets of paper, this is often referred to as "tiling". Despite it's name the new version of DrawPrint not only handles Drawfiles, but also Sprites and JPEGs.
DrawPrint
As one would expect the user has full control over the size of the assembled image, the margins and the overlaps. There is also a handy review feature that lets you check the job before committing it to paper, and potentially wasting some expensive ink. DrawPrint was originally developed to be used in conjunctions with NetSurf on the Iyonix, but since then has come on in leaps and bounds. It provides an excellent way to print posters, large size family trees, multi page spreadsheets, indeed it can manage almost anything that can be imagined.
GnuPG 1.4.9 - Stefan Bellon
This is the long awaited update to GnuPG (the privacy encryption system) and is the fist update for over three years. GnuPG is a complete and free replacement for PGP. Because it does not use the patented IDEA algorithm, it can be used without any restrictions. GnuPG is RFC2440 and RFC4880 (OpenPGP) compliant.
The GnuPG suite
GnuPG itself is not a desktop application, but a tool designed to be run (or accessed) from the command line (F12 - ED). It's designed to be used by other applications, much like a relocatable module such as the Shared C Library. It's supported by a number of applications including Messenger Pro and Pluto, to name but two. Developers writing their own applications can make easy use of GnuPG to protect potentially confidential material. As it's open source it's quite easy to examine how it works, which should please those who are heavily concerned about keeping their material private.
SiteMatch V 2.27 - Richard Porter
SiteMatch is designed to make maintenance of a website much easier. It keeps track of a local copy of any site on your harddisc. It can then monitor the local copy for any changes and then make sure that these changes are automatically uploaded to the server. Not only does SiteMatch allow for existing files to be altered but it also checks for new files that have been added, and for old files which have been removed.
SiteMatch
SiteMatch ensures that what's on your copy of a website is correctly replicated on the server. Speaking from personal experience I have fallen foul of this myself, having re-worked part of a site to my satisfaction and then neglected to actually upload it so that it's available to the rest of the world. SiteMatch can interface with both sFTP and FTPc to perform the maintenance. In addition it can record the changes that need to be made on the server as a script which can be imported into a range of FTP clients at a later date. If you are upgrading from an earlier version then I strongly advise that you consult the supplied documents before performing the upgrade.
Top Ten - Benoit Gilon
TopTen is designed as an add on to RISC OS and provides similar functionality to the Windows Recent Documents folder. TopTen keeps a track of the files that you have recently used and keeps a lit of the most recent, or top, ten, hence the name. This list can be opened at any time from the Topten icon on the iconbar by clicking with the Select button on the mouse.
TopTen configuration window
TopTen works on a FIFO process (First In First Out), this means that it will starts building up a list of the documents and folders that have been used. Once it reaches the predetermined limit the oldest document in the list will be removed. The user can also freeze the application to stop it gathering any more information for a period if you are working on a large number of transient files.
Signing off
And there we must leave things for this issue. IF you would like to get in touch then please send an e-mail to the
ARM powered touchscreen technology in your pocket? Aaron investigates...
I am sure that all RISCWorld readers are aware of the Apple iPhone. This is a super dooper multimedia touchscreen phone with an ARM processor. To be honest the iPhone is just too expensive. It's currently only available on contract and when you add the whole price up over 18 months you are looking at the thick end of £800.
So what's this got to do with the Fly SLT100? Well the SLT100 is also an ARM Powered touchscreen phone. However it's not an iPhone, unlike the apple product it's not available on contract and can only be purchased on a pay as go basis. You may well never have heard of
In the box
Inside the box you will find the phone itself, a Virgin pay as you go SIM card, battery, mains charger, headphones, a collection of cables (which we will come back to later) and the printed user guide. Also included is a software CD with a quite useable phonebook syncing application and some other utilities. This software is Windows only, although you may not need to use it. This is because when the phone is connected to a PC (I don't have a RISC OS machine with USB ports) it appears as a normal USB flash drive. This makes copying files to and fro exceptionally easy. The phone itself is very neatly packaged. Initial charging time is around 8 hours but one slightly disconcerting feature is that if the phone battery is totally flat then the phone won't appear to start charging for up to half an hour. After the initial charge the phone lasts nearly a week and a half on standby, although using it heavily will reduce this quite considerably as you would expect.
Appearance
The Fly SLT100 is a fairly standard looking slider phone. It seems well made with a combination of chrome, metal and high quality plastics. The slider mechanism is smooth to use. The slide out keypad has large and easy to use buttons. There are also two "action" buttons, a start call and end call button and an ipod style wheel to access various menu functions. In addition there are volume buttons on the side of the phone. The SLT100 is available in two colour schemes. The black version and the pink (more of a metallic light purple) version. Internally they are identical.
Call quality
Modern mobile phones have many built in gadgets, and the SLT is no exception, but their primary purpose is to make phone calls. The SLT has very good voice quality and the other person's speech comes through loud and clear. The microphone, as with a lot of slider phones, does suffer from some wind noise so you won't be making intelligible calls outside on a very windy day. Signal strength is good and the phone works in places where some others can fail. The phonebook is comprehensive and you can search alphabetically. One thing I especially like is the volume of the ring tones. They are very load so you will hear the phone ringing when it's lodged at the bottom of a bag. The speaker also works as a speakerphone and again this is clear and loud for a mobile phone. So overall, simply as a phone, the Fly is good and I have had no problems in two months of use.
If we were just interested in the call quality then this would be a very short review, but the SLT offers lots of other features which we will introduce as we go. Firstly we need to take a look at how you can input information. As the SLT is a slider phone you can just use the keypad to type in numbers, but unlike most slider phones the SLT also has a 320 x 240 pixel touchscreen. The stylus is neatly tucked into the top of then phone. You will need this as unless you have very small fingers you simply won't be able to operate the touchscreen properly. it's quite possible to use almost all of the features of this phone without using the touchpad at all. You can navigate using the scroll wheel and the buttons. However should you decide not to use the touchscreen you will be missing out on quite a lot.
Texting
Like all modern phones you can text using the keypad, this is fine but is as cumbersome as it is with any phone. Texting become much easier when you use the stylus which gives you access to a mini keyboard on screen. Texting then becomes much easier and, speaking personally, a great deal faster. The normal on screen keyboard follows a QWERTY layout. If you need punctuation or other symbols then a single press will switch to a number of alternative keyboard layouts. This very quickly becomes a godsend and it's easy to compose proper full length texts in English without having to resort to psuedo gibberish, which is gr8t
So you can text either with the keypad or the on screen keyboard, but the SLT has another trick up its sleeve. You can also compose a text message using handwriting recognition. It's a little limited, you need to write one character at a time, but it works and if you find keypads too fiddly then this could be a very useful feature. It's certainly very surprising to see this feature on any pay as you go handset and starts to give you some idea of the features the SLT offers.
Camera
The SLT has the now defacto 2 megapixel camera. As with most phones you can adjust the light levels and set the image quality. You also have various toys to play with, including options to take sepia photographs and various other photographic effects with dubious usefulness. Unlike many budget phones the SLT also has a powerful LED flash. The pictures are perfectly acceptable for a camera phone. They do suffer from a blue tinge, occasional contrast problems and from blurred colours, but then I am sorry to say so do most of the competition (with the notable exception of some Sony Ericsson models). Provided you are careful with the settings it's possible to take some very acceptable photos. You can even set the camera to burst mode to capture up to 9 pictures close together, which is very welcome.
I have included some sample photos taken by the SLT in the Software directory.
As well as taking still pictures the SLT can also record moving video with sound. The resolution is only 352 x 288 pixels, but at 25 frames per second the image is quite smooth. The video camera includes similar options to the still camera, with flash, light levels, image quality etc. The results from the video camera are very good for a budget mobile phone. They can be sent to people as a multimedia message, saved to your computer, or you can watch them on a TV. Yes, that's right, the SLT also has full TV output. Remember those cables we found in the box earlier? Well one of them is a TV out. Unlike some phones that only display photos or videos via the TV out socket the SLT displays everything that's on the screen, it even plays back audio.
Multimedia
The SLT can also play back video files that have been correctly encoded on another device. Playback is smooth and the sound quality is fine. Whilst on the subject of sound one of the few negatives with the SLT is that there is no standard headphone jack. Although the supplied earphones are suprisingly good, they use the same connection socket as the USB cable, so if you lose them getting replacements may not be easy. As well as using the earphones for making phone calls you can also use them to listen to music via the built in MP3 player facility. This is a little basic and isn't easy to navigate, but we can come back to this later. Another surprising inclusion is an FM radio, which uses the headphone lead as an aerial. This again works very well and also has the unusual benefit of allowing you to record a radio program to listen to later. The MP3 encoding is little heavy, but recorded radio programs are still fine to listen to.
Java and gaming
The SLT supports a full version of Java and includes a couple of fairly forgettable games. The Java handling is exceptionally good and applications can be installed to the phone's main 24MB memory, or to an external MicroSD card, although only cards of 1MB or less are supported. Unlike a lot of phones installing a Java application is as simple as copying it to the phone and running it. You then just follow the prompts on screen. In my tests it ran almost everything I threw at it, which is impressive. As well as games you can install Java applications. For example the SLT doesn't have a full built in web browser, although you can access the Virgin Bites on-line information service for a single 30p per day cost. Not having a web browser isn't a problem as you can just install a copy of Opera Mobile (or FireFox mobile). Since the SLT isn't a 3G phone browsing is a little slow, but works well and you aren't stuck with the manufacturer's default browser.
What else
So what other features haven't I mentioned. Well the SLT supports full Bluetooth 2.0, which should include stereo Bluetooth headsets, although I haven't tried this. If Bluetooth isn't your thing then the SLT also has InfraRed connectivity. The built in message centre supports e-mail as well as normal and multimedia text messages. You can use pretty much any MP3 as a ringtone and the phones customisation options would run to several pages. There is also an option to permanently disabled predictive text, which, since predictive text is a pain, is very welcome. As you would expect there is a calendar, alarm clock and organiser. As well as a world clock, calculator, currency converter, stopwatch, e-Book reader and even an essential Bio-Rhythms application.
The SLT also has another great feature, the file manager. This doesn't just let you copy and delete files it sensibly launches any file that's been clicked on into the relevant application. Text files go into the e-Book reader, MP3 files are played, video files are loaded into the video player and Java files are launched and installed. It even shows you a thumbnail preview of your photos. As I've been writing this review I have also discovered a picture editor that lets you adjust the contrast, saturation and brightness of any saved photos. So despite having owned this phone for two months I still haven't got to the bottom of all the features. (P.S. Another week after writing this I have just discovered how to get the phone to speak phone numbers as you dial them).
Conclusion
In my opinion the Fly SLT100 is a truly superb package. Everything it does is done well and I can't find a single significant flaw anywhere. Some reviews have complained that the menus can be a little clunky, but I have had no problems, you can even configure your own quick links to the features you use the most. The Fly SLT100 is a phone, an MP3 player, a portable radio, it takes adequate photos and it takes useable video. It also acts as a handheld video player and games machine, you can even play your Java games on a TV. It has bright clear high resolution touch screen, the call quality is good and the feature set almost matches the iPhone.
Which brings us back to where we started. You may remember that I said the SLT100 was not like an iPhone. Given the huge range of features, many of which are similar to the iPhone's, you may be wondering what the big difference is. The big difference is price. You can have a slice of ARM powered SLT touchscreen goodness in your pocket for under £50.00. You may have to double check the price, but it really does sell for that little. How Fly have managed to make this phone for this price I simply don't know. If you are in the market for a new phone I can unreservedly recommend this phone, even it it was twice the price it would still be great value. Other phone manufacturers had better watch out.
Product details
Product:
Fly SLT 10
Supplier:
Purchased from Currys Digita
Price:
£49.00 (inc VAT and £10 call credit
Address:
Aaron
ÿÿÿÿISSUE1/VA/INDEX.HTM Issue 1, VirtualAcorn Tech Support
VirtualAcorn Tech Support
More from Aaron's tech support notebook
The Vista Game...
There's been some interesting news about Windows Vista recently. Although it's not directly VirtualAcorn related I thought it was worth a couple of paragraphs. It seems that Microsoft have finally started to realise that they might have made a large error with Vista. Firstly Bill Gates was giving a talk a few weeks ago and just "happened to mention" that Microsoft will be trying to bring forward the release date of Windows 7 (Vista is the 6th generation of Windows). Sales of Vista on new machines are acceptable (to Microsoft) as a lot of people have little choice. If you buy a new computer from most of the big retailers it will come with Windows Vista. However sales of upgrade or stand alone versions have been very poor. So poor indeed that Microsoft have recently announced price cuts for some versions. This is the first time I can ever recall this happening, except near the end of a product's life span.
Something else interesting has happened. Microsoft used to sell a product called VirtualPC. This provided a closed PC environment for people to test applications/code etc without any risk to the main machine. It also allowed you to run an alternative version of Windows inside your PC. So, for example, you could have Windows 98 running in a window under Windows XP. What was interesting was that Microsoft stopped selling it at some point and late last year made it available for free. Why? Well, the reason seems to be so that people could carry on using their software under Vista. I have lots of stuff I want to run, but most of it doesn't work under Vista. So I downloaded VirtualPC. It's really very good, as you would expect from a company with the resources of Microsoft. What was even more interesting was that you could also download a cut down version of XP, to run inside VirtualPC, free of charge. What does that say about Microsoft's faith in Vista?
On a similar subject I have been using Vista on my main laptop for a year now. I got used to the fact I couldn't run some of my favourite software, but oh well, I can still run it on one of the main desktop machines. Anyway recently Vista started grabbing lots of upgrades. Then it all went wrong. Firstly the wireless network packed up and just wouldn't re-start. Then the audio failed. This wasn't very helpful as it was on the Thursday night before Wakefield. I managed to bodge everything together to keep the machine running for the show but it had to be fixed.
On Sunday I started again. I decided to make a very important update to the laptop. I now have an OS that works on the wireless, with a reported signal strength of excellent, rather than poor under the original Vista install. I've managed to get lots of my old programs to work again. The audio now works correctly with all the special effects that never worked before, for example the quite effective 3D pseudo surround sound. The machine runs quicker, the hard drive is less full and everything just works as it should. I've also discovered that the battery life is increased by around 25%, even when running on full power "Presentation" mode. Games run better and faster, in fact the machine is now a joy to use.
So what was this magic upgrade to Vista that made all these improvements? Simple, I've upgraded the machine from Vista to XP. After all that seems to be Microsoft's approach. If Vista doesn't work then slap on a free copy of VirtualPC running XP. I've just gone one logical step further. If you have a copy of Vista I suggest you do the same.
MessengerPro
I've had a few problem reports with MessengerPro over the years. As I don't use it myself we have always passed any support related to using MessengerPro on VirtualRPC to R-Comp. After all it's their application. However I recently had several VirtualRPC users with what appears to be the same problem. They could receive e-mails fine, but when they came to send e-mails with attachments VirtualRPC locked up and had to be quit from the Windows Task Manager.
Now this isn't very nice and is a little worrying for the user. It could be quite disastrous of they happened to have some unsaved work open at the time it happened. Now I know that VirtualRPC isn't at fault. Indeed MessengerPro has had reported issues running on lots of hardware. One customer independently reported a similar problem when running on an Iyonix and I've heard stories of MessengerPro corrupting harddiscs on the A9. Why it does this I don't know and I was also at a loss to explain why it wouldn't send attachments from VirtualRPC. Luckily a solution has been discovered.
I am sure you all know Paul Beverley, who edited Archive magazine for 20 years. Well he recently ran into this problem and provided the solution. It seems that MessengerPro gets its knickers in a twist when your !Scrap folder is on a HostFS drive. If you move !Scrap to an ADFS harddisc image file under VirtualRPC then it behaves quite correctly. So how does one make the required changes to VirtualRPC?
The easiest approach for those that don't like fiddling with !Boot sequences, is to set up the ADFS harddisc image drive and copy over the RISC OS !Boot sequence. Now this sounds rather daunting, but it's very easy. All one has to do is:
Double click on !Boo
The configure window will open
Click on the Discs/Drives icon
Set the number of ADFS harddiscs to 1
Now click on the Set button
Ignore the warning about "Changing the number of discs"
After a few moments a new harddisc icon will appear on the RISC OS iconba
This new icon is called IDEDisc4
Click on it to open it and you will see some files
Double click on the !BootADFS application
Confirm that you want to set VRPC to boot from the ADFS harddisc image
Go away and have a cup of tea whilst the boot sequence is copie
Whilst drinking your tea RISC OS will be re-configured to boot from the new drive
Once the boot sequence has been copied you can shut down and re-start VRPC
That's it, you are now booting from ADFS and hence !Scrap (which is in the boot sequence) will be on ADFS
Now try using MessengerPRO to send an e-mail with an attachment, it should now work
Although the above does look like a long list it will only take 5 minutes at most. For those that are happy messing with their Boot sequences there is another way of achieving the same. The first few steps are the same. Only once you have the IDEDisc4 icon on the iconbar you don't run the !BootADFS application. Instead:
Shift double click on !Boot to open it
Open the Resources directory
Drag a copy of !Scrap from !Boot.resources to the root of the new IDEDisc4
Now go back and double click on !Boo
Click on the Boot option
Click on Run
Drag the !Scrap from IDEDisc4 and drop it into the Run at Startup window
Click on Set
Job done, you can now quit and reload VirtualRPC
The second method is probably that most sensible for most semi experienced users. It has the benefit of keeping most of the Boot sequence on the faste
HostFS drive and only moving !Scrap over. It also means that if you ever need to recover anything out of !Scrap it's dead easy to find.
Now we come to the nub of the matter, why is this necessary? To be honest I simply don't have a clue, however given the other problem reports I have seem I am inclined to suspect that MessengerPro really wants to do things inside !Scrap that can only be done properly on ADFS. If you do run into this problem then the above methods will both solve it. For myself, I will carry on doing what I've been doing since 1994, using Windows for my e-mail.
Installing Sibelius without a floppy disc drive
This follows on from the MessengerPro section rather neatly. In order for Sibelius (a music composition application) to run on VirtualRPC you need to be booting from ADFS, rather than HostFS. So before undertaking the following your must set up VirtualRPC as per the first set of instructions in the MessengerPro section of this article (or indeed as per the relevant Appendix in the VirtualAcorn User Guide).
So anyway, here is the problem. The user concerned had a disc image of Sibelius (I am not sure how this had been created) and needed to install Sibelius on VRPC. The problem was that their machine didn't have a floppy disc drive and that the Sibelius installer wouldn't run from the 2nd floppy (the one that normally is set up to read disc images).
This is the workaround that we eventually came up with...
You can make ADFS:0 the "virtual" (image) floppy drive quite easily. In order to do this you first need to quit VRPC and then make a backup of your VRPC models folder. Then you will need to edit the particular model file you are running when installing Sibelius (for example the ARM710 one). The models files will be in:
You need to load the particular model.cfg file into NotePad. Double click on the file and it should load into NotePad. If not tell Windows you want to open the file using a program chosen from a list and then choose NotePad. You will see that the model file is human readable. Find the [RealFloppy] section and delete it (not just the one line the entire paragraph). Now save the model file and load VRPC.
ADFS drive 0 will now be referenced to your floppy image. The user was now able to install Sibelius from the floppy disc image file. There are a couple of potential gotchas with Sibelius though. Firstly as I said earlier you must be booting RISC OS from the ADFS harddisc image file, otherwise Sibelius simply won't work. Secondly you need to install Sibelius itself to the ADFS drive (I understand you can subsequently copy it over to HostFS, but you have to keep booting from ADFS). Thirdly before making the floppy disc image you need to ensure that the real floppy disc has a copy of Sibelius that it can install. The Sibelius copy protection moves the software from floppy to harddisc when it's installed. It then moves it back again when you un-install. So you might find that your Sibelius master floppy disc doesn't actually have a copy of Sibelius on it!
As a quick follow up to this I was talking to another VirtualAcorn user at Wakefield and they had obtained a copy of Sibelius without the copy protection, which solves all the problems. I don't know where they got this from but if you have a RISC OS version of Sibelius and the floppy disc is knackered it might be worth giving The DataStore in Bromley a call...
Roundup
Well that's your lot for this issue. I haven't the faintest idea what I will be covering next time, but if you have an interesting hint or tip to get round an issue you have had with VirtualRPC please do let me know.
Aaron
ÿÿÿÿISSUE1/WAKE/INDEX.HTM Issue 1, Wakefield 2008
Wakefield 2008
The official RISCWorld show report...
Good heavens, is it time for Wakefield again already? This was my main thought about two weeks before the show. At this point we were still working on the full release of VirtualRPC for the Mac and also on RISC OS 6.10 (aka Select4i4). Although bringing the show forward by a month meant that there was no longer any danger of it clashing with the cup final it did mean that it crept up on me more quickly than I expected. There is an old adage that work expands to fill the time available. That might be true, but it's also true that the time available is never quite enough to fit in the expanded work.
So it was only a couple of days before the show before we were sure that everything that had been worked on would be ready. This meant that my usual pre-show smugness (yes I am all ready, you're not? Oh dear) didn't appear. Instead I had a mad panic to get everything together. Have you tried assembling 200 DVD cases at 2 in the morning? No? Well I don't recommend it. Still it all came together and on the morning of the 26th of April I found myself toddling up the M1 towards Wakefield with the Matiz jammed solid with all the show paraphernalia....
Setting up...
This year the Wakefield show returned to its spiritual home, the Cedar Court Hotel, a snails fart from junction 39 of the M1. Despite leaving home at 7am (half an hour later than I had planned) I still arrived before half eight and was ready for the day's adventures. The first bit of fun happened before I had even got out of the car. Jack Lillingston's (Castle Technology) car was in front of mine and he was about to reverse into the loading bay behind the hotel. I quickly nipped in behind him and parked up whilst pretending to look the other way. I had barely alighted when I was approached by one of the show helpers pushing along what looked suspiciously like a large cage from a Victorian freakshow. Was he going to throw me inside? "No, you can unload and we can get everything up to your stand." Ahh, right. I unloaded most of the boxes and stacked them in the cage. It was then pushed round the back of the hotel to the service lift. There was a small queue, despite the lift having doors at either end, so people can enter one side and leave the other confusion still reigned supreme. I asked what floor we needed to go to. "There's only one". Then why do we need a lift?.
Never mind, here's some more entertainment. The lift doors only stay open for a few seconds so as the cage that's come down is being wheeled out one way and my cage is coming in through the other door the doors decide to close, trapping both cages and both helpers. We manage to force the doors back open again and get into the lift. "It doesn't work unless you press the button" I am told by another helper as the doors try to close for the third time. What does he expect it to do? It's not voice activated. In the lift with me is Steve Potts from the Wakefield club. We arrive at 'the only floor'. As we try and drag the cage out of the lift the doors shut for the fourth time. Trapping Steve in the lift. I am mainly outside of the lift by this time apart from one leg, which is still inside. Luckily we manage to prise the doors open before I get a free leg extension and groin strain.
I push the cage over to where my table is. I can tell which one is mine because the APDL International EEC Software Mountain is occupying several tables next to mine. I quickly unload, then remember I have a couple of boxes still in the car. I decide to use the stairs. Not only are these safer than the lift but they are also quicker and I get to keep both legs where I like them, attached.
Having now got everything from the car I set up the table and then notice that the screens for behind the stand have yet to arrive. I was about to ask Chris Hughes (the show organiser) where they were but apparently the van delivering them is late. Since I have done what I can Dave Holden and I pop outside for a chat. As we arrive outside so does the van with the display screens. We wait a suitable period of time (20 seconds) and then dash back upstairs to make sure we get our screen first. This works. So I am able to make my choice of posters, from the broad range I have available and it's job done. I now have nearly an hour to kill before the show opens.
I do my usual wondering around interrupting people who are feverishly trying to put their stands together. Meanwhile a queue of eager customers is starting to form outside.
By about five to ten I am outside chatting with Paul Beverley (the old editor of Archive) who is looking for Jim Nagel (the new editor of Archive). I notice Jim wandering around outside the hotel lobby and Paul goes over to direct him to the show. I make my way back upstairs and get ready behind my stand for the customers to enter the hall. There seems to be some sort of delay as it's several minutes past ten before Chris Hughes shouts that the show is open. The first round of customers come rushing in...
A tour of the stands...
Due to the power of creative (ahem) writing I will stay on my stand serving customers whilst the narrative will take you on a tour of the exhibitors...
The entrance hallway is rather dark, with little natural light, so having paid to get in (they will have to pay again later to get out) customers walk through into the spacious well lit room containing the show. If we walk right we will first see the WROCC (Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club) stand with the show organisers ready to assist anyone that needs it. Next along is a rather interesting collection of BBC based machines. Firstly there is a complete Domesday machine, with the cover removed from the video disc player so you can see it working. It set up so you can see Maps and zoom them in, just like the Multimap.co.uk website, except this is 25 years old. It must have been amazing in its day. Also on display is a BBC with a second processor. But this isn't any second processor, it's an ARM chip connected to the good old 6502 via the Tube interface. Wow!
Next door, and encroaching on these BBC machines, is the charity stall. There are mounds of software and some rather tempting hardware. We need to resists for now though as there is still a lot to see and we don't want to spend all our money on one stall. Moving along the next stand is the rather large RISCOS Ltd one.
There is a wide variety of machines all running RISC OS 6.1 with a collection of different sized monitors. One that catches our eye is the 24" iMac.
The stand ends up looking like a cross between PC World and Oxfam. Paul Middleton is on hand to dish out RISC OS 6.1 CDs to Select subscribers and to take new subscriptions. He won't be around for that long though as he has to go and do a theatre talk shortly.
Meanwhile across the isle Advantage6 have a couple of dual head A9 computers. Dual head means that they are running two monitors with the desktop split across both of them. A close look reveals that both machines are running a prototype version of RISC OS 6, rather than the RISC OS 4.42 they currently ship with.
We can ask either Matt or Stuart when this will be released but neither of them will be drawn on a date. Still it's worth seeing that RISC OS 6 is being worked on for the A9Home and presumably other variants.
Talking of other variants of the A9 we poke our noses round the corner to look at the NetSurf stand. All the NetSurf guys are round the back trying to get a network connection. The hotel's wireless has packed up. Later we learn that it's a fault with the phone lines. Demonstrating a web browser without a connection to the internet is a rather frustrating process, but just after lunch they manage to bodge something together using a 3G mobile phone connection and can then sit back.
We mentioned the A9. Well on the stand is a prototype touchscreen handheld machine which has very similar hardware to the A9. It's not currently running RISC OS, but if enough people were to put their hands in their pockets, it might...
Across from the NetSurf stand is the APDL emporium. Dave Holden has his hands full with his huge range of software. He's also demonstrating the SparQ drives that are on offer to RISCWorld subscribers for under £20, complete with power supply, leads and two 1GB discs. They are very tempting. If only they worked on Windows XP as well. We are told that they do. Oh, well we haven't spent anything so far so we may well come back later. Dave is also taking RISCWorld subscriptions, selling some second hand Acorn machines and answering a myriad of questions about his wares.
Next to APDL is VirtualAcorn. In order to avoid a split in the space time continuum I'm just behind the display screens getting an upgrade for a customer, after all I can't be in two places at once. On the stand is a laptop running Windows Vista and an iMac with Mac OS X. Both machines are merrily running RISC OS under VirtualAcorn. As we turn away Aaron comes out from behind the display panels with a Wendlesdale and ham sandwich. Oh, and an upgrade CD for the customer. Next to VirtualAcorn are Crawfords the printers who seem rather busy having a picnic on their stand. We won't disturb them, although we can't help wondering where Aaron had obtained the sandwich.
In the corner are R-Comp, who have nearly as many products as APDL. Andrew Rawnsley has been working late nights this week in order to try to finish some new products. On display are a new PDF Generator, Touch typing trainer and an updated version of Iota's Image Animator, which R-Comp have just taken over.
Theres also lots more to see, Andrew is writing a new backup package and although it's not ready yet we are welcome to a demo. However we have just spied an Asus EEE PC, the miniature laptop, running a copy of RISC OS care of VirtualRPC. It's generating a lot of interest and it's not tied down. No, we musn't, so we don't.
Across the way is Orpheus Internet and RISC OS Now magazine. In fact this whole corner seems to de devoted to magazines as next door are Archive, with a dazed looking Jim Nagel and Qercus, with an exuberant John Cartmell. All three publishers have the latest editions of each magazine to hand. So we grab a copy of each, it'll give us something to read until the next issue of RISCWorld comes out. In the corner is Vince Hudd of Softrock software. He's been working on WebChange, but we'll forgive him. He even gets two sentences to himself as he's going to ring Dave Holden next week and renew his RISCWorld subscription.
Across from Vince is the CJE Micros stand. As usual they have high stock levels and prices to match. Still the stand is busy and it looks like there are several people buying various items so CJE should be pleased. However there isn't any sign of Chris Evans, CJE Supremo. We are informed that he's restocking on the charity stand and may be some time.
Next door as RISC OS Open who have just released a new batch of RISC OS 5 source code this very morning. We can take away a CD if you like, or a T-shirt or a mousemat, or something. The RISC OS Open stand seems to be a mirror of the NetSurf one. Two tables pushed together with a banner attached to the front and with three geeks sitting behind. As we turn away we notice that the RISC OS Open banner is falling off the front of the stand. We decide not to tell them, they will find out sooner or later.
On the next stand are Martin Wuerthner and Mike Glover of Artworks and Techwriter fame. Martin has a new version of ArtWorks with PDF handling. We have to stop for a demo. It's very impressive and certainly beats any other RISC OS methods of making or reading PDF files. Martin has also been busy updating both TechWriter and EasiWriter now that he has taken them over from Mike Glover. Talking of Mike Glover, we ask what he's doing here, hasn't he retired? Apparently he can't just give up shows in one hit and has to do it gradually. Really? No, he's here to help as Martin is giving a theatre talk and there won't be anyone to mind the stand.
The next stand along appears to be unmanned, which is strange as it's the Arm Club. Looking more carefully we notice a strange green creature clutching a cup of black coffee. It's the same size as David Ruck. It is David Ruck. Apparently he and some other's were in the bar till after four in the morning. This doesn't strike either of us as a good idea. Anyway wasn't it expensive getting drunk in a hotel? Apparently not, if the rumour about all the drinks being paid for out of the Arm Club subscriptions turns out to be true. Would we like to join? Whilst the idea of being able to contribute to David Ruck's ill health is very tempting we decide that if anyone is going to get drunk on our money it will be us. David Ruck turns his back to us for a moment and we hide his coffee. As we walk away we can hear him asking where it's gone...
Next along we find Castle Technology and Jack Lillingston. His smile, like a medieval torture instrument, appears instantly and vanishes just as quickly as we say that we aren't buying another Iyonix, or a monitor, no we have a copy of Oregano...no really we would like to carry on looking round...no...no we have a printer already...that's very kind...no we don't carry cash...can you let go our our leg now?
There is still more to see. There is Ray Favre with copies of Dr Wimp. The RISC OS Connect project have a small stand, there's the RISC OS packaging project, Steve Fryatt, he of PrintPDF fame is also around somewhere. We consult the handy show guide with a floorplan of the event. I have to return to my stand now, I can see a customer. No you carry on, I took some photo's this morning before the show opened. Don't forget to take home one of APDL's SparQ drives...
Aaron
ÿÿÿÿISSUE1/WOLF3D/INDEX.HTM Issue 1, Wolfenstein 3D
Wolfenstein 3D
Foundation RISCWorld
Wolfenstein 3D by Id Software
RISC OS conversion by Eddie Edwards, Powerslave Software.
Foundation RISCWorld Special Edition
To celebrate the merger of RISCWorld and Foundation RISCUser we are including a full copy of Wolfenstein 3D, as published in the 100th issue of RISCUser. This is the full updated version of Wolfenstein 3D which is fully StrongARM-compatible and should run on any 26bit version of RISC OS. In addition some small bugs in 1994's commercial release have been fixed, the front-end has been improved, and the software protection has been removed so that the game can be installed easily onto hard disc and then run without the need to insert a key disc.
The cheat mode has also been enabled by default, but that's all we're telling you about it for the moment!
The Story So Far...
You stand over the guard's body, grabbing frantically for his gun.
You're not sure if the other guards heard his muffled scream. Deep in the belly of a Nazi dungeon, you've only a knife, a gun, and your wits to aid your escape.
Just a few weeks ago you were on a reconnaissance mission of extreme importance. You were to infiltrate the Nazi fortress and find the plans for Operation Eisenfaust. Captured in your attempt, you were taken to their prison, and awaited your execution. Only you know where the plans are kept, and the Allies will face a great defeat if you don't escape! You must face the horrors of the prison keep known as Wolfenstein.
Captain William J. "B.J." Blazkowicz, you've got a gun and eight floors of hell to get through. Good luck!
If you make it, you'll have something to tell your grandkids about...
If you don't, at least you'll go out in a blaze of glory!
Installing and running Wolfenstein 3D
Before running Wolfenstein 3D, you must install it onto hard disc. This is very simple: just open the directory on your hard disc where you wish to store Wolfenstein, and drag the !Wolf icon from this RISC User disc into that directory. Finally, insert the second RISC User disc and locate the !Wolf icon on that disc, then drag that second !Wolf icon onto the !Wolf icon on your hard disc to complete the installation.
To run the game, double-click on the !Wolf icon on your hard disc. This will install a desktop front-end. Note that if you hold down the right-hand Ctrl key while double-clicking the icon, you will bypass the desktop front-end and launch straight into the game.
The Desktop Front End
When the Wolf icon is on the icon bar, clicking on it with Select will launch the game. Clicking Menu will bring up a menu from which you can open a Choices window, and clicking with Adjust on the Wolf icon will also open the Choices window directly.
The Choices window provides a variety of options:
VSWAP options: see the file "VSWAP Info" for information about VSWAP files and how to handle them. VSWAP files allow you to use custom scenarios with Wolfenstein 3D, and several new VSWAP files can be found on the Internet. Dragging a directory containing the appropriate new files needed by Wolfenstein into this window (or onto the icon bar icon), and ensuring that the "Use alternative VSWAP file" switch is turned on, will allow you to use the new scenarios with the game.
If you have Internet access, you may find the following sites a useful start in your search for Wolfenstein 3D extensions:
Monitor options: here you may choose whether to use screen mode 13 or mode 49. Mode 13 is the default, because it works with all machines, but mode 49 should be used if your computer supports it. (You require a multisync monitor and an ARM3 or better processor to use mode 49.).
Memory options: choose Low memory if your machine has only 1Mb of RAM.
Playing the Game
When you first launch Wolfenstein 3D, an animation plays; you may skip this by pressing Escape. When the title screen is displayed, and the music plays, press a key to get to the main menu. Full instructions on playing the game are provided in the game itself (choose "Read this!" on the main menu to see them).
Default game keys
Up arrow - Forward
Down arrow - Backward
Left arrow - Rotate lef
Right arrow - Rotate righ
Alt+Left arrow - Strafe lef
Alt+Right arrow - Strafe righ
Ctrl (Action) - Fire/sta
Shift+up/down - Run forwards/backward
Space bar - Activate door/secret door/elevato
Special Keys
1,2,3,4 - Select weapo
Escape - Return to main men
F1 - Quick save game (save slot 0
F2 - Quick load game (save slot 0
F7 - Decrease size of game windo
F8 - Increase size of game windo
P - Pause/resume gam
The default game keys can all be redefined, and Wolfenstein 3D can also be played with the standard RISC OS mouse or an Acorn-compatible joystick.
