It's quite a large DiscWorld this month, which reflects the size of the software directory. As per usual we have the latest PD releases and the latest RISC OS games. Also this issue we are giving away a free copy of Sleuth, the OCR package.
Sleuth
Sleuth is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) package for RISC OS. To put it simply what Sleuth does is "read" a scanned paper document and convert this into ASCII text that can be edited or reformatted in a word processor or DTP package. This can be much much quicker that reading a document by hand and typing it in yourself.
How Sleuth works
This is a brief description of the way Sleuth works.
Training
Before it can recognise letters the OCR program must be taught their shapes. The main problems are that there is a lot of variation for each letter because of different fonts, sizes and of course various defects introduced by the printing and scanning processes. The training program for Sleuth (not supplied) incorporates a sophisticated algorithm which starts with an outline font and mimics the processes of printing, faxing and scanning to make many examples of each letter. The training program uses about 400,000 examples in all. Each of these shapes is converted into a list of numbers (a "feature vector") which represents the important aspects of the shape. As each feature vector uses about 100 bytes it would require about 40Mb to store this information directly so it is "summarised" in a special way.
Finding lines of text
The first thing Sleuth does is find all the black shapes in the image. Some large and very small shapes are weeded out at this stage.
Next Sleuth estimates the skew in the image and removes it. It does not rotate the shapes (which would introduce further distortion) but moves them so that lines are horizontal and gutters (the space between columns) are vertical. Then the shapes are gradually merged together to form lines. Care is taken to avoid jumping over graphics and gutters or joining dropped capitals onto a line. Lines are then grouped into blocks and the blocks ordered.
The program finds and orders the lines before reading them. This means that it can start outputting text fairly quickly. However, since it knows nothing about the identities of the shapes at this stage, it does sometimes make mistakes that could be cured if more information was available to it. Later versions of Sleuth improve accuracy here, but that does mean losing the ability to edit while OCRing.
Character recognition
During reading shapes are extracted from the image, converted into feature vectors and compared with information about known shapes acquired during training. The result is a shortlist of possible letters, with scores representing how close the matches are, and also information about the style (bold/italic/serif) of the letter.
Although character recognition is at the heart of any OCR program it is only one part of a complex system. Letters are often joined to their neighbours, and sometimes split into two or more parts, so these problems must be dealt with before character recognition can take place. Some characters (eg p,P,c and C) can only be identified once the scale and position is known from the rest of the line. Others (eg I,l,1,e and c) can often only be correctly identified by using information about the likely identities of other shapes in the same word.
Reading a line of text
A shortlist of possibilities is obtained for each shape in the line and the best recognised letters used to find the baseline and scale of the text and so remove letters from the shortlists if they have the wrong size or position. Next word breaks are found and each word is visited in turn. If letters can be chosen from the shortlists so the word spellchecks without any letters being poorly recognised the word is done. Here's how the word "excellent" from a low quality scan might look like at this stage. There are no split or joined letters, but the correct interpretation is far from obvious.
If the word is not recognised at the first attempt it is examined more closely. Suspicious parts are identified, and these are cut into smaller pieces at likely places. Then the program considers various ways in which the pieces can be put together to make new possibilities for the shapes in the word. Each time a new set of pieces is combined to make a shape, the shape must be recognised. This process can be slow, and is the main reason why the program takes longer on poor quality images. Here is part of a word which has been cut into pieces:
The black lines represent where the cuts would be made by the program to try and find the letters in the image.
The pieces in this shape would probably be combined so that 1 was on its own as a 't', 2 and 3 would be combined to make a reasonable 'c', then 4 would be added to make the 'o', 4 and 5 could make an italic 'n', 5 and 6 both make bad i's, but together make a good 'u', it is possible that 6, 7 and 8 could make a bad 'w', but that would be discarded for 7, 8 and 9 to be combined to make the 's'.
Paragraphs
The program checks for paragraph breaks after reading each line. Sometimes it has to read a couple of lines of the next paragraph before it can be sure there is a break, which is why you may (for example) see it is reading line 4 when it outputs the first one-line paragraph. When a paragraph break is detected, the text size, line spacing, justification are estimated and the program tries to find the main style (bold/italic/serif) of the paragraph and then find any words which do not fit this style. It does not try to identify style changes within words.
Finally the paragraph text and formatting information are sent to the text editor where you can then change them.
The complete DiscWorld line up
Files
Support materials for Brian Pickards file transfer series.
FreeCiv
The complete RISC OS version of FreeCiv.
Games
All the games from this issues games world column all ported by Peter Naulls.
Mustek
Samples images and two videos from the Mustek DV3000.
PD
All the latest PD, shareware and freeware releases from the PD column.
PowerBase
The latest version of Derek Haslams Database application.
Sleuth1
The complete version of Sleuth the OCR package.
Sleuth3
A demonstration version of Sleuth3.
Tanx
The latest version of Neil Whites game as discussed in his article.
ToolBox
The latest 26/32 bit neutral system components, required if you want to run a lot of new software releases on 26bit machines (ie. anything that isn't an Iyonix).
Having just completed a series on eBay for this magazine, what do eBay do? They change the item description page so that some of the description and illustrations in those articles are now out of date.
Not to be outdone, this article covers the essential changes. However, this article is designed on the assumption that you have seen the previous ones in the series, if not perhaps now would be a good time to order some back issues! (Good idea - ED)
Basically the layout of the item description pages has changed and they have become dynamic, changing in design and content depending on whether you have bid for the item or not.
Above is the original layout and below is the new layout if you have not bid on the item. Notice that the seller information is now grouped on the right hand side and the "watch this item" link has been moved up nearer the top of the page. If you bid on an item you are automatically considered to be watching (tracking) the item whereas previously it was considered as entirely separate.
The "bid history" link mentioned in the third article in the series has now changed to become a link via the number of bids that have already been made. Hence to see the bid history you now click on the number of bids, listed by a "history" label rather than a "bid history" link.
The dynamic element operates provided that you are a registered user and have signed in. If you have not bid on an item you are viewing then you just get a "Hello <username>" message at the top as shown in the screenshot above ("Hello mikechoo" for me).
However, if you have bid then you get an additional message depending on whether you are currently the highest bidder or whether you have been outbid. These are each shown below.
You have been outbid
You are the highest bidder
Notice the prominently placed bid entry box if you have been outbid, surely some sort of psychology to make it easier to continue bidding. Of course, if you are the highest bidder the bid box is not put prominently by the greeting.
If you win the item then you get the panel shown above which includes details about progress on the transaction as well as links to help it to take place.
The postage (shipping) and payment details now come below the item description although there is a link to them roughly where they used to be. A button to place a bid is now directly by the current price rather than just at the end of the item description, although a box to place a bid is still at the bottom even though there is now that link button. The screenshot below shows the details for the electron described above.
That just about covers the main points, other alterations can probably be sussed out by scanning a page and becoming familiar with changes in links and positioning. The changes probably represent an improvement but it can initially be off-putting to find things have moved around.
By the way, nice to see there are still people around wanting to buy old Electrons.
I found out about Castle's acquisition of RISC OS on the Friday morning that the press release came out. I wasn't in front of the computer though. Instead we were getting ready for a friends wedding when my mobile got a text message. The message was simple and to the point, "Castle buys RISC OS". I cannot say in all honesty that I am that surprised, someone was going to buy it at some point, after all Pace have been trying to sell it for almost two years. I am aware of a number of approaches made by those in the RISC OS market who have attempted to persuade pace that they should be the new owners.
Will the change of ownership make any difference? Well to be honest I can't see that it can do any harm at all, indeed quite the opposite. Pace have hardly been keen at pushing RISC OS, but then it was just one OS out of several which they used. Castle, on the other hand, may well be able to push RISC OS into areas that were not economic for Pace. Castle have already been working in conjunction with ex Pace engineers on the Iyonix project, so handing RISC OS to them makes a great deal of sense. We will have to wait and see what happens, but as far as I can see the future may well have got quite a bit brighter.
Editors Rant of the month
Just one rant this month, Greyhounds. Well actually when I say Greyhounds I actually mean one Greyhound, and when I say one Greyhound I actually mean one Galgo. For those who don't know what a Galgo is, it's a Spanish hunting dog, very similar to the Greyhounds we use for racing in this country. Indeed most people can't tell them apart, although once you know the differences a Galgo and a Greyhound are easy to differentiate. Anyway the one particular Galgo I am going to rant about is currently doing a credible Ivor the Engine impression on my office floor. However that isn't the reason why I am ranting.
The reason I am ranting is that unlike other animals Galgos are clearly silicon based lifeforms. How have I deduced this? Well it's really very simple for someone of my experience. When it gets hot (and looking around it's currently 32 degrees in my office) silicon based items such as PCs and their components overheat and start misbehaving. Indeed so far today both one of the monitors and one of my CD Writers have given up the ghost and refused to co-operate. Now lets travel back in time to earlier this morning....
Our house operates to a simple schedule, it's time for a walk the second I show any sign of life, it's also time for breakfast directly after a walk, and then it's time to lie on my office floor and get in the way. The usual routine allows me to get up, walk round Peacock Farm before having woken up, then come back, make tea and hunt out the dog food (preferable Pedigree Chum lamb flavour, that's the one with the blue top, and the one that is the most difficult to get hold of). Anyway all this can easily be achieved by 9 o'clock. Unless your Galgo suffers an "Abort on Data Transfer" due to the heat.
It's usually easy to spot when your Galgo is about to crash, firstly the ears prick up and are then disabled, the eyes go glazed, and the legs go full speed in any direction that they aren't supposed to go. This morning I spent over half an hour calling the little "darling". In the end I gave up, put the little dog on the lead and had to force my way 50 feet into the undergrowth where the now "blue screened" idiot was just standing there panting. A swift "re-boot" up the output terminal soon had him working normally again. Of course standing in the shade must have cooled him down enough for some functions to start working again. I will be taking the pair of them out again later in the evening when it's cooler, then perhaps I might get some sensible normal behaviour. In the meantime I will be investigating the possibility of attaching a large heat sink, just don't tell the RSPCA.
Printing RISC World
The new look of RISC World means that you will no longer get the yellow background when printing articles from RISC World. 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 RISC World 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
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE2/EDUC/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 2, The Education Column
The Education Column
Andrew Harmsworth with the latest Education news
Gosh - summer's here at last (and now it's gone - ED) and as always time is very precious. This month I report of yet another way of accessing broadband from your RISC OS machine. Staying on the networking theme, I try out the amazingly useful little utility provided with Select - !AT Print. Lastly there is positive feedback from the first consumer users of MicroDigital Alphas.
Broader Broadband
Last column, I briefly wrote about Paul Vigay's support for ADSL under RISC OS. Unbeknownst to me, ADSL access has been available natively for RISC OS users for some time from none other than prolific software and hardware producers, R-Comp. Pay attention, Harmsworth!
According to R-Comp, they have been doing ADSL and Cable broadband/networking kits for around 18 months, and it's proving very popular indeed. They also have (printed) manuals detailing how to network your machines. These fall into three categories: general (e.g. networking to Windows, file sharing, etc.), ADSL in-a-box and Net in-a-box. Now that I'm finally moving house, I'll have need to set up an ADSL connection for my RiscPC, so hopefully I'll be able to report successfully on this next issue. Which product to go for is the big question...
Check out http://www.rcomp.co.uk/rci/networking for more information on R-Comp's ADSL and networking solutions.
Select: Network Printing
One of the great things about the Select Scheme is that it provides you with more and more surprises each time you look at what you have. One little utility that I had missed was !AT Print. This wonderful program allows the queueing of PostScript files for AppleTalk printers.
I happened to find this little darling whilst on the phone to our Music Faculty - who are avid Apple enthusiasts. My colleague was intrigued to see if it would work, so I set !Printers up to output a Postscript file.
Fig. 1. Re-activating the PoScript2 printer driver
In case you don't know, the PoScript2 driver is a standard Acorn PDF (printer definition file) installed by selecting PRINTER CONTROL from !Printers' iconbar menu, then dragging the PDF file to the window.
The Postscript driver does need to be set up to print to a file, as you will need this to send via !ATPrint (unfortunately it can't do this seemlessly, but it's very easy).
Fig. 2. Remember to set the driver to print to a fil
Next, I fired up TechWriter with a letter I'd written earlier in the evening, and hit print. The file rapidly appeared in my root directory. !AT Print has two different windows that show all print jobs:
Fig. 3. Four available printers supporting AppleTalk printing
... and individual print job information:
Fig. 4. Information flashes up here!
It worked first time, and it worked within minutes, so I (and my Apple-eating colleague) was certainly happy with the result. It has already proven useful and was so easy to set up. Let us hope that RISCOS Ltd are able to continue to offer such gems in the future.
Arguments and Gossip
Drobe - the RISC OS portal with energy - is one of the best places on the web to visit in order to keep abreast of day-to-day RISC OS news. Recently they posted users' comments about the new MicroDigital Alpha laptop which was seen first in the last issue of RISC World. They certainly seem happy with their machines, reporting solid reliability and StrongARM-like performance. Various benchmarks have been made, and overall this would seem to be a highly desirable solution to RISC OS portability.
Yet, as always, there are those in the forums who don't seem to accept that it is the ability to use RISC OS (software) on the move that makes the Alpha route a perfect (indeed, currently the only) solution. I've borrowed a very old Windows 95 laptop for the summer. Whilst it isn't fast, it does run Microsoft Word (I needed the machine to do some writing) and I can sit with it at the dining room table, or outside on the patio. I cannot consider moving my RiscPC into - and out of - these locations and expect to remain sane!
As I've said before, laptops for teachers in schools (and indeed the pupils!) are rapidly becoming the norm all over the country. The requirement to use Windows and its associated applications is now unavoidable (unless you really want to become unpopular and jeopardise your professional development in the process). The ability to run RISC OS programs reliably and at speed on a laptop is a very significant bonus. I would hope to see Alphas priced competitively for school use, but time will tell. Once I've bought the new car and paid for my wedding, my order will be in...
If you have any questions or comments on the use of RISC OS computers in education, please either email education@harmsy.freeuk.com or better still join the RISC OS Education Discussion List, and air them there.
Andrew Harmsworth
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE2/FILES/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 2, PC File Conversion
PC File Conversion
Brian Pickard
Part 2 - Graphics Files
In the following I will refer to freeware apps. Since there are many such apps that do similar jobs I will not try to list them all. To find them I suggest a web search such as 'PNG to Sprite conversion' etc. Or look on the Acorn portals such as
As many of you are no doubt aware graphics files come in two main types:
Bitmap images generally pixel maps of an image.
Vector Graphics are a file of instructions on how to "draw" an image using lines, curves etc.
Bitmaps
Bitmap images have a set resolution, usually a multiple of 90 dots per inch (dpi) in RISC OS while 96 dpi seems quite common in the PC world. But any resolution is possible.
There are many types of bitmap image file. The most common are BMP (Windows native type), TIFF, PNG, GIF and in with RISC OS the Sprite format. All these are really equivalent and therefore can be converted from one type to another fairly easily. There are several RISC OS freeware programs which will do this, !ChangeFSI being the most well known as it is supplied with all RISC OS machines. As far as I know this will change most PC bitmap formats into Sprites. The one exception that !ChangeFSI won't convert is PNG. Another great app is Creator by John Kortink, this can be found at
Probably the most comprehensive converter and image modifier I have come across is DPSS (Dave Pillings Scanner Software) by David Pilling. Even though this is sold with Twain drivers for most SCSI scanners it is more than just a scanning application. It deals with pretty well every format you would wish for and you can scale, resample to different dpi, sharpen, change colour depth etc. I use this and can recommend it. You can buy it from Daves web site at
Bitmaps from PC
So, if you receive an image from a PC user look at its file name extension to find what type it is, and then use software to change into a sprite. Remember to set the filetype so that RISC OS apps can accept it. In the following list I have suggested some suitable RISC OS apps to convert the PC file to a Sprite.
BMP (Windows Bitmap)
You can use !ChangeFSI or DPSS
TIF (Tagged Image File Format file)
!ChangeFSI or DPSS
GIF (Graphics Interchange File)
!ChangeFSI or !InterGif
PNG (Portable Network Graphic file)
Use DPSS or find some freeware PNG to Sprite converter
ICO (Windows Icon image)
DPSS or freeware Winicon
MTV (Old format not used much now)
!ChangeFSI or DPSS
PCX (Another less used PC format)
!ChangeFSI or DPSS
JPG or JIFJPEG (image used for photos)
!Paint, !ChangeFSI, DPSS plus many freeware apps.
One point concerning the JPEG format.
This format is used by digital cameras. Many of them add extra info, such as camera settings embedded within the file header. This means !ChangeFSI and other conversion utilities cannot always load and convert the file. To overcome this I use !JClean by
Animated GIFs
GIF images can be stored so that they are displayed as animations in WEB browsers. This means there are more than one image in the file. A nice app called
Sending Bit images to PC Users
With all the different bit image formats in the PC world which is the best to use when sending an image to the PC user? The answer depends upon the image.
If it is fairly small or is a diagrammatic/cartoon style image then use BMP since all windows apps can read this format. The colour depth can be reduced to 256 colours if the size of the file is a problem (this is where DPSS is useful). The BMP file can be compressed using SPARKFS (use the zip archive option) if it to be sent as an email attachment.
If it is a large image (greater than about 480 x 320 pixels) or it is a photograph use JPEG.
This format uses lossy compression to reduce the filesize. Try and set the quality to about 75 for reasonable results. DO NOT try and zip archive this type of file since it could produce a file greater than the original!
Most Windows Photo re-touching/painting apps will be able to read JPEGs.
Just as an example of conversions I have used a digital camcorder grabbing a single frame (using the PC software). Ported this still to the RiscPC as a GIF. Used DPSS to change it to a sprite. Loaded it into Artworks and added titles/labels etc. Saved it using Paints screengrab facility, (checking in Paint that any unwanted borders are deleted and the image size is the same as the original). Used DPSS to change it to a JPEG. Ported this back to the PC. Loaded it back into the camcorders still library and finally recorded it onto the video tape for the required time.
The results impressed the viewers!
Vector Graphics
These types of image files are not so easy to convert.
RISC OS has always had its own Draw format. Then the superior Artworks format (which can output its designs as a Draw file) was added by Computer Concepts.
The PC world has again a number of formats.
WMF (Windows Meta File)
This is similar to a Drawfile. There are freeware converters for RISC OS such as !WMF->Draw and !Draw->WMF
CGM (Computer Graphics Metafile)
Another vector file Again there are freeware converters (!CGM->Draw)
EPS (Encapsulated PostScript)
!Draw->EPS or !AIEps-Drw
MET (Meta file)
!Draw-Met
DXF (Data eXchnage format)
!Dxf-CGM
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic)
This type is gaining favour especially for web pages. There aren't many RISC OS converters. You can buy a SVG add on for Artworks, DrawWorks Third Millenium will save a drawfile as a SVG file (as will the Select version of !Draw - ED).
I have found that PC apps do not usually deal with many of the above. The most common seems to be WMF. There are limitations especially if Fonts are used. It is best to convert all your Text in Draw to a Path before any conversion.
The neatest way (but expensive!) is to try and find an application that has a PC version as well as a RISC OS one. The closest I have come across (unless any of you know better!) is to use Artworks on RISC OS and Xara X on the PC.
These two are equivalent and understand both RISC OS Draw and Artworks EPS formats.
One of my PC friends has Xara X so we have been able to swop files over the internet reasonably successfully!
I have found WMF to be the best general vector format to use. But do not be surprised if some text goes missing or certain fills etc. do not work.
The main problem occurs when a sprite image is used within the Draw or Artworks file.
Converters seem to leave this out so the WMF version no longer shows the image.
The only way I have managed to port over a Draw file which contains a sprite is as follows:
Load the Draw file into Artworks. Convert any text to shapes
Export the file as an Artworks EPS file. (add file extension of /eps to file name) Port file onto PC harddrive
Run Serifs DrawPlus 3 application on the PC
>Select import EPS files and then import the file.
Serifs software can be bought quite cheaply and in fact it has even been on some PC Computer magazine discs. It is quite a good program. DrawPlus 3 states it converts the EPS file to a Metafile. So I tried converting a Draw file to a metafile using freeware !Draw-Met by Keith Sloan but Drawplus 3 would not load it.
Using the PDF format
You can change a RISC OS Drawfile into a PDF file using the free GhostScript package or buy RiScript from Cerilica.
First produce a PostScript printout using the RISC OS Postcript version 2 printer driver. (You use the Save option on the Draw Menu). It is advisable to change any sprite in the Drawfile to 24 bit colour depth.
Once the Drawfile is a PDF file then it can be read on a PC by any Adobe Reader from version 4 onwards. The Adobe reader is free so it's common amongst PC users.
This works fine and is the only reliable way of getting any sprites ported across.
General Rules for Vector Graphics
Try not to include any sprite/bitmaps. If you have to then use the PDF method.
Change all text to a path before converting the drawfile to a PC format.
Invest in Xara X and Artworks (expensive!).
Thats it for this part, I have included a test Drawfile called CMYKTest for you to tryout.
If anyone has any different methods of getting vector files to and from RISC OS and PC machines please let me know.
Next time I will look at Spreadsheets and Database files.
a shell. Then click the "Metaserver" tab and the "Update" button there. Look for
game in "Pregame" state, possibly with nonzero players, connect and wait there
for more players. Type "/create name" to get a computer enemy and "/start" to
begin.
The goal
The goal of Freeciv is to build cities, which in turn
can build armies to attack the other players. You get 2 settlers and 1 explorer.
Using the numeric keypad, move the settlers to a good location (see below) and
build a city by pressing b. You can move diagonally, by the way. Freeciv is turn
based; every unit can move once per turn. The turn ends when everyone clicks
"Turn done" or when a timeout is over.
Cities
Cities extract resources from the square they're built
on plus one nearby square for each inhabitant; you start with 1 inhabitant. The
resources are: Food (to grow cities), Production (to build settlers/armies) and
Trade (for research and money). Click a city to bring it up for management.
Click on a used square on the small map to remove your worker (and turn him into
an entertainer, see below), then click on an unused square to place your worker.
However the default placement is usually good.
Food: All food from the used squares is added to the granary. Every
inhabitant uses two food per turn though, and settlers built by this city
require one or two also. When the granary reaches 20 food, the city grows to
size 2 and can use an additional nearby square. Settlers can irrigate (press
i) nearby squares if there is water adjacent, which increases food by one for
some square types, see table below. The square under the city gets a free
irrigation.
Production: The production you get from a square can be used to
produce military units or settlers. Producing a settler reduces the city size
by 1 and can only be done in cities of size 2 and larger. Some units require
one production every turn (upkeep) for as long as they're alive. You can
change the unit or building to be produced in the city report, or buy
unfinished units. Settlers can mine (press m) some square types, which
increases their production; see table below. The square the city is on gets
one production if otherwise zero.
Trade: Trade can be turned into tax, luxury or science. Science
lets you research new military unit types. Tax yields money, which you can use
to prematurely complete a cities production. Luxury creates happy inhabitants.
You can select the distribution of your trade by pressing shift-R). Corruption
reduces the amount of trade that a city delivers; the further away from the
capital, the more corruption. Settlers can build roads (press r) which add 1
trade to some square types, see table below, and allow for faster movement.
The square the city is on gets a free road. Inhabitants can be happy,
content or unhappy (shown by different icons in the city window). If there are
more unhappy than happy inhabitants, the city falls into disorder and stops
producing anything. The first four inhabitants of a city are content. Additional
ones are unhappy and must be made content either with temples in their cities,
with wonders (see below), with luxuries or with entertainers.
Research
In the Reports menu you find the Science report. There
you can decide what to research. You can select an immediate thing to research
and a long term goal that the next immediate will be selected from. Most
research items require others to be discovered already. After discovery of
knowledge, you can build new types of military units, new wonders or use new
governments. This window pops up whenever research on one item finishes.
Government
The type of government you have affects how many
resources your cities can extract from the land. You can change government by
researching the new government type and then starting a revolution (in Kingdom
menu, will take a few turns). The most important ones:
Despotism: This is your initial government type. Each square that
yields more than 2 of anything (food, production or trade) has that yield
reduced by one. Settlers use one food per turn for upkeep, military units are
free unless there are more built by a city than the city has inhabitants.
Science rate can only be set to 60%. High corruption.
Monarchy: No more resource reduction. Settlers use one food. The
first 3 military units per city are free of upkeep. Maximum science rate is
70%. Corruption is small.
Republic: Each square with trade gets another trade unit. Settlers
use two food, and one production. All military units use one production. Only
one military unit is tolerated abroad (not in city), additional units create
one unhappy inhabitant. Corruption is small.
Wonders
Each wonder of the world can only be built by one
player and only in one city. Other cities can build and send caravans (after you
research Trade) to help in building wonders. The most important wonders are:
Magellan's Expedition: Sea units can move 2 squares further per
turn. Requires Navigation
Leonardo's Workshop: 1 obsolete military unit upgraded per turn.
Requires Invention
Michelangelo's Chapel: 3 unhappy inhabitants become content in
every city. Requires Monotheism
J.S.Bach's Cathedral: Creates 2 happy inhabitants in every city.
Requires Theology
Square types
Tile F/P/T
Name
Irrigation
Mine
Road
Defence
Ocean
-
-
-
-
Grassland
F
-
T
-
Plains
F
-
T
-
Desert
F
PP
T
-
Tundra
F
-
-
-
Forest
-
-
-
+50%
Jungle
-
-
-
+50%
Hills
F
PPP
-
+100%
Mountains
-
P
-
+200%
Swamp
-
-
-
+50%
Glacier
-
-
-
-
These are the food, production and trade yields of all squares under
Monarchy. Note that the fields in the second and third column are
rare. For the initial government type, reduce all numbers above 2 by 1.
For Republic, add 1 trade to each square with trade. Irrigation/Mine/Road
shows the increases in food, production, and trade when those are
improvements are performed by a settler. Defence is the increase in
defense power you get when attacked on such a field. Rivers add 1 trade
and 50% defense power; they also ease movement along them. Squares with
increased defense power are harder to walk fast (horses get slowed down)
except for explorers. You can identify any square (or unit) by
middle-clicking it.
Military units
Unit
Name
A
D
M
Requires
Remarks
Explorer
-
1
3
Seafaring
No slowdown by rough terrain
Settlers
-
1
1
-
Builds cities, improves land
Diplomat
-
-
2
Writing
Can subvert cities and bribe units
Caravan
-
1
1
Trade
Carries production to wonders
Phalanx
1
2
1
Bronze working
OK defense against most land units
Horsemen
2
1
2
Horseback riding
Good invader of emptied cities
Trireme
1
1
3
Map making
Carries 2, turn must end at coast
Caravel
2
1
3
Navigation
Carries 3 units
Ironclad
4
4
4
Steam engine
Strong attacker of coastal cities
Destroyer
4
4
6
Electricity
Like ironclad but faster
Cruiser
6
6
5
Steel
Much stronger than destroyersMilitary units are
characterized by three numbers: attack power, defense power, and movement speed.
Those three numbers plus the production cost are what you see when changing
production. When unit A attacks unit B by moving onto B's square, A's attack
power is matched up against B's defense power. If A has attack power 2 and B has
defense power 1, then A has about a two-thirds chance of winning (more info in
the Freeciv manual). The survivor often becomes veteran, which increases his
attack and defense power by 50%. Being built in a city with Barracks makes a
unit veteran, too.
Rivers and some terrain types increase the defense power
of the defender, see table below. Units in cities enjoy a 50% defense power
increase as well. Damaged units have red bars in the bottom left corner, they
move more slowly and have their attack power reduced. They recover slowly
(faster in cities or when fortified).
Pressing f will fortify the unit, which
increases defense power by 50%. Pressing s will put the unit on sentry; they
will wait until healed or until an enemy unit moves to an adjacent field.
Pressing g lets you select a destination to go to. If an enemy is there, it will
be attacked. Military units can take enemy cities when there are no defenders
left. Defended cities have a little flag in their top left corner. If you lose
your capital, you get very high corruption and your kingdom may split.
If
several military units are on one square, the strongest one defends. If it is
defeated, all units die (except in cities). Sea units can attack land units but
not vice versa. Some sea units can carry land units, just move onto them at the
coast. Loaded units have a + in their bottom right corner.
Diplomats are very
powerful. They are easy to defeat but can incite revolts in enemy cities (the
city becomes yours), steal technologies or bribe enemy units. Diplomat actions
can be performed directly from a ship. Defending diplomats in cities may prevent
them.
Winning strategy
Most multi-player games are played using "/set generator 2". This creates one island
for every player plus some small empty additional ones. Here's standard strategy
to play these.
Find good settling spots. A good settling spot must at least yield 4 food
(from the two squares used) and as much production as possible. Don't look
longer than, say, for 3-4 turns. Whales and pheasants are the best resource to
be close to. Grassland and plains are good to settle on, wheat/oasis/buffalo
even better.
Once you built the city, set its production to settlers. Bring up the
science report and set research to Alphabet and the goal to The Republic.
As soon as any city reaches size two, click it and set all workers on
production fields using the little map. As soon as you can afford it, buy the
settler.
Keep producing nothing but settlers and have them build nearby cities.
There should only be 1-2 empty squares between the cities. Don't build
irrigation, mines or roads.
When The Republic is only one step away, set goal to Navigation. When
Republic is reached, set research to Map Making and immediately start a
revolution (from Kingdom menu). Once you're a republic, build roads on used
squares. See image for an example.
VARIANT: If you get discovered by an enemy, build ships as soon as you
can, and defending units like warriors and phalanxes if necessary. You may
choose to collaborate with neighbours, use Players menu to find out who to talk
to.
When Navigation is only one step away, set goal to Steam Engine. When
Navigation is reached, build a couple of caravels to explore your neighbourhood
and settle nearby islands. VARIANT: It's often useful to research Trade before
Steam Engine so you can build wonders.
Once most spots on your island are taken, start building roads, preferably
on grassland and plains. Use the roads to move faster and gain trade.
As soon as Steam Engine is reached, build lots of ironclads. Increase tax
rate to buy them. Accompany them with horsemen on caravels. Find neighbours,
kill their city defences with the ironclads and invade their cities with the
horsemen. Place ironclads in conquered cities for initial defense.
After Steam Engine, you may want to research Electricity and Steel to get
even better ships, destroyers and cruisers. Once you got Steel, set tax rate
to maximum and put everything into war. If you play on the default
generator, there are three possibilities:
If you have your own island, play like above.
If you have a shared island but your enemies are far away or you can have
peace with them (which usually is preferable), you can play mostly like
generator 2, just research horseback riding and bronze working right after
republic (gives horsemen and phalanx).
If your neighbours are close and you can't have peace or alliance, research
horsemen, monarchy and feudalism to defend. Then play like generator 2, only
try to attack cities just after you got the new offensive unit (horsemen,
knights). Consider building some Barracks. VARIANT: Research horsemen and the
republic. Now build diplomats and bribe enemy cities of size 1-2 and attacking
units. Also research map making to allow for surprise attacks off the boat.
When your opponent is no urgent threat anymore, set your science back to
maximum and research gunpowder or navigation.
Further reading
A lot of documentation is found on the Freeciv home page, namely the Freeciv manual and more tutorials (some outdated). And
once the game is running you can check the help function for a complete list of
wonders, military units, science advances and government types. Also check the
Orders menu to see what a unit can do.
Credits
This article was reproduced from the
RISC World
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE2/GAMES/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 2, Games World
Games World
Paul Brett with the latest gaming news.
As I said last issue we will have another crop of games for this issue. Last time we covered the games produced by Neil White, this time we are going to have a look at some of the games produced by Peter Naulls.
Peter Naulls' Games
Unlike Neil's games these aren't RISC OS originals but are part of Peter Naulls'
These new games have been made possible by the porting of the SDL (Simple Directmedia Layer) libraries to RISC OS. These libraries have been ported before by eQ labs (as keen RISC World reader may remember - ED), but they were rather buggy. Peter Naulls has done a sterling job of providing a new SDL library that does not suffer from the same problems as the eQ labs version.
Circus Linux
Circus Linux! is based on the Atari 2600 game "Circus Atari" by Atari, released in 1980. Gameplay is similar to "Breakout" and "Arkanoid. You slide a device left and right to bounce objects into the air which destroy a wall. In this case you move a see saw left and right, with the mouse, to bounce the clowns into the air to pop the balloons, and the more balloons you pop the higher your score.
Gamma Patrol
A vertically scrolling shoot 'em up. Use the cursor keys to control your ship and Space to fire. You can select your weapon (if you have more than one) with Page-Up and Page-Down or 1, 2 and 3 on the numeric keypad.
Gem Drop
"Gem Drop" is an interesting one-player puzzle game. It is a direct port of the Atari 8-bit game of the same name written in Action!, a very fast C- and Pascal-like compiled language for the Atari. If you're familiar with games like Jewels, Klax, Bust-A-Move or Tetris then this game will feel very similar. You are positioned at the bottom of the screen. Move left and right with the cursor keys, and grab and throw the gems using the up and down keys.
Glutton
A game based on Pacman, go around the maze and collect all the dots using the cursor keys, but watch out for the ghosts.
IceBreaker
So, uh, there's a bunch of penguins on an iceberg in Antarctica. You hav
been selected to catch them so they can be shipped to Finland, where the
are essential to a secret plot for world domination.
In order to trap the penguins, you'll need to break the iceberg into smal
chunks. (They're afraid of water, for no apparent reason. Ah well. "Th
Matrix" had more plot holes than this, and it was still a hit.) You d
this by melting lines in the ice with Special High-Tech GNU Tools.
If a penguin hits a line in progress, however, it vanishes with a lou
noise, and you lose a life. (Yes, a life. This story is really breakin
down, isn't it? But never fear -- I'll keep going until it's completel
dead.)
Once 80% or more of the iceberg is gone, the remaining chunks are smal
enough for shipping. Of course, if you manage to get rid of more tha
that, you'll save on postage, thus earning you exponential amounts of Gee
Cred (a.k.a. "score").
After you ship off one batch of penguins, it's time to move on to th
next. Each subsequent 'berg will have one more penguin, and you'll hav
one more life. This will continue until you lose, or until you excee
level one hundred or so, which Ain't Gonna Happen.
Of course, this is an urgent mission, so you'll be penalized if you'r
slow -- every second or so, your score drops down by one. But don't worry
I'm not completely cruel, so any points you earn on one level are yours t
keep forever, no matter how long you take on subsequent icebergs.
As far as I can tell, this makes no narrative sense whatsoever, so at thi
point, I declare the backstory / game metaphor completely collapsed. Jus
go play.
The left mouse button starts drawing lines; the right (and/or middle
button toggles between making vertical and horizontal lines. Note tha
left clicking actually starts *two* lines: either up and down or left an
right. (This will make plenty of sense when you're actually playing.) I
one of these lines is hit before it reaches the edge of the iceberg
you'll lose a life. If both are hit, you'll lose two lives.
As a tiny bit of grace, if you click directly on a penguin, it will sa
"Ouch" and nothing else will happen.
Once a line is completed, any area containing no penguins is cleared
Falls into the ocean, so to speak. Once 80% has been cleared, the level i
complete. However, you get an exponential bonus for every percentage poin
above that, so you want to try to make your last line suddenly clear
huge chunk of ice. (Again, this will make sense once you've played for
while.) Oh, and you also get a (much smaller) bonus for having lives lef
over at the end of a level.
Taking a long time on a level doesn't affect these bonuses, but it ca
chip away at your score, so you have to balance the time it takes to se
up a situation where you can clear 99% of the iceberg against the bonu
you'll get for doing so.
Having trouble? A hint: it's useful to make traps by intentionally lettin
some of your lines get broken. That way, you can create smaller areas i
which you can catch the pesky little things easily.
MunchMan
Press Enter to start the game. Use the arrow keys to guide MunchMan. The goal is to eat all of the pellets just like PacMan. The Escape key quits the game. Have fun when you get to Level 4.
RocksNDmds
It's a BoulderDash clone. For those who have a more gentile English upbringing it's very very like Repton....but with a lot more levels!
SDLRoids
Yes it's a multi tasking version of Asteroids, turn with the left and right keys. Thrust with the up and down arrows. You can fire a bullet using Space and a SmartBomb with S. If things get too tricky activate your shields with TAB or just give up and quit with Escape.
Heroes
Heroes is similar to the "Tron" and "Nibbles" games of yore, but includes many graphical improvements and new game features. In it, you must manoeuvre a small vehicle around a world and collect powerups while avoiding obstacles, your opponents' trails, and even your own trail. There are five game modes available. Quest is the classical Nibbles, in Death Match you start with very long tails a must kill your opponents, in Kill'em All you must run over lemmings moving on the ground, in Time Cash or Color modes you must collect money or pyramids of color. Heroes features 12 original sound tracks, 94 levels (in 10 different tile sets) plus a level editor.
FreeCiv
And finally we come to the piece de la reistance, FreeCiv. This is such a huge game that we have devoted an entire article on how to play. For those that are not familiar with FreeCiv it is a multiplayer strategy game that is quite similar to Civilisation II from MicroProse.
In order the start playing FreeCiv all you need to do is:
Run !CivServe
Run !CivClien
Click "Join Game
Click "Connect
Type "start" in the server taskwindo
Choose your nation in the client, then click "start"
The in game controls are:
+ Enter to show input dialog
hide/show log windo
hide/show fog of wa
hide/show road/R
hide/show terrain
hide/show irrigations/farmland
hide/show units
hide/show pollutio
hide/show city production
hide/show map special
hide/show map grid
hide/show nuke was
hide/show citie
hide/show city name
make screensho
- cities repor
- units repor
- economy repor
- science repor
- advanced menu
- advanced men
- open production dialog
- open buy production dialog (works only in fullscreen mode)
if active unit stay on city then key enter the city
- options dialogue
In options dlg key exit game
In City dialogue:
change production dlg
hurry production dlg
In all dialogues:
- exit/close dlg
- ok/commit/etc
In Worklit dlg:
on "target" - change production to "target
on "target" - add "target" to work lis
on "target" - callhelp about "target" - not implemented
on "worklist item" - swap "item" u
on "worklist item" - swap "item" dow
on "worklist item" - remove "item" from worklist
In MiniMap:
center map here
open minimap scaling dialog
In Unit Info Window:
- next unit
- center on focused unit.
Signing off
That is it for this GamesWorld, now what do you think might happen if Neil White and Peter Naulls got together, perhaps we will find out next time!
Paul Brett
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE2/HUGHJ/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 2, The Hugh Jampton Experience
The Hugh Jampton Experience
Yes, live from a reconstituted dustbin somewhere on the M1....It's.......Hugh Jampton!
Thank you, yes it's me, back again.
Last issues caption competition
As you may well remember we ran this picture last time round....
As luck would have it the HughJ@riscworld.co.uk email address is now working and so we have some lucky competitors this time round. So in no particular order the entries were....
"Bill had removed the fans from his Windows PC so it would be as quiet as his friend Jack's Iyonix"
Andrew Harsmworth
"I know PCs are frustrating, but when I said DRAG and DROP I didn't mean into the fire."
I Semple
"What pillock suggested using Firewire!!!"
John McCartney
"I had only switched it on for 10 minutes, boss, honest!"
William McNee
"Intel announce the new 20GHz P4"
Stephen Parkin
"It hasn't done THAT before!"
Michael Poole
"I knew that Intel chips ran hot, but I didn't expect it that hot!"
Dennis Williams
However for me the winner must come from a "tired and emotional" Alan Shooter with this...
G'day, I thought smiley face only came laid on the side. To me the main box has a thank full smile or from the froth of a pint of a certain beer.
Alan Shooter
ps caught you, I ment Tetley's beer
Yes.....thanks.....no wonder Australians are xxxxing all over. Alan wins a packet of Aspro Clear and a lie down, now can anyone please tell me what on earth Alan is trying to say? (And no that isn't this issues competition, that's coming up............now).
Hughs Caption Competition
Right after the success of the photo in the last issue can anyone come up with a caption for this?
As usual send your entries to HughJ@riscworld.co.uk and we will print the cleanest ones. Just like last issue there may be a prize, but lets face it that really isn't very likely.
Moving on to this issues collection of sillyness that has arrived in my in box over the last few weeks.
Ah, well, if only it could happen again....still it might put a stop to these sorts of products.
And if you have had that NT experience you might sympathise with this.
Of course you could always pop into your local book store for one of those handy "idiots guides."
And then of course you will need a new computer with a new processor.
I wonder what the Pentium4 version looks like? Still I will leave you with one that really did make me laugh.
Until next time
That's it for this issue, and don't forget to leave your radio on during the night.
It's jolly good to see, letters coming marked for...er...me!
And lets kick off with last issues mistakes...
Hi Aaron
Just when you thought it was safe...The MW Software link in the Artworks 2 article is duff, as it points to: http://www.mw-softare.com/
TYPO!
Andrew Harmsworth
Damn! And all because of a missing w. The correct link should have been
Hi,
I find the new logo gets me confused with the index and forward/backward
logo they all have arrows one or the other should be changed and use
different colours.
I transferred htmlsearch to my HD and then clicked on it to unzip and it
loaded arcfs2 from the cd and complained 'APP MAY HAVE GONE WRONG'
quitting reported 'Arcfs in use' and ran my SparkFS when dragging the file
to be unzipped also complained 'APP MAY HAVE GONE WRONG' but it worked OK,
except lost the sprite for the application. On shutdown the computer hung
for a time and then complained again with the above and I was left with a
grey blank screen and needing a hard reset.
Will try again and record what happened.
Re new computers I am one that is going to move to the PC world
permanently in the near future specially as I have been given a 3 year old
Toshiba laptop.
I bought VA for it but unfortunately it will not run on it which was a
waste of money.
I cannot afford a new RO computer, by the time I have imported it the
price would be about 6 or more times that of a locally supplied PC.
I also cannot afford to upgrade SW for example ArtWorks2 is nearly 2 weeks
income especially when Xara can be bought for less than the upgrade.
Cheers
Peter Prewett, Coromandel Valley, South Australia
I think I know what you mean about the new arrows and I must confess that I am still not totally happy with them. The back arrow is OK, but the forward one is wrong (actually looking at it again I can see what is wrong, it's shaded wrongly and appears to be upside down, I have corrected this for this issue, is it any better?). I have no idea why HTMLSearch wouldnt unzip properly, but then I don't know which version of RISC OS or which computer you are using. With regard to VA not working if you e-mail me I will see what I can do, as VA works on almost anything made in the last four years, if the laptop is older than that then it is very unlikely to match the spec required. I take the point about the price of native RISC OS hardware, but hardware developers have to get back their development budget on far fewer units. If you spend £1 million on developing a product, and sell a million units then the development cost is £1 per item. If you spend £1 million and sell a thousand units then your development cost per unit is £1000. I think RISC OS developers deserve massive congratulations for the hard work they put in.
Hi,
I just read Dave Holden's article on improving the video output, jus
out of curiosity, and am now a little confused about my computer.
He says if you've got a Series 3 motherboard marked 1208.000 you wil
have slightly fuzzy video, 3 chip capacitors by the VIDC chip,
inductors by the video connector, no problem with large SIMMs, an
although he doesn't say so directly, by implication no C32.
Well, my motherboard is marked 1208.000, and it does have the chi
capacitors by the VIDC (I couldn't be bothered removing the podules t
check for the inductors, but if I've got the capacitors, I assume I hav
those, too). In addition, it does have C32, and it won't run with SIMM
bigger than 16MB (I've tried).
Am I unusual in having a Series 3 motherboard that has C32 and doesn'
like SIMMs bigger than 16MB?
By the way, I won't monkey with the video circuit. When my AKF60 died
I replaced it with a 15" LCD screen, and the result at 1024 x 768
32000 colours is crisp like the old AKF60 could never even dream of
low-pass filters notwithstanding, with no signs whatsoever of fuzziness
No, I haven't slowed down the frame rate, and in fact I'm still usin
the AKF60 MDF as-is. Of course the monitor may be doing some interna
cleaning-up for all I know. It may have an analogue input, bu
internally it's clearly digital.
Regards
Michael Poole
What make of SIMMS have you tried in the motherboard? I have not myself run into a series3 board that won't run at least 128Mb, unless it has a serious hardware fault. Are you sure the board is a series 3 one, it may be an earlier board that has been "modified" under warranty. TFT screens are really getting very very good now, and at 1024x768 you are highly unlikely to see the fuzzy video problem, try 1600x1200 on a big CRT and you will.
Moving on we can say goodbye to yet another RISC OS user...
Dear Sirs,
I'm writing this e-mail in response to your mail advert. We
unfortunately, lost interest in the Acorn platform and we almost stopped
using it. It was an enthusiast hobby, and changes in life and work make
that hobby redundant.
As you want to hear some comment from us, here they are. For me, the
magazine is well done; the only thing that I wanted was some form of
tutorial on programming - sometimes, to understand the descriptions of
some piece of software is impossible. What's a veneer? And porting and new
libraries. How about making the port of a simple game using the SDL
libraries? Understanding the algorithms, porting specific parts, changing
others, compiling and linking with SDL?
Well, as I stated, we are softly leaving the platform. Now I have Red
Squirrel on my laptop - and the ROMs I copied from my old A3000 (RO 3.1).
From time to time, I boot my RiscPC (SA, RO 3.7) and play some old game,
or perform tasks that Windows (98 and XP) apps are still unable to do. For
"serious" games, I have the laptop and a Dreamcast (a very good machine).
Finally, I must say that not living in UK make very difficult to follow
the (ex-)Acorn way of life. Second-hand opportunities almost always are
offered only to people living in UK, and the Euro/Pound ratio make stuff
expensive. Also, I had some negative experiences with snail-mail ordering.
Kind regards,
Stefano e Fernanda Bertinetti
What can I say? RISC OS has been an enthusiasts market since Acorn lost their stronghold in the education market. Thanks for the kind words about RISC World, it would be good to run more "programming workshops", perhaps a keen reader might like to have a go? Since RISC OS has been a "British" OS since its earliest days keen RISC OS users in other countries have found it difficult to get support and service, this was true even in the Acorn days and before the collapse of the Acorn dealer network. I sympathise with your position, but do keep the Risc PC!
Now a club based comment...
Hi,
The current AAUG link to the North Kent Amateur Computer Club (NKACC) is still valid. Just to confirm, anyone who would like details should go to our website at All the best,
Richard Nevill,
Secretary, North Kent Amateur Computer Club
Followed up with a windscreen based comment...
Hi,
I enjoyed hearing about your saga! Glad it wasn't me.
Are you sure your ins coy doesn't have "small print" that says if yo
use other than an approved repairer they void your policy?
you know, like the manufacturer's warranty on cars always says: use our
agents or lose the warranty.
just a thought.
Erik
Well I did use the "approved specialists", it's just that I don't approve of them and the service was far from special...grrr...
Anyway back to RISC World problem corner....
G'day
Since it was announced some time ago that you were changing to the 700M
disc I have not been able to get past the start up menu of the disc o
my 32x drive. Clicking on the !RWORLD file asks for the RISC World dis
to be put in the drive. Luckily I also have a CDWriter which can rea
these discs. With the volume 4 issue cd I again tried to load it fro
the 32x drive and got the message that the RISC World boot may b
infected by the Vigay virus and to run the pineapple virus software.
then put it in my other drive with no problems
Regards
Alan Shooter
Sounds like the drive doesn't work very well with RISC OS, what make and model is it? The CD itself should be OK as they read in the other drive, however I have run into a couple of drives recently that don't read some CDR discs correctly, this could be the problem.
And finally last issues Insider column produced these thoughts from Matthew Thompson.
Hi,
With reference to the Insider comment - The Solution, in Volume 4 issu
1 I would like to say that one of the biggest problems that RISC O
isn't growing is the simple fact that nobody knows it exists, basicall
people just think that if you have a computer it's Windows and thats i
because thats all anybody knows, a few might know of Apple Macs and
couple of about Linux but RISC OS? Whats that?
The fact is the RISC OS companies need to get out there as a unite
front and promote RISC OS together it doesn't matter who makes th
machine it's still running RISC OS, for some reason there is endles
preaching to the converted who don't need telling how good RISC OS, thi
should be told to those that don't know, why aren't these companies a
computer shows doing presentations there in addition to RISC OS sho
presentations? there should be adverts for RISC OS and the relevan
companies in Computer Shopper/Personal Computer World etc telling th
outside world that RISC OS is still in existence and that there ar
other systems to chose from, some people will not be interested but
bet you could get some to change systems if they knew it existed, fa
too many people think RISC OS died with Acorn and they need to be tol
that it didn't, you never know old RISC OS users might even come back.
RISC OS machines are expensive which doesn't help matters so perhaps th
£399 APDL machine that was on sale could be done with a bit more stuf
with it for maybe £499 inc and more widely available, or a cut dow
Iyonix for £999 or something similar.
I appreciate that advertising and promoting costs money, you have to spen
money to make money, and they might not be able to afford that but unless th
RISC OS companies start telling the outside world that we're still here the
will be out of business anyway, so they might as well give a damn good tr
at least rather than just pottering away in our own little corner of th
computing world.
It's not too late to spread the word , but unless something is done it will be.
Matthew Thompson
Well it is the age old problem, you are too small to be noticed, but because you are so small you don't have the funds available to get noticed. I agree all the companies need to get together, perhaps with Castle acquiring RISC OS from Pace this might happen? However advertising in PC magazines is unlikely to help very much, well actually that isn't quite true, it helps sell VirtualA5000 when we advertise in PC mags, but then we are selling an item of software to go on a PC, not a RISC OS computer. The old story was that RISC OS was "cheaper" long term than a PC, when you took all the costs into account. I simply don't think this is true anymore, an Iyonix or an Omega is certainly better, but neither are cheaper. And these days consumers are more price conscious. An Iyonix for £999 sounds exciting, but if Castle could sell it for that don't you think they would be? Iyonix costs £1300 because that is what it needs to cost to get the development budget back and to fund future development, oh and to make a profit.
Anyway that's it for this issues letters page. Why not write in and tell us what you think about the recent RISC OS take over by Castle, or indeed about anything else that tickles your fancy.
The Mustek DV3000 is a fairly cheap (sub £100 if you shop around) 3 mega pixel digital camera supporting resolutions up to 2048x1536. It takes both SD and MMC memory cards, has a USB socket and can display its pictures directly on a TV. Like most cheap cameras it has a fixed focus lens and a digital zoom. However unlike most other cheap cameras it can record video with sound at a quite reasonable 15 frames per second and is designed to look like a miniature video camera.
As you can see the camera is quite tiny, only slightly larger than a cigarette packet and seems to have come from the same design school as a lot of mobile phones. Unlike most cameras it does not have a viewfinder, instead it relies on the TFT display, which does give the batteries a bit of a hammering, having said this I have had it on for well over 2 hours and the supplied batteries are still fine (They finally packed up after using the camera for about 3 hours). The TFT display is used to provide not only a view of what you are shooting but all the on screen menus. Behind the fold out TFT are all the picture controls, arranged much like a Canon video camera. There is a rather nasty on-off button on top, along with the digital zoom control and the shutter button.
What's in the box?
In the package you get the camera, a wrist strap, two batteries (AA Alkaline), a user guide, 2 software CDs, carry bag, video cable, USB cable and a 32Mb MMC memory card. Recording on a card is useful as it means you can buy a bigger card to increase the video recording time or the number or pictures you can take. You can also read pictures off the card using one of the readily available card readers for RISC OS. Since the camera behaves as a removable USB storage device I see no reason why it couldn't be connected directly to a USB equipped RISC OS machine.
First Impressions
The camera seems quite well made and all the controls can be easily found, although the sliding on/off switch is truly awful. I did have to consult the manual to work out what all the buttons under the TFT display did, especially the exposure control button which is designed for shooting at night (the camera has no flash). Still it's a camera so what are the results like?
Photo 1 - inside using natural light
As you can see mid range detail is quite well captured, but darks are a bit too dark and light dog shaped items are a bit too light and tend to wash out a little. Still the camera did a good job of capturing the texture on the throw that's over the sofa. There is also a very slight blurring and close examination of the image revealed the tell tale signs of JPEG compression that has been turned up a little too high.
Photo 2 - outside using natural light
Outside the camera coped quite well, but as you can see the white patio set has become a little bit bleached out. To compare it I took a similar shot with my Samsung DigiMax.
The same, but shot with a Samsung DigiMax
As you can see the Samsung image is much crisper. Interesting it is also larger (coming in at almost twice the size of the image from the Mustek) which seems to indicate that it is less compressed. Full size copies of all the photos are in the Mustek directory inside the software directory.
Overall the camera performs acceptably for a sub £100 device and I suppose that comparing it to another camera that cost over twice the price isn't really fair. One thing I do like about the Mustek is the fact that it takes a photo as soon as you press the button, some cameras seem to have a slight pause before the photo is taken and you can sometimes "lose" a good shot as a result.
As a video camera
The Mustek has a video resolution of 320x240, which is similar to VHS quality. Again evidence of "extra" compression was evident with the camera really struggling to cope with complex changing scenes. A walk through wood land with the dogs was a bit of a mess, well actually it was a total mess and the result was really a case of spot the moving blob. At this point I was rather unhappy with the camera. However keeping the camera still and videoing moving objects (well moving dogs) produced a quite acceptable result. There is a sample movie (Dogs.mpg) in the software directory that I made after having got to grips with the camera so you can see the results for yourselves.
I also tried videoing my 7 year old niece in her back garden and the results here were quite acceptable. One thing that did impress me was the cameras sound reproduction. Since it is silent in operation you get no camera noise. In addition it seems to pick up well detailed sounds from quite a distance. For recording short video clips for web/multimedia use the Mustek copes far better than other "digital video" cameras I have seen. It won't match a real digital camcorder, but then real digital camcorders are 4 times the price.
Editing the video I had recorded on the PC was dead easy, but then I hit a snag. The video recorded by the camera can't be understood by any of the RISC OS applications that I could find. Consulting the camera manual showed that Direct X V8 codecs are used, which might explain the problem. I did manage to edit the video on a PC and the resulting files could then be played using KinoAmp. Mind you what decent video editing software is there for RISC OS? The supplied VideoStudio6 SE for Windows is quite an impressive product. The codecs for RISC OS programs such as CineWorks are out of date and I am not even sure of Empire is still available.
Conclusion
As a cheap general purpose device that can take pictures and record video clips the DV3000 has a lot going for it. I don't like the digital zoom (and the fact you can't zoom while recording video). However the picture quality is acceptable and the video quality is really quite good.
A couple of example Video Clips, which has been processed by VideoStudio, are in the Mustek folder in the software directory. Note that the quality has been reduced. Also included there is a copy of KinoAmp that can be used to play the video back. The Dogs.mpg file has been heavily processed, the audio tracks have been redone and titles and fades have been added in the editing stage.
The fact you can't do anything with the video directly on RISC OS is a drawback. If you have a PC then this really isn't a bad budget camera. If you just have RISC OS then the extra video features are no use so you might as well buy a camera without video support but that takes better photos.
Product details
Product:
Mustek DV3000 camer
Supplier:
Muste
Price:
Street price around £99 inc VAT (if you shop round
RISC World has had an Omega for several months now...
As I am sure most people know RISC World took delivery of an Omega after the RISC OS Southwest show earlier this year. Those who attended may well have seen the machine running on the APDL stand. This machine is the full size version with the rather plain dark grey case, as opposed to the smaller silver version. However a big case does mean more room for expansion.
RISC Worlds Omega
Display
At present we have the Omega hooked up to a 17" monitor, although for the purposes of "having a play" we did hook it up to Aarons 21" daily display which is usually attached to his RiscPC. What was interesting was the improved picture quality, a RiscPC can manage to do 1600x1200, but only in 256 colours and at a low and somewhat flickery refresh rate. The RiscPC also suffers from a slightly "fuzzy" image. There are no such problems with the Omega, it can do a flicker free 1600 x 1200 display in full 24 bit colour. The Omega also seems considerably more responsive in high res screen modes. All the RiscPCs seems to struggle a little bit, with drags not being as smooth as they are in lower res modes. Again there seem to be no such problems with the Omega and it feels as fast in 1600 x 1200 as it does in 800 x 600.
Hardware
Of course one of the first things you have do with a computer is take it apart so you can see what is inside. The Omega motherboard is not large and leaves plenty of space inside the case. One thing we did find very amusing was the inclusion of an exhaust fan in the case. Is an ARM powered machine is going to generate that much heat? No.
Inside the Omega (PCI sound card removed for clarity)
MicroDigital seem to have solved the problem of RISC OS addressing over 256Mb of RAM and the motherboard has space for two memory modules and can support up to 1Gb of memory (2x512Mb). The Omega also solves the age old problem of the slow RiscPC IDE bus, with transfer rates up to almost 40Mb a second as opposed to the 1.5Mb you get from a RiscPC. The floppy drive performs much the same as any other RISC OS computer, being able to read Acorn and DOS formatted floppies. Both the hard drive and the CD Writer have performed with no problems.
Close up of the Omega motherboard
Updates
Since we have had the machine for a number of months it has been updated a number of times by MicroDigital. An update arrives in our e-mail (which is on a PC), we copy it over to the Omega, run it and then after 10 to 15 seconds during which the upgrade is carried out the machine needs to be restarted. Every upgrade has performed without any problem, and every time the machine gets upgraded it seems to run faster. Since much of the Omega hardware is programmed into the FGAs quite major changes can be made to the "hardware" without having to even open the case, much less return it to a dealer for the update to be carried out.
RISC OS
The Omega comes with vanilla RISC OS 4 installed as standard. If you are a Select subscriber then you should be able to run Select on the machine. RISC OS 4 performs just the same as it does on any other machine, only faster. Every single bit of software we have tried just works, only faster, in some cases much faster. We really have tried to find something that doesn't work and even some really rather nasty RiscPC demos have run without any problems.
The Omega software bundle consists of a version of DrawWorks, Masterfile, Ovation, AudioWorks, TableCalc along with a complete disc image in case something goes wrong. There is also the usual small freeware collection with StrongED, Zap and a couple of games.
Conclusion
It's actually very difficult to say a great deal about the Omega. It's designed to be a RiscPC replacement, and that is exactly what it is. We can't give you any great stories about things not working, because it all seems to just work fine. The updating process has gone smoothly, all the programs we want to use have been copied over and have worked first time. The best way to view the Omega is as a fast RiscPC with all the RiscPCs problems (slow hard drive, only 2Mb VRAM etc) removed. You turn on the Omega it starts, then you use it and when you have finished you turn it off. Our experience so far is that it's as reliable as only a RISC OS machine can be. As a RiscPC replacement it's very good, in use it feels twice the speed of a standard StrongARM RiscPC. If you have an older machine with an ARM610, ARM710, or even an Arm7500 based machine, then the difference will be even more marked.
What can we say? Well the Omega is not sexy, it's not funky, it doesn't have any wonderful tricks up it's sleeve, it just gets on and does the job, which I suppose is the main point of its existence.
Addendum
Hugh has just proof read this article and raised a good point, if the Omega is so good, why is RISC World still assembled still using a RiscPC? There is a simple answer, networking. The Omega doesn't have a network card, although we do have one on order. Aaron can't work without having the PC and the RISC OS machine networked (Damn right! -ED). When the network card arrives he expects to push the Omega into front line service.
RISC World
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE2/PD/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 2, PD World
PD World
Paul Brett with the latest freeware and PD releases for RISC OS.
Basalt - Steve Drain
'Basalt' is a module that provides BASic ALTernative keywords. Basalt contains machine code routines to interpret new keywords or alternative uses for existing BASIC keywords. They are called by a special use of CALL and USR. Double click on '!Basalt' to open 'Basalt:Modules', which contains the Basalt module. For full instructions consult the supplied StrongHelp format manual. Some of the main features are:
Basalt provides alternative keywords by extending the use of normal keywords and adding new keywords
It is written in hand-crafted assembler and new commands execute at BASIC speeds
Basalt uses only documented entries to the BASIC module and should be compatible with all versions
It has been been written to be 32-bit clean, but has not been tested
There is not yet a version of Basalt for BASIC64
Basalt is simple to use. When the module is loaded, put *BasaltInit as the first effective line of a program and use the alternative keywords exactly as normal BASIC keywords.
Printers+ - Printers+ Developers
Printers+ is hosted as an open source project on
!Printers+ 1.91 has the following enhancements over previous versions:
Longstanding problem with slow printing to certain Hewlet
Packard printers has been resolved in latest version o
ParallelDevice Driver in ROM
Paper feeds and output bins can now be configured for 'dp' an
'lj' printers, as well as for Postscript ones
The Printer connection window has been much enhanced with ne
connection methods. If the relevant filing systems are installe
then !Printers will allow connection via LanManFS, LanMan98, LPR
JetDirect and USB. LPR, JetDirect and USB drivers are planned fo
future releases
A new format of PDF has been created that allows both standar
PDF information and resources (palette files, paper feeds, outpu
bins, paper sizes etc) to be bundled together. The user can the
install these new PDFs just by dropping one file in. A tool
!PrtBundle, has been built to allow simple creation/extraction o
these bundled PDFs
When using shared printers across Access networks resources fo
shared printers (such as palette files etc) no longer need to b
installed locally on every machine
!Printers+ can now be run with a -quit flag on the command line
This starts !Printers+, loads the modules required and configure
the default printer, then exits. By running !Printers+ in this wa
at startup applications can instantly print without needing to loa
!Printers+ manually. This also uses the minimum amount of memory
LJ based printing now copes better with non-A4 paper sizes
New Canon CX2 module (type 14) to cope with incorrect printou
positioning when using printing from !Draw with newer Canon printers
Support for Device ID detection to allow automatic printe
capability detection in later versions of !Printers+
Changes to the Default paper sizes to correct for smal
inaccuracies in Paper Size calculations in certain applications
To report a bug in Printers+ visit
The Printers+ project has three mailing lists. The announce list is a very low volume list for announcement of new releases of Printers+ only. The users list is for discussion of the use of Printers+. The new development list is for discussion of the development of open source Printers+. To subscribe to any of these lists please visit the project mailing list page at
SpamStamp - Jan-Jaap van der Geer
SpamStamp is a program to help you filter out spam by adding extra headers to incoming mail indicating if it is spam or not. SpamStamp decides if a mail is spam by checking its contents and comparing that with past experiences. If you tell SpamStamp that it made a mistake, it will learn from that and therefore become better at differentiating between spam and non-spam.
SpamStamp does not filter or delete mail, it merely adds a header that you can use in your mail program to move it to a spam folder or whatever you want to do with it.
Thumbcat - Malcolm Ripley
ThumbCat catalogues images in two formats both on-screen in normal RISCOS windows and HTML format. The main features are:
Handles - Sprites , Drawfiles , AVI's (from digital cameras) , JPEG's , EXIF's plus any file formats recognised by ImageFS or ChangeFS
Will build a catalogue of a directory tree of images
Files dragged to the iconbar icon will be interpreted and then displayed in a detail view
Directories dragged to the iconbar will be searched and all recognised images displayed in a thumbnail view
Creates JPEG thumbnails for fast re-creation of a thumbnail view
Essentially adopted the EXIF tags list for its own image database details
Almost all tag values can be edited. Some tags don't make sense to edit e.g. x-y dimensions !! Please note that when an EXIf file is handled the embedded tags are extracted into the Thumbcat database and can thus be edited. The tags within the file remain unchanged.
Thumbnail views behave similar to filer windows in that
Images can be copied (by dragging) or moved (by shift dragging) between views
Images can be copied and modified by adjust dragging. In this case an options window will pop up allowing you to choose simple rotations and reflections and to change the filetype of the copy
Catalogues can be stored with images or remote from the images in a "pseudo" application. The pseudo application can be relocated without loss of functionality. Thus catalogues can be created of read only sources
HTML catalogues can be created. These will have relative links for catalogues with the images and absolute references for catalogues remote from the images
Configurable thumbnail and detail views
Thumbnails are self repairing once created
Vice - RISC OS versions Andreas Dehmel
VICE is a Versatile Commodore Emulator, i.e. a program that runs on a Unix, MS-DOS, Win95/NT, OS/2, Acorn RISC OS or BeOS machine and executes programs intended for the old 8-bit Commodore computers. The current version emulates the C64, the C128, the VIC20, all the PET models (except the SuperPET 9000, which is out of line anyway), the PLUS4 and the CBM-II (aka C610).
If you have no idea what a Commodore 8-bit computer is, or have questions about how these machines are used, how the file formats work or anything else that is not strictly related to VICE, you should read the appropriate FAQs first. See section 14 (Contact information) in the supplied manual for information about how to retrieve the FAQs.
All the emulators provide an accurate 6502/6510 emulator, with emulation of all the opcodes (both documented and undocumented ones) and accurate timing. Unlike other emulators, VICE aims to be cycle accurate; it tries to emulate chip timings as precisely as possible and does so efficiently.
Please do not expect the C128, PET, PLUS4 and CBM-II emulators to be as good as the C64 or VIC20 one, as they are still under construction.
Signing off
That is it for this PD column. As usual if you have anything you would like featured please send it in to the RISC World editorial address.
Our subject this month concerns some of the many choices which are available to determine how Powerbase works, and also how non-standard features may be added. When preparing Article 6 I quite overlooked the fact that it would appear on a compilation disc: the different structure of the disc meant that none of the links in the article worked! Sorry about that. (Whoops that will actually be my fault - ED).I presume readers who are following this series located everything referred to all right. Since I have received no requests for further enlightenment this will be the last Powerbase article in RISC World.
The latest version of Powerbase
Control buttons
Clicking ADJUST on the Powerbase icon on the iconbar opens the Preferences window. We won't be discussing every single option in this window - many are pretty self-explanatory anyway - but it's worth a reminder that every one of them has a message which will be displayed by the !Help application.
In the section labelled "Control" three radio buttons give you the choice of using the tool-pane (default), the alternative keypad, or neither. Their effect is immediate: no need even to click the Accept button. The main difference between the tool-pane and keypad is that the latter has pairs of buttons to perform opposite functions such as next record and previous record, whereas the tool-pane has just one. Since ADJUST is consistently used on the browsing buttons to reverse the action of SELECT, there is no loss of functionality when using the tool-pane, but anyone who is an infrequent RISC OS user may be unfamiliar with this use of ADJUST. A 'Windows' user said to me recently "I know how to go forward to the next record but how the heck do I get back?" Such users will find the keypad more intuitive.
The dual function of many of the tool-pane buttons may be emphasised by selecting New sprites which replaces the unidirectional arrows of the regular sprites with pairs of left and right-pointing arrows. The option button is deselected and greyed out when the keypad is selected since there is then no point in using the alternative sprites. Since a right-pointing arrow is used to mean "next" and a left-pointing one to mean "previous" some users might like to make the left and right mouse buttons reflect this by reversing their normal function. Rev(erse) mouse does this, and changes one of the button sprites from blue to red as an indication. This feature was suggested by a long-standing Powerbase user and I have come to prefer it myself. Fig.1 illustrates the relevant part of the tool-pane with the standard sprites and with the alternative set and reversed mouse-buttons selected.
Whatever choices you make will affect the current work session only, unless you Save choices, of which more will be said later.
Two disadvantages of the keypad in earlier versions of Powerbase are firstly it is easy to lose it behind the record window (although pressing Tab will bring it to the front again) and secondly, if you are running two copies of Powerbase with two databases open, you can get the two keypads mixed up. v.9.18 overcomes these little problems by enabling you to attach the keypad to the record window. To do this click MENU over any keypad button (which opens the Key equivalents window) and select Attach keypad then click Close. The keypad may still be moved around freely and toggled to its reduced size just as before but it will follow the record window when the latter is moved and always stays in front. You must Save choices in the Key equivalents window if you want the keypad to be attached next time you open the database.
Choosing Neither tool-pane nor keypad does not prevent you from using the function keys to browse, search etc. and is really intended for users who prefer to have all their control buttons on the record window itself. In article 2 we added Quit, Exit and a Menu button to !MusicBase. Any of the buttons on the keypad or tool-pane may be placed on the record window in the same way, i.e
Choose Alter format from the iconbar Utilities submenu
Click MENU over the blue grid (not over a pre-existing field) and choose Create field
Select the radio button labelled Keypad button or Tool-pane button. (The labelling depends on what you have selected in Preferences.
Choose the required button from the field-type menu and click Create
When you have added the buttons you want and dragged them into position choose Quit design from the main menu
If other people use your database and you want to give them restricted facilities, such as being able to browse and search, but not add or delete records, placing the appropriate buttons on the record window and turning off the keypad/tool-pane is an obvious way to do it. By itself, however, this isn't good enough because the "restricted" user can easily make him/herself into an unrestricted one by opening the Preferences window and enabling the keypad/tool-pane! To prevent this you need to password protect your database. In what follows the term "keypad" should be understood as referring to the keypad or tool-pane.
Restricted access and password protection
Choosing Miscellaneous=>Set passwords from the main menu opens the Password window (Fig.2)
Access to this window is only possible if either no passwords have been set or if the user opened the database with the Manager password. For the present enter "read" and "write" respectively in the first two boxes and your own name (or anything you fancy) in the third. You can actually see the two lower level passwords but the Manager icon shows only a line of hyphens. Click Set and close the database.
When you try to re-open the database you are first presented with with the Access window which requests a password. Try entering "rhubarb" followed by Return or clicking Open. The message Password not known is displayed, followed by a request to enter the password again. Three such "fails" throw you out altogether and remove Powerbase from the iconbar. Enter "read" and the database opens but some of the keypad control buttons are greyed out. You'll find you can move around the database and retrieve individual records but you can't alter anything. The caret can't be placed in the fields and many of the menu choices on both main and iconbar menus are barred to you. Close the database and re-open it with "write". This time things are (superficially) as you're accustomed to seeing them, but most of the iconbar Utilities submenu is still unavailable so you can't rename the database, alter its structure or redefine its primary key. Also, crucially, you can't get at the Password window. If you open the database with whatever you set up as the Manager password then all facilities are open to you, including the ability to alter the passwords.
As you will have noticed, the Password window has quite an extensive list of features which you may enable or disable. Since only a Manager password will let you into the Password window, any features you decide to disable will be protected from re-enabling by lower-level users. The first of these features is the keypad. Deselect this button and click Set. The keypad disappears just as it does when you select Neither in Preferences. The difference, however, can be seen if you open the Preferences window. The whole Control section is greyed out.
So, if you wish to restrict the way your database is used by others you have the following facilities:
Set passwords and only divulge one of the lower level ones
Disable things you don't want anyone else but yourself using by deselecting buttons on the password window
If allocating a Read password doesn't restrict keypad use as much as you wish, disable the keypad altogether and place such buttons as you do want available on the record window
No doubt you've noticed the greyed out Access button at the bottom of the Password window and wondered what it's for? It opens up a whole new system of password protection in which individual users can be allocated their own personal login names and passwords which may be set at any of the three levels (Read, Write or Manager) previously referred to. This gives much better security but is not something to describe in an open article like this. If anyone is interested in using this feature please email me for further instructions.
Automatic index balancing and saving
Because of the way Powerbase stores keys in its indexes it isn't a good idea to enter records in key order, especially primary key order. If you do so the "tree" structure of the index becomes degraded to a mere linear list which takes longer to search when retrieving a record and is also slower when inserting or deleting records. Even if the records are entered in a more-or-less random order with regard to key the index tree can become very lopsided. That's why there is a utility to balance the tree to improve the efficiency of search, insert and delete operations.
There are times, however, when it is inconvenient or almost impossible not to enter records in key order. If you are presented with a pile of several hundred forms with someone's name on each, and the forms have been tidily alphabetised by name, you'd get some funny looks (to say the least) if you threw them in the air and gathered them up in random order "because the computer prefers them that way"! You can always pause every couple of dozen records to balance the index using the choice from the Utilities submenu. In fact typing Ctrl-B will do the same thing, but it's nicer not to have to bother about it at all. This is where you might want to select Balance every [n] records. [n] is set by default at 25 but you can enter any number you wish. With auto-balancing enabled you will find that Powerbase pauses every now and again, ignoring your keystrokes, while it balances its indexes.
Whatever choices you make in the Preferences window will only be remembered next time you use the database if you have saved them. Save choices saves them in a text file called Preference and gives you the option of saving them inside the database (in which case they apply to that database only and different databases can have different saved Preference files) or in Powerbase itself. If you choose the latter the choices will affect all databases except those which have their own Preference file. A "private" Preference file saved inside the database directory always takes precedence over the one in Powerbase.
There is a third radio button on this section of the window which is relevant only if you are using RISC OS Select 4.33 or later and have the operating system's Users facility enabled. This provides a separate directory for each user inside the !Boot application where programs can save the user's personal choices. The third radio button on the Preferences window (and on some other windows) will then incorporate the name of the logged-in user in its labelling. Selecting the button causes the Preference file to be saved there. The priority level of such a file falls between that of a file saved in a database and one saved in Powerbase. Thus, when loading a Preference file the sequence of testing and selecting is as follows:
Does this database have its own Preference file? If so, load it
If there is no database-specific Preference file, is there one for the exclusive use of the logged-in user? If so, load that
Failing either of the above, load the file in !Powerbase.Resources
This raises the question of what happens when you click the Load default button. If simply clicked with SELECT it reloads the same file that was loaded on opening the database, i.e. it looks for a file using the priority order shown above. You can, however, override this by Shift-clicking. If there's a user-specific file then that will be loaded, even if there is also a Preference file in the database. Ctrl-click forces the file from !Powerbase.Resources to be loaded. In extreme circumstances (where you've got the Preference file in Resources into an unholy mess and wished you'd left it alone!) you can use Alt-click to load the one from !Powerbase.Initial. This is the "factory default" (like all other files in Initial) and should not be altered.
Using Query-by-example
The default method of targetting records to include in a report is by entering a search formula which describes the records required in terms of the contents of fields. Article 3 contained several examples of search formulae and readers are referred to that article to refresh their memories if necessary. If your query requirements are very simple you might prefer the alternative method: query-by-example.
Load the MusicBase database we worked on in earlier articles. If you don't have it extract it from the zip file
Adding non-standard features to Powerbase
The ability to add non-standard features arose out of the original use of Powerbase for maintaining student records in an F.E. college (see "Origins"in Article 1 of this series). Some one said how nice it would be if one could print personal timetables for students and obtain a list of class totals for all subjects. These features were already provided by another program which reads a Powerbase database and does fancy things with it, but it was inconvenient to have to run the latter program every time a student came along with a timetable change. Powerbase itself, on the other hand, was always running with the student database open, so could I please make it offer these handy facilities? It was really just a matter of lifting some of the code from the timetabling program and incorporating it into Powerbase but I didn't want specially-doctored versions of Powerbase around the place. They'd have to be updated separately every time I made changes to the standard program.
Eventually I developed a method of providing these features without modifying Powerbase, and it is that which is now to be demonstrated and explained. The method involves placing a new subdirectory inside the database directory. This subdirectory must always be called Customise and contains all the files needed to implement the new features. The minimum requirement is a Basic file whose name is specific to the database with which it will be used.
Our first demonstration uses the Elements database and the feature we will add is one to print out the elements group by group in parallel columns, i.e. Group 0 (the noble gases) in the first column, group 1 in the second column etc., ending with a column listing the actinides. To try this you will need the database and its appropriate Customise folder. These are in zip files on the CD and may be readily obtained by clicking the links
Run Powerbase and open Elements, just to remind yourself what the non-customised database looks like. Note especially that the tool-pane ends, as usual, with the four grey "book-mark" icons. Close the database (no need to quit Powerbase), open the database directory by Shift/double-clicking, and copy the Customise directory into it. Now re-open the database. If Powerbase and Elements aren't in the same directory you will at this point see a message recommending that they should be. You may dismiss this message and ignore it for the present. Look at the bottom of the tool-pane and you should see a new button called Groups. Clicking this button creates the specialised report described above and you may save it as a text file in the usual way by clicking MENU over the report window.
Before we delve into details of how this is achieved you'd probably like to see the second demonstration. This uses a modified version of the Music database called MusicDemo. It contains a subset of my own, large, database of recorded music. For the demo I have selected BBC Music Magazine cover discs since they cover a wide range of composers and musical genres. Get the database from the link
Open the MusicDemo database, which contains 114 records, noting once again that the tool-pane is quite normal. Now close it, copy Customise into the database directory, and re-open the database. This time there are three new buttons at the bottom of the tool-pane as in Fig.3:
Clicking the Disc button lists the contents of disc BBC MM44, since that is the disc which appears in the Cat.No. field. Move on a few records until one is reached with a different catalogue number and click Disc again. This is a genuinely useful feature. Whenever you retrieve a record and are wondering what else (if anything) is on the same disc as the displayed work all you have to do to find out is click the Disc button.
The "menu" button produces, as you'd expect, a pop-up menu. The music in the database is classified as Orchestral, Chamber music, Instrumental (solo), Choral & Song, and Opera. Choosing one of these categories from the pop-up menu lists all matching items in the database. Thus, choosing Opera lists all works which have "Opera" in the Type field. The little blue "window" button opens a window - surprise, surprise! This is not, however, one of Powerbase's own windows; it's one specific to this database's Customise directory (Fig.4).
It enables you to list all the works by a specified composer. Try entering Beethoven and either clicking List or pressing Return. It also provides an alternative means of listing the contents of a single disc - any disc, not just the one referred to in the displayed record. Select the Catalogue number radio button, enter BBC MM126 and click List. Having developed these customised features for demonstration purposes I've decided I like them well enough to use them in my own music database!
You can hop back and forth between Elements and MusicDemo; the appropriate custom buttons for each database will appear on the tool-pane and the special features will work. If you switch to the keypad as described at the beginning of the article the custom buttons will be missing but will appear if you quit Powerbase and re-run it. (You might need to click the Toggle-size icon on the keypad a couple of times before correct operation is achieved.)
Customisation uses memory most efficiently when all customised databases are in the same directory as Powerbase itself, which is why an advisory message is displayed when you first open a database in a different directory. When Powerbase is run it searches whatever directory it is in for customised databases and allocates space for the biggest Basic file it might need to load. The last entry (Libraries) on the iconbar Utilities submenu will list all customisation files Powerbase knows about. Double-clicking an entry in this list opens the relevant Customise directory so that you can edit its contents.
So how does it all work?
Here comes the steepest part of the Powerbase learning curve! What follows requires some knowledge of programming in Basic and you should feel free to skip this section if the idea doesn't appeal to you.
Open the Customise directory for MusicDemo. It contains two objects: a Basic file which I've called MusicLib and a Templates file. The latter contains just the template for the non-standard window used to list works by composer or disc and there's really no more to be said about it. The MusicLib file is what does all the work and this should be loaded into your favourite editor for examination. A quick scroll through the listing will reveal several functions and procedures in which "MusicLib" forms part of the name. This is important, as will be explained below.
I have provided another Customise directory in
It will also be immediately apparent that this isn't a complete Basic program since it actually begins with a DEF FN. It is in fact a library of functions and procedures many of which are called from Powerbase and which may, in turn, call functions and procedures within Powerbase. The first function in this customisation library is called FN_MusicLib_setup. There is always a function whose name is of the form FN_<filename>_setup, where <filename> is the name of the Basic library file itself. When a database is opened Powerbase checks whether there is a Customise directory and, if so, calls the appropriate setup function in the library.
One of the most important actions performed by the setup function is the creation of the custom buttons on the tool-pane or keypad. This is done by calls to FNadd_button (which is part of Powerbase). In this instance there are three calls to FNadd_button and it is important that the variable names holding the icon numbers of these added buttons aren't used by Powerbase for something else. Names which have "MusicLib" as part of their name are safe to use and you are advised to stick to such a pattern in any work of your own. I've called one icon handle "Discbutton%" because I know no such variable name is used by Powerbase, but other users wouldn't know that. For a detailed description of how FNadd_button is used (and for other information about customisation) you are referred to Ch 15 in the user manual.
Some of the actions in the setup function need to be performed each time the database is opened without quitting Powerbase. Others must be done only once and these are placed inside the IF new% THEN...ENDIF block. Dimensioning arrays is a common example, although none are used in this library. What we do have are five calls to FNfield (part of Powerbase again) to define variables holding the field-numbers of the fields whose tags are COMP (Composer), WORK, TYPE, DISC (Cat.No.) and TOTL (duration). Even if your own database has these five fields with different field-numbers things should still work provided the tags are as stated. If not this part of the library is easily changed. The template for the non-standard window is also loaded here.
The next function definition in the library is of FN_MusicLib_button which handles mouse-clicks on the custom buttons. A click on the blue "window" (MusicLibwindow%) opens the special window. (The fiddling with Wimp_GetWindowState, block% and PROCpostion_window here ensures that the special window opens just to the right of the tool-pane.) If the menu button is clicked the menu is created and displayed.
Clicking the Disc button directly calls PROC_MusicLib_list, which is at the heart of these special features. FN_MusicLib_select can also call call PROC_MusicLib_list directly, using the text from the menu choice itself (choice$(1)). FN_MusicLib_click is called whenever the Wimp informs Powerbase of a mouse-click but the window involved isn't one of Powerbase's own and therefore must be a custom window. There could be several such but there's only one in this instance and its handle is MusicLibW%. PROC_MusicLib_list is called from this function too when the List button is clicked. FN_MusicLib_press takes a sneaky short-cut by "faking" a click on the List button if Return has been pressed.
You are probably wondering about the apparently-useless FN_MusicLib_drop. It does absolutely nothing but return a value of TRUE, so why is it there? This is the function which would be called if you dropped a text-file (or a directory) on the custom window. We don't want any action taken in such an event - but we don't want Powerbase returning a "No such FN/PROC" error either. The function to respond to such file drops must always be present, even if there are no custom windows on which files might accidentally be dropped. This is because dropping a file on any of Powerbase's own windows for which there is no defined action (such as the tool-pane) will also result in a call to the library's drop function - and an error if it isn't present. The empty function just quietly returns TRUE and Powerbase is happy.
We will now move on to examine PROC_MusicLib_list itself. It takes three parameters. The first one, mode%, will have the value 0,1 or 2 depending on whether the request is for a list of a certain type of music, music by a specified composer, or the contents of a disc, and is mainly used to set up a sensible heading for the list. The second parameter (field%) is the number of the record field which is being examined and content$ is the target-value we are looking for. e.g. if we were listing all Orchestral music we would have mode%=0, field%=TypeField% (actually field 10, tag=TYPE) and content$="Orchestral".
PROC_MusicLib_start_list does what is necessary to set the list up with an appropriate width, top and left margins etc. (There is really too much detail in this procedure to go into here.) The first call to FNneighbour points address% at the first key in the index. The WHILE loop is then entered and performs the following actions at each iteration
Get the record number by calling FNrec_no with the value of address%. (This function also returns the actual key as key$, but we don't need it here.
Call PROCsimple_read which accesses the numbered record and loads it into the array F$() - one field into each element
If the relevant field matches content$ assemble a string containing the composer's name (omitted if the request was for music by a named composer), the name of the work, and the duration. This string is then stored in the list buffer using a procedure in Powerbase
Point address% to the next key in the index
The loop terminates when address% points to a special node called the list-head whose address is in the variable top. The contents of the list buffer are then displayed. The composer's name (if present in each line) is forced to uppercase via FNu to make it stand out from the rest of the line.
Well, that's it for Article 7, and for the series as a whole. I hope some readers have found it useful and that it has given them an incentive to investigate Powerbase. Anyone struggling with a customisation library of their own is welcome to email me for help and advice.
Derek Haslam
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE2/RISCOS/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 2, Castle buys RISC OS technology from Pace
Castle buys RISC OS technology from Pace
Issued by Castle Technology Ltd
4th July 2003 - Castle Technology Ltd today announced the purchase of the RISC OS technology from Pace Micro Technology plc. The transaction involves the payment of an undisclosed cash sum, ongoing technical support for Pace`s existing products and the grant of a licence back to Pace for intellectual property rights. Castle, based in the UK, have been developing and supplying RISC OS products for over 10 years and this acquisition will ensure that RISC OS products continue into the future. Castle have also formed a joint venture with Cambridge based Tematic Ltd who will develop, market and support an embedded version of RISC OS which has been designed for use in the new generation of smart multimedia products for the high volume consumer electronics market, while Castle will continue to service the desktop market. Anthony Dixon, Company Secretary of Pace commented, "We are delighted to have concluded this transaction with Castle. This allows Pace to maintain the necessary intellectual property rights and technical support for our RISC OS based IP gateways through these new licence agreements. We wish Castle every success for the future". Jack Lillingston, Castle`s Managing Director, said, "The purchase of this technology combines perfectly with our expertise in manufacturing and marketing RISC OS computers (illustrated by our recent success with the launch of the IYONIX pc). This deal will allow us to be at the heart of exciting new products." Jack concluded, "RISC OS provides a proven, small-footprint solution, for cutting edge products such as handheld media devices; we are all very excited with this new development and relish the future for RISC OS" .
About RISC OS
RISC OS development was started in 1988 by Acorn Computers Ltd, Cambridge and acquired by Pace in 1999. RISC OS is a unique combination of hardware and software technology developed for desktop computers . It is also deployed in a number of commercially successful, consumer electronics products including Pace`s DSL4000 gateway, Internet TV devices and a variety of specialized embedded systems. Over 1 million units have been shipped with this technology. RISC OS technology is ideal for the new generation of ARM-based smart embedded devices because it is the most sophisticated and highest performance software environment currently available. It has been designed specifically for high volume, low-cost products that need to support a market-winning set of features with the absolute minimum memory and processor requirements.
Tematic Ltd offers comprehensive production-ready design solutions for consumer electronic companies. The Tematic team has a proven track record for creating and delivering innovative products for their clients. Tematic can provide a complete, fastest time-to-market solution for companies who need to turn their ideas into revenue generating products in the shortest possible time. Tematic`s web site is at
About Pace Micro Technology plc
Pace Micro Technology plc (LSE: PIC) is a leader in digital television technology. The Company`s primary focus is the development of innovative home gateway (set-top box) solutions for operators, broadcasters, telecommunications companies and retail markets worldwide. In addition, Pace develops edge of network devices for service providers, in particular digital IP gateways for low-cost integrated voice and data services. Pace`s head office is in Shipley West Yorkshire, with further offices in Bracknell, Cambridge, the USA, France and Hong Kong. For further information, please visit Pace`s web site at
The FAQ
(In addition Castle Technology released this FAQ on the 16th of July - ED)
Q.Will RISC OS 4, Select and RISC OS 5 merge?
A.RISC OS 5 already contains most of the enhancements from RISC OS 4, however not all of the Select features apply to non-desktop applications
Additionally care must be taken to avoid RISC OS losing its competitive edge in other fields, with increased code size and loss of performance
Castle wish to maintain only one source tree, so RISCOS Ltd will continue to produce Select (containing Desktop specific features) and Castle will encourage RISCOS Ltd to migrate this to RISC OS 5.
Q.What does this mean for other hardware developers such as MicroDigital Limited and RiscStation Limited?
A.There are no changes to the current position; they can continue to ship their RISC OS 4 desktop computers; the only difference is that Castle now holds the head license instead of Pace.
Q.I want a license to use RISC OS - must I apply to Castle to get one?
A.Not necessarily. A number of companies have the ability to grant 3rd party binary licenses for RISC OS, for example RISCOS Ltd can licence RISC OS 4 for desktop computers. In addition they could also apply to Castle for an extension to include new hardware - there are no plans at all to withhold permission to any genuine volume applicant.
Q.Castle make hardware, isn't it a conflict of interests to also own the operating system?
A.No. Historically Acorn made hardware and owned the operating system, but didn't license RISC OS to competitors. The exciting difference here is that there is now the ability for 3rd parties to produce/market ARM based products featuring RISC OS, there would be no conflict as Castle will benefit from royalties for these products. As covered in the press release on July 4th Castle will forge new partnerships with mass-market consumer companies, this should become a major use for RISC OS in the future.
Q.What about !Browse, can I expect any updates?
A.Sadly after years of frozen development !Browse is now a long way behind in its standards compatibility. Though upgrading it to handle HTML4 and newer Javascript is theoretically possible, this is a huge task. As Oregano 2 already offers these features, and with the recent announcement of it's use in the Playstation 2, a huge amount of investment is being made in Oregano which should be very easy to port back to RISC OS in future versions of Oregano.
Q.Will a version of RISC OS 5 for the Risc PC and A7000 be released?
A.Although a simple HAL for IOMD based machines does exist for testing purposes it would require an unfeasible amount of work to turn it into a production quality version.
Additionally running in 32 bit mode on an old processor which still supports 26 bit mode doesn't really bring any benefits. 32 bit applications will of course still work on these machines (fitted with a 26-bit version of RISC OS) and can also use the new 32 bit APIs through the free CallASWI module, SharedCLibrary, and HAL module in a fully backwards-compatible manner.
The HAL module referred to above is available from
Q.When can I buy a legal version of RISC OS for emulation on my PC?
A.Emulator authors wishing to ship RISC OS for non-ARM platforms will be contacted shortly. It is expected that there will be a number of solutions available over the next few months.
Q.This is all very confusing! Who does what?
A.Put simply:
RISCOS Ltd will continue to produce versions (including Select) of RISC OS 4
Castle also will encourage the production of a version of Select for RISC OS 5
Pace continue to develop, produce and sell the DSL4000 IP gateway from their Cambridge based office
Castle continues to ship its lightning fast IYONIX pc range, as well as granting new licenses (which don't overlap any existing exclusivity)
Tematic Ltd would be the first point of call for all new embedded versions of RISC OS
Q.What new hardware is on the cards?
A.With the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and fully 32-bit operating system, RISC OS can run on all ARM devices including ARM9, ARM10, ARM11 and XScale devices as and when they become available. Specific new hardware will depend on what individual companies negotiate with Castle.
Q.Is anyone working on an ARM laptop now?
A.As with previous attempts the major stumbling block is sourcing a case which has a long enough life span to be able to ensure supply. This doesn't rule out the possibility of selecting one of the many ready-made A4 sized industrial tablets based on fast ARM9 and XScale technology.
Issued by Castle Technology Ltd
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE2/RISCPC/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 2, Improving RISC PC Video
Improving RISC PC Video
Stephen Morton makes a suggestion
Improving RiscPC video
I read the improving RiscPC video in the previous issue of RISC World and although I found it most interesting there was one aspect which I expected to see covered and that is the subject of cooling. Dave Holden's suggestions allow you to remove the Acorn designed filtering from the video circuit of a RiscPC and hence to improve the clarity of image that can be obtained on a quality monitor, whether it be TFT or CRT. There is another modification that I have thus far carried out on a number of RiscPC machines, both my own and those belonging to friends and acquaintances. This modification can be carried out very cost effectively in a few minutes and allows one to improve the video output of a RiscPC by "overclocking" the VIDC in software. Of course one can do this quite easily using the Acorn MakeModes program, but you may well discover, as I have done in the past, that the VIDC will simply give up and not be able to produce a clean and clear picture when you can't help feeling that it should. The reason for this is quite simple and is caused because unlike the vast majority of the components inside a RiscPC the VIDC chip can actually get hot, especially when driven harder than intended by Acorn. The answer therefore is to provide some cooling for the chip.
VIDC cooling
This is a very simple alteration to the RiscPC and involves nothing more than attaching a heatsink to the top of the VIDC chip. In order to achieve this you will need the following:
A heatsink that can be cut down to the correct siz
A tube of thermopaste as used when mounting the heatsinks on PC processor
A tube of superglu
The full kit of parts
I usually use whatever old heatsinks I find, although you can easily go and buy a new from any computer parts supplier. Indeed I believe that you can even purchase stand alone heatsinks from the likes of PCWorld (Yes you can - ED). The thermopaste creates a joint between the heatsink and the top of the VIDC chip so that the heat is transferred easily and efficiently away from the chip. Finally the super glue is used to provide a firm mounting for the heatsink. Thermopaste is designed to transfer heat, not to attach components, and although it does have some adhesive quality this is not its primary purpose and so the superglue is used to provide extra adhesion to the top surface of the VIDC chip. I must stress at this point that under no circumstances do you want a large aluminium heatsink coming lose inside your computer and therefore causing damage which could be very expensive to repair, the super glue ensures that this eventuality will not occur.
Fitting a VIDC heatsink
The first challenge that needs to be attempted is to remove the top of the RiscPC and then remove any podules that are attached to the backplane. These podules must be removed as the VIDC sits under them. Of course you should never do this with the computer turned on or plugged into the mains. You will now clearly see the VIDC chip. As you will be able to see it is quite small and I have no doubt that your heat sink will be far too large to sit cleanly on top of the chip. One therefore needs to cut the heatsink down to size using a small hacksaw. This can be time consuming but it will be worthwhile.
Having cut the heatsink down to the correct size, which should be roughly 1 inch square, you also need to take note of the height of the cooling fins. The gap between the top of the VIDC chip and the bottom of the lowest podule is not that great and you will need to ensure that any podule that is fitted in the bottom slot clears the heatsink by a safe margin. Provided you have now prepared the heatsink and it is of a suitable size and height it can be fitted. You will need to spread a thin even layer of thermopaste over the top surface of the chip, whilst doing this you must make sure that you leave the four corners of the chip clear of paste. To provide the required adhesion place four small drops of superglue, one at each corner, on the chip.
The VIDC chip covered with thermopaste
Now place the heatsink over the chip and apply discrete and careful pressure for 10 seconds while the superglue grips. Under no circumstances should you press hard as you then could well run the risk of damaging your computer, instead you need to apply just enough pressure for the paste to spread evenly and for the superglue to take hold.
Completing the work
I now advise leaving the computer for a couple of hours, or perhaps even overnight. Having done this re-assemble the computer and check its operation in the normal way. It is highly unlikely that you will notice much change in the way the computer behaves, that is unless you were already driving the VIDC chip at its limit, in which case you may find the display improves by a noticeable margin. For those that are interested in the efficiency of the heatsink then you can try running the machine for a couple of hours whilst fully assembled and then turning it off, removing the cover and any podules and feeling the heatsink with your fingers, you may well be surprised at how warm it is (actually I was amazed at how warm it becomes - ED).
The completed heatsink
Since this improvement only has an effect when the VIDC is being driven harder than normal you may need to alter the boot sequence on your computer and indeed make some new monitor definition files to exploit the improved performance. This is beyond the scope of this article but I have been asked to write a further article that covers some of these matters and I will be delighted to do so, I understand that this will be featured in the next issue.
(A quick note here I have now made this mod to my own machine, without doing this I could run 1600x1200 at 60Hz, with the heatsink I can run the same mode at 68Hz, I think that shows how useful a heatsink is - ED
Stephen Morton
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE2/ROF/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 2, Does RISC OS have a future
Does RISC OS have a future
Dave Holden
Does RISC OS have a future?
RISC OS is in decline. You may not like that statement, buts it's the truth. RISC OS has been in decline for years and as a result RISC OS dealers and developers are an endangered species. If dealers and developers had fur or feathers there would probably be laws to protect them.
Understanding and accepting the decline of RISC OS is essential. If we stick our heads in the sand then this decline could become terminal, and I don't mean this could happen in five or ten years, I mean within the next 18 months.
So what can we do to reduce this decline? Can we do anything at all? Probably, but the first thing we have to do is try to work out what the causes are before we can even begin to do anything about them.
The atmosphere
One thing that I don't think is helpful is the group that I call the 'RISC OS Fundamentalists'. If you like, the 'militant wing' of the RISC OS community. These are the people who say that you can do everything using RISC OS, Windows is the invention of Satan and anyone who uses it, let alone finds anything good to say about it, should be vilified and excommunicated from the RISC OS world. Anything that can't be done using RISC OS or that can be done easier or better on another platform they don't want to do anyway, and, by extension, anyone that does want to do these things, or is even prepared to admit that they might exists, is a subject for attack.
Most ordinary users know better, and all this attitude achieves is to alienate them and help drive them away from RISC OS. In fact, the very (and vociferous) existence of these people is a symptom of the decline. As the more sensible figures give up and depart so the field is left open for these people whose rants are no longer balanced and countered by a much larger number of more moderate voices.
The basic facts
But why is RISC OS in decline? It can be summed up in one word - numbers. If the number of users falls then the sales of any product on the platform will fall. .
It doesn't cost any less to develop a project that will sell 500 units than it does if it's going to sell 5 million. In either case the development cost must be recovered, and as each item you sell has to carry a part of this development cost it naturally follows that the fewer items sold the greater the proportion of this burden must be applied to each unit. In other words, the less you sell the more they're going to cost.
If the price is higher, people are discouraged from purchasing it. Therefore you sell even fewer units and we're into a downward spiral. The financial risk is increased and the potential profits are reduced. So it makes sense to develop for a platform with lots of users. .
To put it another way - you have to be financially naive (or nuts) to develop for RISC OS.
If we are going to even slow the decline in the numbers of people using RISC OS, let alone reverse it, we need to develop new strategies because it's self evident that the existing ones aren't working.
The new machines, the Iyonix and Omega, do nothing to address this problem. That's not a criticism, it's just facing the facts. Almost everyone who has, or who will buy, one is already a RISC OS user, and not just a user but already has something like a Strong ARM RiscPC. Moving someone from a RiscPC to an Omega or Iyonix doesn't do anything to swell the user base. It may encourage purchasers to spend a few pounds on software they might not otherwise have bought, but if they have 'top end' machines already then they probably will already have most of the software they require and will simply transfer it.
RISC OS in education
Whatever you may have heard to the contrary there is almost no chance of people abandoning their Windows machines and migrating to RISC OS. It's true there's a lot of anti-Microsoft feeling, especially as the cost of licensing software such as Microsoft Office in a school or company can make quite a hole in the budget.
However there are other strategies that customers are adopting, such as moving to Open Office or Star office, or even migrating completely to Linux. They are not going to shift back to RISC OS machines.
Why? One obvious reason why this isn't going to happen is because of the high initial purchase price. There are very good reasons why these machines are comparatively expensive, and I don't want to go into that here, but the main one, as discussed previously, comes back to numbers. RISC OS computers sell in almost insignificant numbers, so they are inevitably a lot more expensive than something that sells by the million.
Moreover, although we are often told about the 'low cost of ownership' of RISC OS machines used in education this comparison does not really bear scrutiny. It only had validity when applied to a school which already possessed a large number of RISC OS machines and appropriate software. Once a school has disposed of its RISC OS computers and moved to Windows PCs then there is absolutely no valid financial argument for changing back. If a school does decide that it wants to cut its costs and abandon Windows the logical step is to move to Linux. This is no more traumatic than abandoning Windows in favour of RISC OS and the costs are comparatively minuscule since it involves the purchase of no new hardware.
Anyone who tries to get a school to abandon hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of hardware and take what will be seen as a huge leap in the dark and purchase expensive new machines with a comparatively unknown OS which has a dubious support policy, little software, no decent web browser, and which will severely restrict their future options is simply not going to be listened to.
The computer is not RISC OS
However, what we are, or should be, primarily interested in is not the numbers of dedicated RISC OS computers but the number of RISC OS users. We need either to get new users, or to get back users who have now left the platform. The ideal is that people will be using RISC OS on dedicated hardware, the most important thing is that they are using it. Whether they have an A7000, RiscPC, Omega, Iyonix, Windows PC or crystal ball doesn't matter, what matters is that they are using RISC OS.
People are not going to abandon their PCs to return to RISC OS. Neither will they, at least initially, buy a RISC OS computer that may or may not be suitable for their needs but which they can plainly see is going to cost them more than double what a good Windows PC will cost. We need some lateral thinking.
Breaking the im0passe
So how do we persuade these potential customers that they should even look at RISC OS? Make the computers cheaper? As we have already discussed the computers can't be made any cheaper as the development budget is split among such a small number of units. However we are interested in RISC OS users, so can we sell PC owners a copy of RISC OS?
The only way to do this is to supply emulation software on their PC. It's the only way they are going to be able to keep what they already have and get something extra. We are not asking them to abandon what they already have and are familiar with, whatever it's faults, neither are we requiring them to spend a huge amount of money. We are not promising a magic solution to all their computing problems. RISC OS emulation on a Windows PC just gives them more options without requiring them to give up anything.
RISC OS under emulation is also an ideal way back into education. It requires minimal expenditure for the school, just another 'software Licence', and once installed allows RISC OS dealers to sell RISC OS educational software to the school. In many cases where the school previously used RISC OS computers they may already have software available, which is obviously an incentive for them to run RISC OS under emulation, so there's no immediate or obvious gain the dealers. However, the school then becomes a potential customer, and that's better than if they were just running Windows because that would mean there is no possibility of selling them RISC OS software.
RISC OS under emulation is the only hope we have of increasing the RISC OS userbase. Without it I would anticipate that within a year or so the number of users will have declined to the point where they will no longer be able to support a viable RISC OS industry. Even now you can count the number of dedicated full time developers on the fingers of one hand (without needing to use thumbs), and if things go on as they are then it won't be long before even they have vanished.
Future development
Lets apply this directly to my own company, APDL. At present we own more software titles than anyone else. In fact, we probably produce more commercial software titles than everyone else put together. We actually have a lot more stuff than appears on the web site because there are many programs that require work before they can be re-launched. We have a major development program to buy more rights, and, just as important, to update and improve much of our software. This program has been effectively put on hold or drastically slowed down for the past several months because of my worries over the future of the RISC OS market. I'm not prepared to commit tens of thousands of pounds to this development program unless I can see some realistic likelihood that there's going to be a market there. The only way I can see that there will be a market which will make my investment viable is if we can continue to expand the RISC OS user base by way of emulation.
Virtual A5000 has proven that the product is viable and shown what can be done, even with an obsolete OS. We need better emulators, using later versions of RISC OS, so that the package is more attractive and modern and a better representation of RISC OS as it is today (that is, a better 'advert' for RISC OS) and able to run the latest software. If we want to develop the market, and I mean the RISC OS market in general, we now need to move on.
Without a true RISC OS marketplace the OS has no future. A few enthusiasts writing freeware or porting various odds and ends does not make a 'market'. If there is to be any hope of selling the new hardware products the prospective purchasers need to be able to see dealers and developers who are available to supply software and support them. No amount of rhetoric or enthusiasts on newsgoups will make them spend twice the price of a good PC on a RISC OS machine unless they can see a thriving marketplace.
It's the old 'chicken and egg' situation that has prevailed since the earliest days of computers. Before people would buy a particular computer they wanted to see that there was plenty of software; before anyone would write software they wanted to see a sufficient number of computers sold. We're now looking at the 'other end' of this equation. Before developers will commit to work on existing software, much less write new stuff, we need to have some confidence that there's going to be a market there to sell to; before any potential new user can be persuaded to move to RISC OS or existing users encouraged to stay they need some assurance that the developers will be doing this work. The only way to break this cycle is to get more users, and the only way I can see to get more users is emulation software.
The criticisms
One of the things that the 'experts' have said is that people don't buy software to run under emulation. Rubbish! None of these people are commercial developers or have any idea of the true picture. There are few enough developers remaining for RISC OS, but if you talk to any of those that are left, for example, Icon Technology, ExpLAN, R-Comp, or, of course, APDL, we will tell you how important we believe this development is. Even Gerald Fitton, who distributes the Colton Software range (PipeDream, FireWorkz, etc.) and who was initially highly sceptical has now produced a software CD especially for Virtual Acorn users.
It's not just users that Virtual Acorn is bringing back. Accontz.com, who produced the well known programs Personal Accounts and Prophet and who abandoned RISC OS for Windows some years ago recently began to produce a special version of Prophet for Virtual Acorn. They attended the Wakefield show earlier this year to promote this, and so successful was it that they have now asked APDL to hand back Personal Accounts, which we have been distributing for the past two years. So a valuable ex-RISC OS developer who had previously left the scene because of falling sales has now been attracted back.
So far there have been two commercial products that have used emulation technology to run RISC OS on PC based hardware. One is the free standing VirtualA5000 emulator, the other is the MicroDigital Alpha. One of the criticisms of the Alpha is that it takes money 'out of the market'. Again, it's only people who have no idea of how business actually works who could possibly say this. A RISC OS dealer actually makes similar money selling an Alpha or an Iyonix, and in both cases the majority of the cost of the hardware goes to purchasing from 'outsiders'. Remember that Acorn RiscPC motherboards weren't made in the UK. The significant point here is the money that goes to dealers. If the dealers are able to supply a product that their customers want and that makes them some money then they can stay in business. Without dealers we don't have a viable market.
(I have been reading some right old rubbish on this theme recently. To set the record straight RISCOS Ltd makes more money on each Alpha than MicroSoft does - ED).
A further criticism is that sales of emulation software will affect sales of 'real' hardware. As I've already said, I believe that what is important is the number of RISC OS users, not the number of people who are running RISC OS on ARM powered hardware. If a software product costing a few tens of pounds can out-perform a computer costing over £1,300 then don't blame the low cost software. Logically, which product would you think has the better chance of expanding the RISC OS user base?
In reality, of course, there are still many advantages in using the 'real' hardware, and any true enthusiast will almost certainly not be satisfied with emulation. However, there are many people who need to use Windows and who, for a variety of reason, don't want two separate machines. For these people dedicated hardware is not an option, so should we just write them off?
Another argument, from the rabid anti-Windows protagonists, is that Windows is so terrible that no-one should be exposed to it, so RISC OS emulation under Windows is a 'very bad thing'. Windows crashes all the time, nothing works properly, you'll be plagued by viruses etc., etc. If Windows (and particularly Windows XP, which seems to be a favourite target) is so bad then inevitably exposing Windows users to a viable alternative must be a good thing? And surely similarly allowing RISC OS users to get some experience of the (alleged) horrors of Windows will encourage them to stay with RISC OS? .
Of course, the argument disintegrates completely if Windows isn't quite so bad as they say. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why so many people seem to have abandoned RISC OS in its favour, whatever it's faults, and hurling insults will not make them change their minds. Giving them decent emulation software might help them remember some of the benefits of RISC OS and perhaps keep in touch.
The Solution
The biggest problem at the moment is that emulation has reached a crisis point. If it's going to help the RISC OS market to expand and move forward then the software itself, or, more accurately, the machines it emulates, have to move up a gear. This means Virtual RiscPC. The software used on the Alpha portable shows the way, but (for various reasons) that is tied to specific hardware. To reach the necessary wider audience we need a software product at a sensible price. .
If it is going to be priced so as to encourage people to come back to RISC OS or, if they are new users, to give it a try, then RISC OS 4, as used on the Alpha, is probably not sensible. The logical way to proceed is to use RISC OS 3.7, which would enable the product to be sold at an attractive price. If there is a demand for later versions of the OS then this type of upgrade could be supplied by the people best placed to do so, RISCOS Ltd, which would bring in further money to go towards development of RISC OS itself.
VirtualAcorn are in discussions about the licensing of RISC OS 3.7 with RISC OS Ltd. The recent changes to the ownership of RISC OS present an excellent opportunity for those involved. VirtualAcorn can be used to halt and reverse the decline in numbers of RISC OS users. This will be good for the users, good for the software developers and good for the dealers. Both MicroDigital and RISCOS Ltd have embraced the opportunities presented by VirtualAcorn, but in my view time is running out. If the decline isn't halted very soon then I predict that the future for RISC OS will be very black, although perhaps mercifully short.
Dave Holden
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE2/SLEUTH/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 2, Sleuth OCR software for RISC OS
Sleuth OCR software for RISC OS
The version of Sleuth described below and the software supplied on this CD is Sleuth 1. The latest version, Sleuth 3, has many additional features and is considerably more powerful. A 'demo' version of Sleuth 3 is supplied in the SOFTWARE directory complete with the full manual in HTML so you can see what extra facilities it has. The normal price for Sleuth 3 is £49, but as a very special offer to RISC World subscribers we are offering the complete Sleuth 3 package for just £40. This price includes UK post, but please add £1.50 for carriage outside the UK.
No part of this product may be reproduced in whole or part by any means without written permission of the publisher. Unauthorised hiring, renting, lending, public performance or broadcasting of this product or its parts is prohibited.
Sleuth is supplied under licence for use on one computer at a time. The user is forbidden to make any copies of the source media where the program is supplied on CD. Please contact APDL for details of site licences.
While every care is taken the publisher cannot be held responsible for any errors in this product, or for the loss of any data or consequential effects from the use of this package.
If you discover a problem with this product please contact APDL at the address below explaining the problem as briefly as possible but including all relevant information, e.g. system configuration, hardware add-ons, version of operating system and the version and Serial Number of your copy. Always remember to quote the version number of the application.
Sleuth - 1994, published by BEEBUG
APDL/ProAction edition December 2000
Published by
APDL
39 Knighton Park Road
Sydenham
London SE26 5RN
Phone -020 8778 2659
Fax -020 8488 0487
Sleuth was written by Graham Jones.
All trademarks are acknowledged.
Introduction
OCR is an acronym for Optical Character Recognition. This is a process whereby text is extracted from a scanned image and converted into a plain text file. OCR has been available for some time on other machine platforms and accuracy has been steadily improving. Sleuth 2 can be used with the majority of scanners available for RISC OS computers.
Installing the program
Sleuth is supplied in an ArcFS archive in the software directory of the RISC World CD. Drag the entire contents of the archive, including the Sleuth program and the examples to a suitable directory on your hard drive.
Once Sleuth is installed on your hard drive it is ready to use.
Loading Sleuth
To load Sleuth, double-click on the application's icon and it will be installed on the icon bar. If you click Select over the icon bar icon an empty window will be opened. The application now requires a sprite to process.
Loading a sprite
To load a sprite drag the sprite's icon onto the icon bar icon or into the open window. Only one sprite can be loaded at a time. If a further sprite is loaded it will replace the current one. A new sprite cannot be loaded if the package is already converting a sprite. If a sprite file contains more than one sprite only the first will be displayed. Most scanners, especially those using a TWAIN driver (see below), can produce monochrome or greyscale sprites suitable for use with Sleuth. Sleuth can automatically load sprites that have been compressed using !Squash.
Greyscale sprites
Sleuth will accept greyscale sprites and convert them into monochrome sprites. Using the Input and processing preferences dialogue box, the user can determine the levels of grey converted to white in this process. A Pre-sharpening facility is provided that will generally improve the quality of degraded text during conversion.
Scanning using TWAIN
Sleuth supports TWAIN to allow direct scanning into the package. To use this facility you must have a copy of TWAIN, an appropriate scanner and Scanner Driver. TWAIN and scanner drivers can be purchased from APDL or from:
David Pilling
P.O. Box 22
Thornton Cleveleys
Blackpool
FY5 1LR
TWAIN supports the Select and Acquire options on the Scan submenu. Choosing Select opens a dialogue box that allows you to choose the scanner driver source that you require. Choosing Acquire lets you set up the scanner before scanning. Sleuth will only accept monochrome images, so make sure the BW option is selected. Full information about these options is provided with TWAIN.
The Save option allows you to save the scanned sprite.
Please note that !TWAIN must be seen before Sleuth can use these options.
Configuring Sleuth
Before beginning the OCR process it is important that Sleuth is configured correctly. The Options dialogue box is accessed by pressing Menu over the sprite to be scanned and going past the "Options" option on the menu.
The Reject character is the character used by Sleuth when, in its estimation, there is no equivalent character in the set of characters that it knows, or it is unsure what the correct character is. The Reject character should be set to an infrequently used character.
The Remove end-of-line hyphens option relates to the how the output file is saved. Any hyphens at the ends of lines will be removed if this option is selected.
End-of-line string can be set to any character. A carriage return is represented by \r escape sequence, a line feed by \n. These can be used separately or in combination e.g. \n\r. You could enter a space if you want to reformat the text in another package. These characters will be inserted at the end of each line of text converted by Sleuth.
End-of-paragraph string uses the same escape sequences as the End-of-line option. Sleuth will insert these characters at the end of each paragraph.
As these settings are read just before the converted text is saved it is possible to change them after the image is converted to text.
Clicking on OK will set the options for the current session.
Icon bar menu
Click Menu over the icon on the icon bar and the following menu will be displayed:
Info
This option on both the sprite window and icon bar menu displays the usual dialogue box giving information about Sleuth. Please quote the version and serial number shown in this dialogue box in any correspondence to us.
Select Fonts
This allows you to tell Sleuth if the text you want to OCR is in a normal or a bold font.
Save Options
This will save as the default settings any changes you have made to the Sleuth options.
Minimise memory
Because scanned images take up so much memory this option has been provided to allow the memory used to store the sprite to be released. The sprite will be lost and the sprite window will be displayed empty. This option is greyed out when a sprite is being converted to text
Quit
Choose this option to quit Sleuth. You will be warned if any converted text has not been saved and you will be given the option to save it before the application shuts down.
Manipulating the sprite
Before starting to convert a sprite you may need to alter it. The sprite must have black text on a white background and the text has to be upright. Sleuth allows the sprite to be zoomed, rotated or inverted. To rotate or invert the sprite choose the Edit option from the main menu and this submenu will be displayed:
Rotate offers a submenu from which you can choose to rotate the sprite by 90, 180 or 270 degrees. Choosing 90 degrees will rotate the sprite in an anti-clockwise direction; 270 degrees will rotate it in a clockwise direction.
Invert will swap the black and white elements of the sprite.
To zoom the sprite choose Zoom from the main menu and the zoom dialogue box will open.
The OCR process
Sleuth cannot deal with complex page layouts automatically. A complex page layout might consist of text in columns and/or include graphics. Sleuth 1 can only OCR a block of text. Both Sleuth 2 and Sleuth 3 can cope with complex page layouts without assistance.
To OCR a simple block of text click Menu over the sprite window and choose OCR. A new window will open. this is the text window and this is where the converted text will appear. Once the OCR process has completed you can save the text by pressing Menu over this new window and clicking on Save.
Using Zones
It may be that you only want to OCR part of the sprite that you have loaded into Sleuth. In this case you can select the part you want with a zone. A zone is a user-defined area from which Sleuth will extract text. To create a zone drag with Select over the sprite window. As soon as you start dragging a zone rectangle will be drawn with eight handles and the pointer will be positioned in the bottom right-hand corner handle as shown below:
As you continue to drag the zone will be resized. The window will scroll automatically if necessary. Release Select to finish drawing the zone. The zone can be resized by dragging with Select over one of the handles and moved by dragging with Select inside the zone.
Sleuth1 only supports 1 zone, Sleuth 2 and Sleuth 3 both support multiple zones.
Manual editing
As text appears in the text window you have the option of clicking in the window with the mouse and manually editing the output to remove any mistakes. You can move the caret around with the cursor keys and remove incorrect letters with the delete key, just like you would in any word processor.
Getting the best results from Sleuth
There are many factors which affect the accuracy of the output from Sleuth. We recommend that the following suggestions are followed where possible to get the best results.
Use at least 300 or 400 dpi resolution scanning. Scan the original document where possible, not a photocopy. Scan a portion first and convert it to ensure that the scan is not too light or too dark. If you are using a hand-held scanner try to make the scan as straight as possible.
Here are some suggestions to help you get the best results:
Review the document and plan the best method of scanning. Do not waste time scanning graphics that will be discarded in the OCR process
Scan a portion of the document and convert it to check that the contrast setting of the scanner is correct. Time spent getting this right will be saved later by having fewer errors in the output to correct
If you are using a hand-held scanner first run the scanner over the document without scanning to check there are no obstacles that will impede progress during scanning and that the scanner is running as straight as possible. Try to line up the body of the scanner with a straight line on the page or the left edge of the text being scanned
Scan the document carefully. If you are scanning to the end of a page you may find that a hand-held scanner will jump slightly as the body of the scanner rolls off the edge. This will almost certainly affect the output from Sleuth when it reaches this point and can have further detrimental effects if the scanner is tilted. Often in this case the image has smudges which degrade the text beyond recognition. One way to alleviate this scan the top half of the page and then turn the document round and scan the bottom half. The second half can be rotated in Sleuth before conversion
If using a flat-bed scanner make sure that the document sits flat on the scanner. If it is not flat smudges will probably appear on the scan
When scanning books keep the book flat and use the side of the scanner that has the least gap between the scannable area and the edge of the scanner. This will minimise problems with scanning to the inner margin
Important points to remember
Check that the image is not too bright or too dark and has a uniform contras
Check that the image is not overly skewed
Use a high resolution scan unless the text is large. 300-400 dpi should be sufficient
Sleuth has only been trained on a limited number of common fonts
There is a limitation on the size of text that can be converted
Sleuth has been trained on a specific set of characters, other characters will not be converted correctly
Problem solving
These are possible problems that may occur when using Sleuth with explanations and possible solutions.
I'm getting output but it is all punctuation or apparently random characters.
The scan is either too light, too dark or contains a font that Sleuth has not been trained on. Re-scan the image to lighten or darken it. If there is a font that is not recognised by Sleuth in the image it will not be able to accurately convert it.
The output is good but the occasional word comes out badly.
It is likely that there is some defect in the scan where the conversion accuracy breaks down or the word is in a font unknown to Sleuth
The output is good at the beginning of the page, but gradually deteriorates.
Check that the contrast of the image is consistent. Uniform contrast over the image is important to get good results. Inconsistent contrast is likely to occur if the document has not been printed well or is a photocopy. Try re-scanning the document in portions adjusting the contrast of the scanner to compensate for the change in contrast.
The output is good, but the order of the text is wrong.
The page layout is probably complex Sleuth will not be able to scan it Select each section in turn with the zone tool and OCR that. Save the text for that section and then continue to the next section.
Sleuth limitations
Although Sleuth has only been trained on the standard fonts it will recognise other similar fonts without further training. It will recognise the following characters :
Sleuth will convert characters between 9 and 24 point in size. This equates to approximately 1/8th to 1/3rd of an inch depending on the font. The actual limits are between 10 and 80 pixels measured from the top of an upper-case letter, like an 'A', to the bottom of a lower-case letter with a descender, like a 'g'. To convert 24 point text use a 200 dpi scan.
Sleuth will convert text at speeds between 80 to 250 words per minute depending on the machine used, the size and quality of the text and the resolution of the sprite.
Sleuth will automatically cope with slightly skewed scans (generally less than 2 degrees of skew, depending on line spacing) and lines of text that are slightly wavy.
The current version of Tanx was written over a period of around 3 years and is in BASIC. The combination of a 640 x 480 x 256 screen mode, 8 way scrolling and slightly unplanned code means that I cannot implement all the features I would like, for example I have a routine that means you bounce off the edge of platforms Chuckie Egg style, but it was just too much for poor old BASIC to cope with. So I am using the DeskLib C library to convert it to C. Out of all of the C libraries available, I found the SpriteOp functions easiest to use in DeskLib, the BASIC version of Tanx uses a sprite plotting system called FastSprite, which helps speed things up a lot.
The Main Character Movement
Our Hero can accelerate left and right, brake, and boost upwards. There are 6 images of the tank for the wheel movement effect in each direction, when you accelerate the images run through at steps of 1 for slow and 8 for full speed giving the effect of the wheels going round faster at higher speeds, if you look closely you will notice that the tank actually 'slides' along the platforms because it isn't quite right. When you boost, the tank is moved up the screen and a flame is drawn underneath it, after jumping you simply move down the screen until you hit a platform.
Tanx in action.
Bullets
Our hero's bullets need to go faster than his top speed, otherwise he would be able to drive into his own bullets! To achieve this I plot the bullet at three points in front of the tank and check between the plot points for any collisions. All the other bullets move in 'real time' so only the point where the bullet is needs to be checked. The Big tank's bullets are a very crude 'homing' system where the bullet simply goes up or down and left or right dependant on where it is compared to its target.
Deciding if you want to get shot
The diagonal gun turrets and the large tanks, like most of the collision detection use a trig function to decide if the tank is close enough to be shot at. The Horizontal turrets and small tanks try shoot you if you are within a certain distance vertically and horizontally.
Platforms
The platforms are the part of the game that were the most complicated bit of the game to achieve, they are in fact quite special. They consist of 4 images, a flat bit, two ends and a bit of foreground art. The platforms can be of any length, for example a 4 length platform would be 64*4+2*8 pixels in length, that is 4 * 64 is the length of the main section of the platform, and the two end pieces are 8 pixels, this is then used to detect if the point at the bottom center of the tank is in a 4 pixel high rectangle area, if it is, then the tank is positioned at a the top of this rectangle and a Boolean variable is set so the tank knows it is capable of jumping. These are not the exact numbers for this operation as quite a lot of tweaking was needed so it looks like you are rolling off the ends of the platforms. The enemies are simply told which platform they are on and the length of that platform, then go left and right of that platform.
Walls and Doors
The walls work in a similar way to the platforms, only they is only ever one wall section, there is no automated system to make a really high wall, the only difference is (other than being vertical and other crucial differences), to make sure it is impossible to drive through them I made the tank bounce away from the wall, this helps with issues such as hitting a wall at high speed and stopping dead, you can fall through the top of a wall, so all walls need a section of platform above them. Doors are just walls that disappear when a key is obtained.
Collectable items
All the collectibles are a four image animation, green coins for keys, yellow for heath and bullets, red damage you and then there are the exit keys, these are little pink rotating things that only appear one at a time, after you collect the first one the second one appears, get that and the third one appears, then the exit 'portal' appears which is the three pink things you collected in the form of a triangle.
Eight Way
To make the game eight way, I use two variables bigx and bigy, this point is used to determine what is plotted on the screen, every plot point is its position on the whole of the level added to bigx and bigy, if the tank gets near the edge of the screen either bigx or bigy is increased/decreased moving the whole of the screen. Various routines are used to determine what is done, for example I had to make sure that even if most of a platform was off the screen the bad tank still moved up and down it and what platforms to check if the tank is on them.
Output form basic crunch Xref:
Cross reference of ADFS::PizzaPie.$.gamesprogs.zRRR.TANX.
A full list of all the procedures and variables used in Tanx can be found in the Software directory on this issue of RISC World along with the latest version of the game itself.
The End
Well, I hope this article might help to inspire some of you to knuckle down and write that game you have been intending to write for the last 20 years, sorry but I'm not going to release the BASIC source for tanx until I have finished the C version, which will probably be in about 20 years, but I will let you have a look at the procedure and variables list.
Neil White
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE2/VALINUX/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 2, VirtualA5000 on Linux
VirtualA5000 on Linux
Paul Johnson
Getting VirtualA5000 to run under WINE
VirtualA5000 is a fantastic piece of software which enables people to use RISC OS under a Windows environment. However, some people won't touch Windows with a 50 foot barge pole and have opted for the totally free Linux operating system...
A brief bit of history
As we all know, Acorn, at one time, was the name in education. Then things went bad and Windows boxes moved in. The RISC OS boxes were ditched, but the software remained. Teachers liked RISC OS, but had the newer machines thrust upon them. With the churn in education though, newer teachers came in and the RISC OS software was forgotten. VirtualA5000 allowed schools to use their old RISC OS education kit with the Windows PCs – and we all know what happened then – they loaded up the old RISC OS software and ran it under VirtualA5000. Former Acorn users, now submerged in the bloated hackery that is Windows, bought VirtualA5000 and started to relive their Acorn days. Okay, they would not be coming back to the platform en mass, but VirtualA5000 has been responsible for a number of new RISC OS hardware sales (and quite a number of second hand RISC OS hardware sales).
That's all well and good, but what about Linux?
There currently isn't a native Linux version of VirtualAcorn. Drat. However, there are two ways to run Windows applications under Linux. Win4Lin and WINE (WINE stands for WIne Is Not an Emulator). I've not used Win4Lin as I have heard some bad things about it.
When you download WINE, you have the choice on what you use. There is the choice of a tarball, rpm, srpm (source rpm) and apt (for Debian). The tarball and srpm versions are the source code versions. Fine if you want to mess around or have compiled code before, but it's not for everyone. Most users are happy with the compiled binary versions. You should also download winesetuptk (the WINE setup utility).
For RPM installation
Open a terminal windo
Log in as su
Type rpm -ihv wine.rpm (or whatever the rpm is called
Type rpm -ihv winesetuptk.rpm (or whatever the rpm is called
Exit as su
For source installation (below is for Redhat, it is similar for other distributions).
If you are using a SRPM, follow the RPM installation above followed by cd /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES
Type tar -zxf winesource.tar.gz
Type cd winesource
Type tools/wineinstall
The compiler will compile the source and if you said “yes” when asked, will install WINE.
Run (from a terminal window) winesetuptk. You should be okay to just accept the default values.
Put the VA5000 CD in and mount the drive. You then need to do the following.
Open a terminal windo
Type cd /mnt/cdrom
Type wine CDStarter.exe /c cdstarter.ini
Select the bits of VA you want to use.
The final part of the operation is to get hold of a copy of mfc42.dll and mscvrt.dll and place them in the same directory as the installation of VA5000. VA will not run without these two dlls. You can download these from the internet or anyone who has a Windows box (hmmm, looks like Windows may have a use after all!).
You can now start VA5000 via the command line via.
That will make a symbolic link to the directory containing the VA5000 executable. This means you can type.
wine VA5000/VirtualA5000.exe
and VA will start. You now have a working installation of VA on a linux machine.
Why did I not just associate exe files with WINE?
Simple – if you do that then there can be problems if you use Mono (C# for Linux and other platforms). If you don't use Mono, then by all means, feel free to associate exe files with WINE. You will then be able to double click the VirtualA5000.exe file to execute it.
Native VA for Linux?
Recently on the RedSquirrel mailing list, Graeme Barnes has stated that early work on VA for Linux has begun by using wxWindows instead of MFC. That means that VA will also be available for any platform with a supported version of wxWindows. Who knows, VA for MacOSX could be just around the corner! (Lets not jump the gun - ED)
Paul Johnson
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE2/WIRELESS/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 2, Wireless keyboards for RISC OS
Wireless keyboards for RISC OS
Aaron makes a cheap and simple modification to his RiscPC
If like me you use your RiscPC a lot, and it's a few years old, the chances are that your keyboard is nearing the end of it's life. Well yours might not be but mine certainly is. It has been stripped and cleaned on several occasions and to be honest with the current low price of keyboards it's not worth bothering with. So I want a new keyboard, and since my office looks like spaghetti junction a wireless device looks attractive. Hold on though, aren't they expensive? Well I thought they were, a quick trip to PC World showed a number of models available from £30 up. Since a wired keyboard is only a couple of quid there was no way I was going to pay that much. So the next step was to surf over to my favourite cheap bits and bobs supplier
A large wireless keyboard box (the monitor behind it is 21"!)
In the Box
Inside the box is a keyboard (which shouldn't come as a big surprise) a receiver unit that plugs into a normal keyboard socket, an extending wrist rest for the front of the keyboard (which also doubles as a short life chewable dog toy), a CD of windows drivers (coaster) and an English (Engrish) manual. The keyboard is surprisingly well made for the money with a firm key action and is far better than some other cheap keyboards I have tried in the past. The receiver is a round blob with a light on and a "connect" button which is used to establish a radio link when the pair are first started.
The first job was to site the receiver and then I had a small brain wave. Instead of mounting the receiver outside the Risc PCs case, why couldn't I mount it inside. The usual reason that you can't is that a lot of PCs are shielded against RF these days and the operating range would be dramatically reduced, perhaps reduced to zero. However a Risc PC case is an older design. Would it work? Well there was only one way to find out.
The receiver mounted inside the Risc PC
As you can see there is an obvious mounting place inside my two slice machine (in the the upper 3 1/2" inch drive bay). I held the receiver in place with a couple of sticky fixers and ran the cable out the back through an unused podule slot. To make a really neat job you could drill the correct sized hole in the back of the Risc PC case or in a podule blanking plate. The cable hanging out the back of the machine was then plugged into the keyboard port as per normal. The keyboard certainly worked with the lid of the case off. However disaster struck when I re-attached the lid, the keyboard would now only work within a few inches of the machine. A quick consult of the manual revealed the keyboard had 2 channels. To change channels you flip a tiny almost hidden switch on the keyboard and then press the button on the receiver. Now the keyboard had a range of several feet with the lid on the computer. Yes!
Yes it's working!
Well what can I say, it's cheap, it works and it's a fun little modification to make to your computer and of course you can always put things back again afterwards. So far I have been using the new keyboard for a few days and although the typing action is fine I do have a couple of niggles. Firstly it has no Caps lock light. I can understand why as having a light would flatten the batteries a lot, but I do miss it. Also so far I have not been able to get all the "special" keys working on RISC OS. So maybe I will write a keydriver module when (or if) I get a chance. The other minor problem (which seems to be going away on it's own) is the keyboards colour. A beige keyboard might have been better, but they don't seem to make one. Still I am happy with the performance and very happy with the price. Perhaps in true Dave Walker style I should spray paint my Risc PC black to match the keyboard then again perhaps not. Instead I could see if I can find any cordless mice that work...hmm...
