David Bradforth looks at the new releases of Artwork2
Back in 1992, had I been reviewing ArtWorks my comments would have been something like "ArtWorks has a lot of potential because of its system of plug-ins and the ability to export files in a variety of formats for the PC and Macintosh. This makes it ideal for all RISC OS based designers".
Of course, we all know what's happened with the Computer Concepts software line since. ArtWorks unfortunately took far too long to return a profit for Computer Concepts, by which time it was uneconomical for a company of their size to release a new package for RISC OS users.
So we waited, and waited, and waited for new upgrades which were sadly lacking.
Plug-ins
Early in 1997, the situation began to change. The little used plug in system means that those with programming experience can develop whole new tools for use within ArtWorks. One of the first individuals to do so, Martin Weurthner, has since then sprung to prominence as one of the most active developers of software for the RISC OS platform.
Responsible for Holy Bible (available through Explan), XChars (available from RISC OS Limited, although it's freeware) and some twenty ArtWorks modules, he is now also responsible for ArtWorks 2.
Taking all of the plug-ins he's developed over the years, Martin has performed an overhaul on the basic ArtWorks package to make it work properly on the IYONIX and take full advantage of the speed available.
The ArtWorks2 toolbar
Arrival and Installation
Once your copy of ArtWorks 2 arrives in the post, the first thing you'll want to do is install it. Installation is simply a matter of loading SparkPlug (or using SparkFS from your hard disc) to open the ArtWorks2 archive on the CD-ROM, then dragging the contents of the ArtWorks 2 archive to a suitable location on your hard disc.
The very first thing you should do is double-click on !ArtWorks2, having first ensured that any copies of ArtWorks which have previously been visible are hidden accordingly. This is to ensure that there are no conflicts between the two applications.
A registration window will appear, into which you should enter your name and the keycode as provided in the four-page getting started guide.
Documentation for ArtWorks 2 comes in electronic format at the moment; the promised upgrade to ArtWorks 2.10 will include new printed manuals for the benefit of all customers.
The complete original ArtWorks 1 manual is included in Impression and PDF formats; together with the complimentary guide to what's changed in ArtWorks 2 and supporting materials for the modules accompanying the package.
Literally hundreds of clipart images are provided with ArtWorks 2, including all of the images supplied with the original ArtWorks together with those produced to aid publicity of the new plug-in modules as they were released.
The examples do vary in quality, if you require further examples of ArtWorks in action, Computer Concepts do still have stocks of one of the ArtWorks competition CD-ROMs.
There are no new fonts provided with ArtWorks 2, but given that the target audience is mainly RISC OS designers and enthusiastic home users you can reasonably expect many users to have a full collection.
The only additional items provided on the CD-ROM are more complimentary than a necessity, AWViewer and AWSwitch are provided to allow the viewing of ArtWorks files without a need for ArtWorks 2 and to handle how ArtWorks manages half tones.
AWViewer
To view the manuals provided on the CD-ROM, !PDF is provided in the latest IYONIX-ready form; together with SparkPlug to make reading the files off of the CD-ROM that little bit easier.
Once you've finished exploring the content of these folders, and have copied anything you're likely to refer to onto your hard disc, you can essentially put the CD-ROM on the shelf as you're only likely to need the CD-ROM again in the unfortunate event of your hard disc failing.
In with the old... and also the new...
What makes ArtWorks 2 perhaps different from alternative successor programs on both our platform and others is that the tools on offer are a logical extension to those already on offer.
Martin has taken the time to upgrade and enhance the functionality of virtually everything including the zoom tool, the select tool, export capability and much more besides.
Artworks2 in action
Some of the most useful functionality comes in the shape of new tools on the toolbar including the famed Crystal (providing real transparency for ArtWorks users) and TextEdit (allowing you to treat ArtWorks as a complete desktop publishing package.
Crystal
Crystal is very memory intensive in its operation; and the faster the processor the better. If you're looking to use Crystal on an ARM610 Risc PC; you'll be waiting an awful long time in between perform even the most simple of operations, on the other hand try it on an Iyonix and everything is almost instant. A comprehensive manual is supplied, explaining exactly how Crystal works together with the advantages it offers to ArtWorks users.
TextEdit allows you to create text frames within your ArtWorks documents and you can either type text straight into them or import text from an alternative file. The style options are basic, but enough to allow the sorts of basic DTP operations you're likely to perform using a graphics package. TextEdit is quick, efficient and we very much like the way it works.
TextEdit
Perhaps one of the most useful extensions to ArtWorks 2 has been in the area of file export; most notably the ease with which SVG (scalable vector graphic) and bitmap (TIFF, JPEG or Sprite) files can be exported from the package.
Again a lot of memory is required to build up a bitmap version of your document in memory, although it must be added that if you intend to use a document containing transparency in another application you have no choice but to export it as a bitmap. The resolution offered by the resultant images is easily sufficient for professional output.
Bitmap export
Conclusions
ArtWorks 2 has achieved what many believed impossible, using a system of mainly plug-in upgrades the toolbox has been extended considerably to reflect the increased scope of the package. With the expansion of the file export capabilities, along with the regular support emails arriving from Martin himself, ArtWorks 2 could very well be this markets next big application.
Product details
Product:
ArtWorks
Supplier:
MW Softwar
Price:
£173.00 inc VAT (£129.00 inc VAT upgrade
Address:
Mannheimer Str.18, 67655 Kaiserslautern, German
Tel:
+49 (0)631 360820
Fax:
+49 (0)631 360820
WWW:
E-mail:
David Bradforth
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE4/AWVA/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 4, VirtualRPC-SE and ArtWorks2
VirtualRPC-SE and ArtWorks2
Christopher Jarman
Like many other people reading this, I was forced to buy a Windoze PC machine about five years ago because I had no alternative. My particular reason was that I could not continue my hobby of Flight Simulation on the Acorn. I had originally moved on from an A4000 to a beautiful RiscPC and had progressed to Artworks for much of my Graphic design work. However, I now discovered the convenience of owning the same computer as the mass of the population, that is, cheap parts and easily bought upgrades. I was extremely pleased to find that my favourite DTP program, Textease, had been ported to the PC, which helped the transition enormously. However, through curiosity I gradually became used to the strange vaguaries of Microsoft Word. Finally, one day I ceremoniously handed the RiscPC over to my wife, who knew nothing of computers but needed a simple word processor. All my precious Acorn files and entertainments including' Chocks Away', now languished on the RiscPC's hard disc and the machine became an underused typewriter.
I became a hard core Flight Simmer and found out how to cope with Windows98, ME and now XP, all very educational, but although I became used to it, the PC environment seemed alien, and what was more to the point I missed all the friends I had made in the Acorn community, the help and support and the understanding. I even had to stop contributing to Acorn magazines, especially as so many went down the tubes or stopped paying for articles anyway. Then the final disloyalty, I stopped going to Acorn Shows!
My wife needed to use a bog standard PC for a number of reasons, which we need not go into; and with little regret, because I no longer saw any use for it, just a few months ago, I sold the old RiscPC. Fortunately, I transferred one or two of my favourite apps and files onto a couple of Iomega zip discs, before it went .
Now this is a fairytale which looks as if it may have a happy ending. During the last week or so I have been privileged to try out this CD-ROM which dropped on my doorstep. It is the usual ordinary circular flat disc but AMAZINGLY, it has turned my powerful Windoze machine into the RiscPC I never had. It is actually better than the one I sold! I am truly astonished. It is without doubt the most unusual and rewarding piece of kit I have ever had to review. It is not like an emulator, it is the real thing!
I have never tried an Ionyx or any of the newer RISC OS machines, so I am not able to compare. But for the nostalgia group to which I belong, who have been lost in the wilderness of PCs for five or six years, this is a godsend.
I am writing this review on VirtualRPC-SE and using Ovation for the first time, because it is provided as a freebie along with DrawWorks, Scribble, StrongEd, Zap and many other goodies and Utilities. I have installed Martin Wuerthner's new Artworks2 and I seem to be back in business. Within three days I am being asked to design the odd Acorn magazine cover. It is as if I had never been away. This is not just a cold review of a CD, but the rather emotional account of a homecoming. Incidentally, I always used to use Impression or Textease on my old RPC, so thanks to Aaron for getting me to try Ovation, I like it too.
Let me calm down and tell you what it is like to install Virtual RiscPC. After inserting the CD into your everyday PC, an Installer window appears with the options to install VirtualRPC-SE, RISC OS 4, Universal !Boot Sequence and standard applications. That is only one of six offers. The others are:
Optional software packs DTP, Games, Clip Art, Music etc
Utilities including CMOS restore and VA5000 hard disc link
Floppy driver for RISC OS
Plug-in extensions such as Networking (i.e. Internet facility)
Install Direct X V9 which is the latest version at this time of writing
In addition, you may open the documentation browser to read the manual and interactive RISC OS user Guide. If you are new to RISC OS then it is essential reading. If you have not been using RISC OS for a year or two then it is just as essential as I discovered. However, you will find all this ready on your desktop when VirtualRPC-SE is installed.
The VirtualAcorn installer
With Windows XP, which what this CD is designed for (It also runs on Windows 2000 - ED), the installation takes about ten minutes if you put everything on. I have a 2.4 Athlon chip and 1 Gb of RAM, and am using a 128Mb Matrox Parhelia graphics card, so the installation and the subsequent operations have been fast.
The next stage is to note the Product ID number which comes on your screen and email it to VirtualAcorn for you personal unlock code. With luck you will receive this quite quickly. If you still don't have email, then a phone call to 01344 452868 will do the trick.
Within a few minutes, up comes that old familiar grey hessian desktop and the Acorn task bar along the bottom. It may arrive as a window or as a full screen. To toggle between the two press Alt + Enter. There is also the slight problem of having two mouse arrows, the white one for the PC and the blue one for the Acorn. There is a small icon on the Window's window to hide the PC mouse arrow if it annoys. The problem of the three button mouse is solved automatically if you have a scroll mouse, as the scroll acts as the centre button. Otherwise you press the MS Menu key on the keyboard.
The default screen size is 800X600 and the number of colours 32,000. I quickly changed this to 1024X 768 which was fine, but my attempt to get 16 million colours took me back to 800x600 screen size again!
At this juncture, I have to say that it was extraordinarily uplifting to see the VRPC working so smoothly and to be back in that environment again. I had to stop and make myself a cup of tea to prevent the excitement from getting too intense.
Before going any further, I have to say that it has not been all straightforward, which is why I strongly recommend that you read the User Guide provided, at an early stage. There is a bug which can slow down the Acorn mouse on some machines, that is well known and is being worked on. It happened on mine. It is also possible that some Alcatel Software for Broadband users may cause a hitch or two, again this is being worked on. The beauty of this operating system however, is that it is all software, and updates and any bug fixes will be put on the Virtual Acorn website as soon as they are available. This is at ;
http://www.virtualacorn.co.uk
Getting down to business, this operating system is a great many steps on from the Virtual A5000 which I had already tried. That was a cheap and cheerful answer to those who wanted an A5000. For my purposes this full blown improvement upon the old RiscPC is exactly what is needed.
The VRPC is installed in its own folder on whichever hard disc you want to keep it. Mine is on an extra disc (F) which slots into a removable mobile rack for convenience. There is a windows folder in there called hard disc 4 which is the VRPC hard disc. It is a simple matter therefore to transfer say, graphics files such as .BMPs or .JPEGs from your PC to the VRPC via the hard disc4. To my delight the latest Change FSI easily copes with .BMP files and the lovely !Thump which is provided allowed me to view any JPEGs that I wanted to transfer. And I do want to transfer, because now, with relief I can get back to using Artworks again!
Artworks 2 by the estimable Martin Wuerthner will cope with embedded sprites so quickly, that I could hardly wait to get on with the next test of this system.
Other favourite Apps such as Studio 24 were waiting on an Iomega zip disc in Winzip form. When dropped into the Hard disc4, needless to say VRPC's Sparkplug unzipped it immediately and it was installed.
I was interested to find out whether I could use my same Epson printer and could I get on the Internet.
This was where I needed to read the User guide because it is necessary to connect to your PC and use both those facilities through it. Following the guide meant installing the correct printer files and then making sure that the connection procedure is followed exactly. You have to click on 'File' in the connections window and fill in the path (in my case) HostFS::Epson_ StylusCOLOR_740_ESC_p_2then click OK.
The Internet connection is much easier. Although Oregano2 is provided as a working demo, it runs out after a short while, and so the open source web browser NetSurf which is also in the Networking folder, is the more permanent answer. Provided that you connect to the web by means of your normal PC before you enter VirtualRPC-SE, then Websurf will connect as soon as you bring it up. Of course you can install your own favourite RISC OS Browser and email client and that will work automatically too. Remember, there is no need to try and make a network connection through VirtualRPC-SE; let your windows system do it for you. This goes for Broadband as well as for dial up. However, as I have already said, some people may find that Alcatel or an Ethernet card causes a problem and it may only work intermittently. If so, report this to Virtual Acorn Support. Fixes for any problems should be available on the Virtual Acorn website soon.
Artworks2:
The availability of Virtual RiscPC-SE means of course, the availability of Artworks2 to those Graphic Artists who would like to use it again. There may be many who have now gone over to Corel Draw or XaraX for obvious reasons. However, the unique qualities of Artworks with its immediacy and ease of use, are now enriched by all of Martin Wuerthner's additions. The current tool bar of Artworks2 now has 33 tools which include transparency, text editing within frames, repeat stamps etc. It also contains the ability to transform, skew, scale and rotate, extremely accurately by measurement and degrees, bringing it up almost to CAD standard, all working seamlessly together. Artworks now deals with inserted JPGs and Sprites, having the facility to alter their shapes, sizes transparency and colour. This means that vector and bitmap designs can be incorporated into one file.
ArtWorks2 running on VirtualRPC-SE
Altogether 2003 has been a great year for RISC OS. The emergence of VirtualRPC-SE means that not only can old friends be re-united with their favourite Operating System at home at very small expense, but you could take your RPC into work, get your employer to cough up for another copy of this super new software, and install it on the PC you are forced to use in the office! QED?
Product details
Product:
Virtual RPC-S
Supplier:
VirtualAcor
Price:
£159.00 (plus postage and packing of £1.50 UK and £3.50 overseas
Address:
86 Turnberry, Home Farm, Bracknell, Berks, RG12 8Z
Tel:
01344 45286
WWW:
E-mail:
Product details
Product:
ArtWorks
Supplier:
MW Softwar
Price:
£173.00 inc VAT (£129.00 inc VAT upgrade
Address:
Mannheimer Str.18, 67655 Kaiserslautern, German
Tel:
+49 (0)631 360820
Fax:
+49 (0)631 360820
WWW:
E-mail:
Christopher Jarman
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE4/BASICV/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 4, BASICV a Dabhand Guide Part 2
BASICV a Dabhand Guide Part 2
Alligata Media
About this book
We have largely left this book unaltered: the original edition was written by Mike Williams and included a section relating to the DABS Press books and software which has, of course, been deleted and we refer you to
At present we are considering an update to this book to cover the use of more modern BASIC in the shape of that supplied with the Risc PC, but offer no promises beyond this re-print. This book was produced using Ovation Pro on my StrongARM Risc PC; with the whole mainly typed from an original which was produced using VIEW on a Master Compact before being laid out for press in MacAuthor.
This book will be serialised in four parts over the next four issues of RISCWorld.
Contents
WHILE loop
Block-Structured I
The CASE Statemen
Passing Parameter
Passing Arrays as Parameter
Local Array
Procedure and Function Librarie
Dynamic Loading of Procedure
Alligata Media
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE4/BIDPAY/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 4, Using BidPay
Using BidPay
Mike Battersby
Regular readers of RISC World will be aware of the series of articles on eBay in earlier issues. The online auction site eBay provides a market for a wide range of items including Acorn/RISC OS products.
Whether you buy or sell on eBay you need a means of making or receiving payment for the items you have bought or sold. While methods such as Cheques are fine when someone in one country is buying from, or selling to, someone in the same country they are of little use for international payments and are anyway quite slow while money is cleared from cheque payments.
The last issue of RISC World looked at Paypal which is one of the most popular means of making international payments, allowing almost instant payment by means including credit cards but at a cost of commission fees.
This article looks at Bidpay, which is an alternative way of making payments. It operates quite differently from Paypal with both advantages and drawbacks in comparison.
Bidpay is a service of Western Union and is essentially an online method of sending money orders. To send money via Bidpay it is necessary to register but it is NOT necessary to register to receive money. Once registered then you can use a credit card to pay the amount due for the item you wish to purchase plus a fee which includes postage of the money order to the recipient by first class mail. You can pay extra for express mail if you wish.
Figure 1 (above) shows the standard fees for Bidpay at the time of writing. It may be advisable to compare these with the cost at a bank (£8 last time I sent one in the UK) and to watch out that over $100 the fee is a percentage plus a flat fee, which can add up. A bank fee is usually fixed whatever the amount.
Bidpay does also provide convenience, however, saving a trip to the bank and replacing it with a quick online transaction.
To make a payment you log in and get to the log in page shown below as figure 2
Figure 2: Bidpay page when you have logged in.
From here you can change your personal info, check on previous or current transactions or click on "Place new order" to send a money order
Figure 3 (above) shows the initial payment page. Note that first class mail in the US is said to take up to 10 days! Don't forget to include all extras such as postage, insurance, handling charges etc in the principal amount. Following the easy steps you arrive at the main payment page shown below as figure 4.
Here is where you enter all the important stuff (other than the amount). You can see that you need the seller's full address.
Once you have sent the money, a money order in US dollars is made out and sent the next business day to the recipient designated. That is, it is posted the next business day but may take much longer to actually arrive.
Once you have done it once the process becomes quite easy and relatively painless as well as being a lot quicker then arranging a money order through the bank. It is likely to be cheaper as well, particularly for small amounts.
For the auction seller who is receiving the money there are NO FEES, a distinct advantage over Paypal. However, if you are not in the US you are going to get a US dollar money order and may have to pay fees, or commission at your bank to pay it in or cash it, something it is advisable to check out. If you are in the UK you can now get an order in UK pounds but the sender is charged an additional fee of US$5 per order which can put off buyers if the overall fees get too high.
In summary
Bidpay provides an easy way to pay by credit card to send a money order in US dollars to any country in the world but because of possible exchange fees is most useful for sending payment to the USA.
There are fees for the sender but not for the recipient. Fees can add up for higher amounts and for having the order in UK pounds rather than US dollars. However, having an order in pounds avoids any exchange fees for UK based sellers when paying in.
This is a more limited service than Paypal but may be useful in certain circumstances. On the one occasion I used it, as the seller did not accept Paypal, I found it easy to use and effective but mainly because the seller was in the US.
Essentially it is another option for payment to consider. Personally I would probably only use if for smaller amounts to the US but for others the ability to buy from other locations, where sellers rarely accept Paypal, may be useful. Bidpay do try and help if the money order goes missing, something that cant happen with Paypal as the money is transferred straight from one account to another
Mike Battersby
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE4/CASEE/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 4, The case for emulation
The case for Emulation
The starting point for this article is the recent pole on The Icon Bar. This was about RISC OS emulation and invited people to select from five options. I won't bother listing them all here, but the last one is the most interesting, it is 'Native RISC OS does everything I need'.
Now you might think that's not strictly a question about emulation, but for me, it was the most telling option, because at the time of writing only 13% of people, just over one in eight, had chosen this. Logically this means that nearly seven out of eight people who use RISC OS also either need or choose to use another operating system as well.
It's really worth pausing to digest this. It explains so much about what has been happening with the RISC OS user base in the past few years, and why Virtual Acorn is so popular. But this isn't a new phenomena, it's always been there.
So you've got a PC then?
As more and more RISC OS users also become PC users they discover that there are lots of things that their PC can do better. The sensible user appreciates this, and continues to use their RISC OS machine for the things it does best while using the PC for the things that it does best. The problem is, over the last few years PCs and PC software have got better, more powerful, faster and (proportionally) cheaper, while RISC OS has not made similar advances from where we were at the end of the millennium, so the things RISC OS is better at get fewer and fewer.
For many, as the Icon Bar poll demonstrates, something other than RISC OS has now become a necessity and the alternative OS for most of these people is Windows. Quite often this isn't from choice but from commercial or other requirements. This isn't the place to discuss the reasons, but we do need to understand that it's happening, and that ranting against Bill Gates and Windows doesn't alter the fact that for many people it's necessary. For someone who needs to use Windows the possession of a reasonably up to date PC is not optional. No matter how much they might like RISC OS it is often the case that if, for whatever reason, a decision has to be made it's the RISC OS machine that has to go. This may be prompted by lack of space, finances or a hardware failure of some kind, but if the choice has to be made between something you like, no matter how much, and something you need, it's no contest.
This leads us to...
Where do we go from here?
When the RiscPC was launched, for almost everyone who bought one it was their main computer. The PC card was therefore adequate, and only a few users also felt they needed a PC as well as their RiscPC. It would seem to me that things have now come full circle. It's the PC that, more and more, is becoming the main machine and RISC OS that is getting sidelined. This might help explain the success of VirtualRPC. It's nice to have the 'real thing', but if RISC OS is your second, not primary, OS, then a good PC with VirtualRPC is probably a very attractive combination for users who want to have their cake and eat it.
RISC OS has changed in another way as well. Whatever their faults, Acorn had a reputation for producing good quality, rugged machines. With surprisingly little refurbishment these machines will probably go on for another decade. This bears testimony to this quality. We used to sneer at the poor quality and reliability of PCs and compare them unfavourably with Acorn machines. Not any more.
The Iyonix
The Iyonix has been hailed as some sort of saviour for RISC OS. It's the first machine to use one of the new breed of ARM processors; it has a 32 bit OS; it's the fastest RISC OS machine ever; etc. etc. The trouble is that it does nothing to address the real problem, the falling user base. I would be very surprised if more than a very small number of these machines have been sold to anyone not already a dedicated RISC OS user. Indeed, it's obviously not even aimed at trying to encourage new users. We had to wait several weeks for our Iyonix to arrive. I won't recount the whole saga, except to say that when it did appear it wouldn't run for more than about 40 minutes at a time, which made software testing rather difficult, although these problems have now been fixed. I'm not trying to slight the Iyonix, if you want 'real' RISC OS hardware and you need something significantly faster than a Strong ARM RiscPC then, at present, it's your only option, but to be realistic this is not a machine that we can proudly show to the world as the 'RISC OS Flagship'. We probably all understand why it's so expensive, but how do you explain to a PC user why this machine, with a price tag of over £1.300, around twice that of a good PC, doesn't have anything like the build quality that would be expected of a PC costing a fraction of the price? The first parts a prospective purchaser sees are the case, keyboard and mouse, and when I saw these I was rather dismayed. All three are the sort of thing found in the 'bargain basement' PCs where every penny counts, and even someone purchasing a 'budget' PC would expect to find much better.
This is not a good advert for a top of the range machine. Another £15 to £20 spent on these components could have made it look much more attractive, and surely that wouldn't have been too much to expect bearing in mind its price tag.
Personally I would not like to try to persuade someone used to a modern PC to buy an Iyonix. Not only is there the problem described above, there is also the total lack of RISC OS documentation, which would make it almost impossible for anyone not familiar with RISC OS to use it. The dealer would then have to make up for this lack, which would mean they'd have to spend many hours teaching a purchaser how to use RISC OS, and this means that a dealer is going to be less inclined to promote the product. Someone buying a low cost machine wouldn't expect this level of support, but for £1,300 new users will. With a PC or Mac you can go into any bookshop or library and find lots of 'how to' books, but there's almost nothing available for RISC OS, so a good manual is absolutely essential.
With just a few more pounds spent on the case and keyboard and even a fraction of the effort put into the hard drive build (as was done with Virtual A5000 so that new RISC OS users would find it a little less unwelcoming) and a decent User Guide it might be possible to sell the Iyonix outside the current user base. However, the Iyonix I see in front of me as I write this doesn't look a very attractive package except to those already committed to RISC OS.
There are a couple more problems; with the Iyonix what you see is what you get, it's running at 600Mhz; in 18 months time it will still be running at 600Mhz. By that time VirtualAcorn will be running at or round 1Ghz on new PCs. Even if you never buy another copy of VirtualAcorn and never upgrade it as you replace your PC RISC OS will get faster and faster. Then we have the compatibility issue, a lot of programs have to be re-written to run on the Iyonix, VirtualAcorn runs 32 bit software, 26 bit software and even runs non StrongARM compatible software at greater than StrongARM speed.
Conclusion
For existing RISC OS users who are determined to stick with a RISC OS hardware solution come what may and who can afford the price the Iyonix is probably the way to go at the present time. It's the fastest way to run RISC OS, it is reliable (after it's been repaired), but it's dull. Stand it next to any £800 computer in PC World and it looks like a £250 toy. Apple machine sell on their looks as well as their abilities (and their processors aren't very much faster than an Iyonix either). Put the neatly designed Iyonix motherboard in a fancy case, provide a proper keyboard, a cordless optical mouse and a proper printed manual and you might be on to a winner; at least you'd be in the game. If you can't compete with PC's on performance, style or price then don't play.
So if the Iyonix can't compete what can? Another PC, that's what. Personally I don't care what hardware RISC OS is running on, I simply want to run RISC OS, if I can run it on new cheap PC hardware, or even on my existing PC then great. I will be running RISC OS. If I had to choose from the current options I would choose a real PC running VirtualAcorn over an Iyonix, and I might well even spend some of the money I save on updating some RISC OS software. If I do that I am supporting VirtualAcorn, RISCOS Ltd, the dealer I buy the machine from and the software developers who I buy software from, and I can run both RISC OS and Windows if I need to, both far faster than on a RiscPC. I can run RISC OS on machines at work, I can try to persuade friends and colleagues to try a VirtualA5000, after all it's only £30. They might like like RISC OS, but they won't spend £1300 to find out! Then they might go further and buy VirtualRPC-SE, or even a real RISC OS computer. VirtualAcorn finally frees RISC OS from expensive hardware, RISCOS Ltd and two out of three hardware manufacturers can see that, and they are embracing the VirtualAcorn solution.
For nearly two decades people who liked Acorn and RISC OS have had almost no choice. They have simply had to take what was offered. Suddenly there's almost infinite choice - and some people are complaining!!>/P
VirtualAcorn is the future. It's a no brainer.
RISC World
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE4/CASEH/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 4, The case for hardware
The case for Hardware
Lets start at the beginning. RISC OS was designed to run on low power consumption ARM hardware. Indeed when ARM was founded it stood for Acorn Risc Machine, the name only being changed later when it was decided that the Acorn link no longer suited the new company's plans. RISC OS runs exceptionally well on lower power machines, which is why there are still so many older Acorn machines in use. They are reliable, they are powerful (for their clock speed) they have an OS in ROM and they are virus resistant.
I am not sure that any of these qualities could be attributed to an emulator, surely it will only be as reliable as the underlying operating system? In the case of VirtualAcorn that would be Windows. Another point is how powerful can an emulator be? I have seen various claims of "StrongArm type performance", but I have an Iyonix with a 600Mhz XScale, and it is far faster then my Risc PC, even though the Risc PC still gets used for running some older software that isn't RISC OS 5 compatible. I don't own Aemulor, which runs older software under emulation on the Iyonix, but then 90% of the software I use runs on the Iyonix, and the other 10% can be used on the Risc PC. Since the machines are networked this isn't a great problem. I also have a PC running Windows 98, not that it gets turned on very much and even then often doesn't work. I find I can do all I want with RISC OS.
Why are emulators a bad idea?
I don't like the idea of emulators a great deal, they are OK in some cases, for example I don't mind playing some older games under an emulator on my Risc PC, but would I want to use an emulator every day? Why bother when I might as well use a real computer. The thought of having to use RISC OS on some great big Pentium powered office heater with the associated noise of cooling fans simply does not appeal. There is another reason why I think emulators are a bad idea, they expose RISC OS users to the horrors of Windows. Now I do know a bit about Windows and I have a PC, but I don't use it much because Windows is a mess and I don't want to support Microsoft in any way. I don't like power hungry hardware, and I don't like Bill Gates.
There is another problem with running RISC OS on emulation, how accurate is the emulation? Will it run all the software that I want, and how compatible is it? If something is wrong in the emulator then the program won't work. It's a fairly trivial matter to re-compile a bit of software for the Iyonix, but how can you re-compile it for the emulator if the emulator doesn't work properly. Castle have done a lot of work to create a 32bit RISC OS, and now they own the OS itself, they are in a position to get things fixed, and indeed there have been a number of updated to my Iyonix since I purchased it. Emulator authors simply don't have the same resources as far as I can see.
Why emulation damages RISC OS developers
Then of course we come to the hardware manufacturers themselves, only one company is still in the running as far as I can see and that is Castle Technology. Castle should be supported for their amazing work on the Iyonix, the thought that sales of a real RISC OS computer developed by a well known and totally respected RISC OS developer should be lost to an emulator running on a PC is unacceptable.
What about the RISCStation laptop I hear you ask? Well it seems to me that any chance of getting a real RISC OS laptop is now lost. Anyone can simply get a cheap laptop from a box shifter and then install an emulator. Some RISC OS dealers have started selling cheap laptops with VirtualAcorn installed already, although the cheapness of the machines doesn't seem to be being passed on to the customer.
What about software developers? Will anyone buy any software to run on an emulator? I doubt it. People will buy software to run on a real computer. I am certainly looking strongly at buying Oregano2 at the moment. If I was running an emulator would I buy a browser, it's rather unlikely as the PC would come with one already. And here is the real problem, if I was using an emulator I would end up having to do some things under Windows, and I don't want to.
Conclusion
Emulation could be the death of RISC OS, it's a terrifying thought that soon all that could be left is a load of over priced PCs running an emulator with no more real machines in site. Castle have already announced that the Risc PC is going out of production, I wonder how much emulation is to blame for this, despite the quoted reasons. I don't believe the emulation does the market any good, I don't believe the quoted speed claims that have been bandied about and I don't want us to be in a position where all that is left is emulation, that will be then end of RISC OS.
!Convolve processes Acorn Sprite files by performing 'matrix convolution' on them. This produces an altered image which can be saved by the user.
Computer bitmap images are made up by little square areas called 'pixels' that each have an associated single colour or grey level.
A matrix is a square of numbers, in this case three high by three wide. The 'convolution' means looking at each 3 x 3 pixel neighbourhood in the input image, laying the matrix over that area, and mutiplying each pixel value by the corresponding number in the matrix at the same offset from the central pixel. These multiples are then summed together and this gives the output image value at the central point where the matrix was laid down.
Because the numbers in the convolution matrix can be negative, the value coming out of each convolution can sometimes be negative, so the 'absolute' value coming out of each convolution is taken. That is, the value with the sign taken out i.e. if the value becomes negative it is multiplied by -1 to always make the absolute value coming out positive.
Further more, !Convolve uses two matrices, with values chosen by the user, and simultaneously applies both. The two absolute values coming out of the convolutions are summed and the resulting vale halved. This gives the output pixel value. If the user intended only to use one matrix, then both matrices can be given the same values, and this will have the desired effect.
The values in the two matrices are displayed on a 'ToolBar' and are each altered by clicking on one of three vertical or three horizontal buttons for 'High', 'Medium' or 'Low' pass horizontal or vertical 'filters' respectively. The user can also select a 'None' button which suppresses any filtering to the input image for the respective matrix.
The selectable 'Low pass filter' reacts most strongly to those spatial pixel values that are altering the most slowly as the convolution moves over the input image. Hence it 'smooths out' the image.
The selectable 'Medium pass filter' reacts most strongly to spatial pixel values that are altering linearly as the convolution moves over the input image and 'differentiates' them. Hence it reacts to constant spatial pixel values by producing a zero value (or the colour black) and produces a white value when an edge in the image is encountered.
The selectable 'High pass filter' reacts to even more rapid spatial change than the 'Medium pass filter'. It still reduces areas of constant pixel values by producing a zero value (or the colour black).
The Processing can only be performed only after an Analysis of the image has been performed. This measures the degree of relatedness between pixel values both horizontally, vertically and diagonally and produces a 'goodness of fit' value (correlation) that is closer to one, the better the fit happens to be. This is only so noise can be added, if desired, with the same characteristics. If you don't intend to add noise, you needn't be bothered by this part of the program. It has no bearing on the matrix convolution, which is a separate process.
Usage.
After having unzipped the !Convolve application, double click on its icon to load it onto the icon bar, then either drag a Sprite file to the icon, or left click on the icon and drag a Sprite file into the window that appears. Clicking the middle 'Menu' button either over the bar icon or the window gives you a set of options including getting the 'ToolBar' with the matrices to appear. Having Analysed and Processed an image you can 'UnDo' and 'ReDo' the processing to look at the alteration the processing has made.
Menus and Commands
Info - Displays program information
Save - Saves the current displayed image
Save Corrupt - Saves the noisy displayed image
Display - Shows the current window
ToolBar - Shows the !Convolve ToolBar. Choose filter characteristics from this
Add Noise - Adds correlated noise to the loaded and analysed image
Analyse - Automatically calculates correlated noise parameters and correlation, by performing a 2D regression on the original image
Process - Processes the image with the current ToolBar parameters
ReDo - Brings back the last processed image
UnDo - Brings back the original image
Help - Shows this info. This may only be done once in a session
Quit - Quits the !Convolve application
ToolBar Entries
Rho X - Horizontal Correlation
Rho Y - Vertical Correlation
Rho XY - Diagonal Correlation
Sigma - The amount of noise present in the regression
Corrn - Overall Goodness of Fit. (The nearer to zero, the poorer the fit, the nearer to + or - 1, the better the fit)
Red - Mean of Red Values. (Zero in the case of grey level images)
Green - Mean of Green Values. (Zero in the case of grey level images)
Blue - Mean of Blue Values. (Zero in the case of grey level images)
Tint - Mean of Tint Values
Matrix Convolution
Applies the First Matrix and Second Matrix spatially at each point in the image, then adds the absolute values coming out and divides by two.
Buttons running horizontally (High, Med or Low) for each matrix, result in Vertical High, Medium and Low Frequency spacial filters.
Buttons running vertically (High, Med or Low) for each matrix, result in Horizontal High, Medium and Low Frequency spacial filters.
'None' stops any filtering at all in the matrix concerned. The appropriate matrices are calculated automatically for the user.
Once again we have come up trumps with our free commercial piece of software this issue, a must for those interested in music we present Rhapsody. This was originally published by Clares but is now owned by APDL/ProAction.
Rhapsody
Rhapsody is to a musical score what a word processor is to a book. It will enable you to enter a musical score onto the screen; to edit it in all sorts of ways, to save it and merge it with other scores, and finally to print it out on your printer in a variety of scales and formats.
In addition, (and this is something no word processor can do) Rhapsody will also perform your masterpiece, either through the internal sound system, using, perhaps, sampled voices, or through an electronic instrument such as a synthesizer which is fitted with a MIDI port. (To do this you will also need a MIDI interface fitted inside your computer.)
All the essential facilities for producing a piece of music rather than just a sequence of notes, are provided. These include repeats, dynamic markings, crescendos and decrescendos, accelerandos and ritardandos, staccato and accented notes and a huge range of trills and ornaments.
If you have a MIDI instrument, you can use it not only to play scores but also to help input musical parts. This can be done in real time while the computer is playing the rest of the score. Rhapsody is compatible with both Maestro and MIDI files so if you already have musical pieces in either of these formats, they can easily be converted to Rhapsody files.
Rhapsody has been carefully designed to be as easy as possible to use. It conforms closely with the guidelines set down for other standard RISC OS packages such as !Paint and clearly it owes a lot to the pioneer in this field - !Maestro, so if you are familiar with these programs, you will find Rhapsody very easy to master. This manual assumes that you are familiar with the RISC OS environment. If this is not the case please read the manuals supplied with your computer. You will soon find that choosing items from a menu and clicking on icons becomes second nature.
Whether you are an instrumentalist in search of a tireless and uncomplaining accompanist; a struggling pianist who wants to discover what your pieces should actually sound like; a teacher who wants a third Euphonium part in Eb tomorrow; or a budding (or even a professional) composer who wants to see your works in print and hear them competently performed, Rhapsody is the program you have been waiting for.
Important note for those who don't like reading manuals!
It is sincerely hoped that anyone familiar with RISC OS will be able to get started without having to read very much of this manual. Nevertheless, there are one or two areas in which even the experienced newcomer is bound to need a bit of prompting. In particular, all editing is done with the help of the Panel-1 window which is obtained by choosing 'Show panels' on the main menu. This window has several white icons. The contents of these icons can be cycled using the Select and Adjust buttons. Select increases the number or moves the selection forward by one, Adjust decreases the number or moves the selection back by one.
Secondly, Rhapsody differs sharply from Maestro in that you have to position a cursor in the score (by clicking on the score with Select) before you can add notes etc. Adding notes etc. is then performed by highlighting the desired icon and clicking on the green Insert-At icon in the panel window. When inserting notes, clicking with Select adds an upstalk note, clicking with Adjust adds a downstalk note. The yellow icons with arrows on are called Insert-Before and Insert-After respectively and the red icon is the Delete icon.
If you want to know what 'Capture' means on the main menu, you will have to read chapter 7. Sorry! You should also glance at chapter 8 if you want to print your score.
You can obtain interactive help by running the !Help application on your applications disc supplied with the computer.
The complete DiscWorld line up
CDInlays
The latest set of CD inlays by Matt le Blanc.
Convolve
Image processing application by Martin Carrudus
Games
All the games from this issues games world column including XU4 ported by the Unix Porting Project.
MakeModes
The Acorn application for generating RiscPC screen modes.
Also included is an example MDF (Monitor Definition File) produced for a 21" Formac ProNitron monitor (effectively a 21" Sony). This includes a number of higher refresh modes, including a 1600 x 1200 68Hz mode, which looks very impressive. Note that you should check the specifications of your monitor before using this MDF as it is designed for large high spec CRT displays.
PD
All the latest PD, shareware and freeware releases from the PD column.
Rhapsody
The complete version of Rhapsody with example files.
ToolBox
This contains two sets of Toolbox Modules. The Castle archive contains the latest 26/32 bit neutral system components, required if you want to run a lot of new software releases on 26bit machines (ie. anything that isn't an Iyonix). The RISCOS Ltd archive contains later and improved versions of a number of modules and is suitable for all versions of RISC OS from 3.1 onwards.
Do people read these editorial bits any more? I don't know, well that isn't true I know Andrew Harmsworth reads them, but does anyone else? So I could say what I liked couldn't I? But then isn't that point of Editorials, they are an opinion by the magazines editor about something or other. I am not sure if I ought to express any opinions about anything, have I any more right than anyone else, just because I sit here putting the magazine together? I do have the right to say that I am very pleased with our newly decorated lounge, even if it did take a week and a half (and was done while we suffered from a series of power cuts caused by a faulty substation). I can hold an opinion on it because it's my lounge, in my house and of course anyone is free not to like it. I will then throw them out, but that's neither here or there.
This thought on opinions also extended to my new surround sound speakers in my office, I like them a lot, I choose them, I use them and I paid for them, so they are mine. However when it comes to software (see this is going somewhere) you chose it, you use it, you paid for it, but you don't own it, you have the right to use it but it's not yours. So why do people get so attached to some bits of software that aren't theirs? I think it's because they forget that they don't own it. I am always seeing posting on usenet (Oh God he's on about usenet again - HJ) saying that "company x should do thing z". What the posters actually mean is "company x should do this, oh, and it doesn't matter if it costs thousands, customers should have it for 2/6d if you don't mind".
So they are expressing an opinion, and are quite at liberty to do so. On the other hand company X is quite at liberty to have a different opinion. There never seems to be a shortage of opinions flying around the RISC OS world, what there is a shortage of is actions. Lots of people seem to think that certain "things" ought to be done, but don't seem to want to do anything to help. If these people want things done then they should offer to help, after all I am quite sure they are capable of feeding themselves (in most cases), so they should be capable of assisting in some way, either physically or financially. If they can't do either then in my view their opinions are pretty worthless. There are lots of things that I would like, but I know they are not practical so I don't express a pointless opinion. Well I could do, how does "Someone should come round and weld up my Camper for 2/6d" sound? It's an opinion, but it's never going to happen, so why express it?
I have just re-read the above couple of paragraphs and I am not sure that they make any sense, but since I don't know if anyone is reading this (apart from Andrew) I don't think its worth having an opinion about. What do you think?
Aarons sad facts corner
I have just finished this issue of RISC World (and yes I have checked all the GIF files - see the letters page) and just wondered how big it was since it seems like our biggest issue ever. So here are some sad facts, laid out in A4 two column format using 9pt Homerton Medium this issue runs to 70 pages without illustrations. I have no idea how big it would be if you put in the pictures and sensible page breaks. This issue also contains over 60,000 words, and has 38 article entries off the main index page. A lot of the size is down to the large Rhapsody manual, but then if we don't publish the manual how will anyone know how to use it? Some more is taken up by our reprint of the BASIC V guide by Mike Williams, but I regularly get asked where users can find a simple BASIC guidebook, and they are almost impossible to find even second hand. Some more of the wordage is taken up by the UltimaIV documentation, you could go and download all of this, but its a lot easier having it on a RISC World CD, for those on a dial-up connection downloading the entire game would take many hours. We still have our mix of regular columns and reviews, plus other special articles that we commission. When you think that RISC World costs not much more that £3.00 per issue it makes me wonder what some other magazines are doing to justify their price.
Editors Rant of the month
This month's rant is about one man, an individual so stupifyingly stupid that he is overqualified to be the winner of the stupidest stupid person ever competition. So who is this brain dead moron? Me. Earlier today (actually several hours earlier) I decided it was about time I updated my old RiscPC. It still does a lot of useful work, including getting used to assemble RISC World and running various other useful bits of software. Anyway my !Boot sequence could be best described as "esoteric", a flipping great mess might be a better description. So armed with the latest updates from RISCOS Ltd and Castle Technology the first port of call was my !System folder, this contained multiple modules directories, all of which seemed to contain the same set of modules. For some reason I then decided it would be a good idea to sort this out and have one up to date set all in the correct place.
Can you see where this is going yet, would it help if I said that my machine is still running RISC OS 3.7? Nope? It does however also have the Universal !Boot sequence and the nested Wimp. Can you guess what is going to happen? Well I couldn't. So I sorted out all the modules, put them in the right places, including making sure that WindowManager 3.98 was in the 370 directory.
I then re-booted the computer and noticed a couple of silly errors from PreDesk, the computer then entered the desktop, but why wasn't it running my usual screen mode? And more importantly why was it continually moaning about not having any free memory? There was over 60Mb sitting in the Applications free slot, but whenever I tried to free any up it vanished into a memory abyss.
Now of course whenever a customer wants to update their boot sequence I advise them to make a backup just in case. Of course I don't do this because I am an IT Professional, and I don't make silly mistakes....er....right. The first thing I tried was to put the screen mode back, but every mode I tried reported that "This mode is unsuitable of viewing the desktop", and that included the 800x600 mode the machine was starting up in! No software would load as all my memory was disappearing. I went back through the boot sequence but couldn't find anything wrong, everything was in the right place. Since I need my odd !Boot sequence as it lets me do some clever tricks I couldn't just replace it with another copy from CD. Even if I did do that would I find the cause of the problem? Would it happen again if I tried the latest updates?
After nearly half an hour of messing around I decided to see if I had a nasty module mis-match going on with some new bits and some old stuff loaded. So I went through each module by hand to make sure it was correct. Finally I got to the WIMP module, and this was indeed Window Manager 3.98 (the one with the nested WIMP), but it was the wrong one! It was the module intended for RISC OS 3.1.....whoops! What I must have done is seen that the datestamp was newer for the copy into 310 directory, and copied that into the 370 directory. The computer was softloading this before the desktop started and that was the cause of the problem. Replacing this one module fixed everything (well at least it seems to so far).
So what is the moral of this story? Firstly it's that stuff intended for one version of RISC OS can cause havoc on another version, secondly that Acorn were bloody silly giving all the modules the same version number and thirdly that I am an idiot. I will try to be more understanding in future when customers delete all the drivers from WindowsXP and then wonder why the computer doesn't work properly any more.
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/ISSUE4/EDUC/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 4, The Education Column
The Education Column
Andrew Harmsworth with the latest Education news
This month I take a look a service I recently discovered that has taken science teachers at my school by storm. Furthermore we have the results of last column's competition.
Science Video Network
If you're not a science teacher, get ready to tell this to someone who is. If you're a teacher, but not of science, get ready to be jealous - and maybe think about setting up a scheme like this for your own subject.
For a number of years I've occasionally enjoyed the ability to download MPEG movies from the web to then play time and time again in a classroom situation. Having a digital video is so much more convenient than cumbersome VHS tapes that wear out through use and require rewinding or forwarding to the correct location. More often than not you only require a few minutes of a video to demonstrate the point, rather than the whole programme itself. Digital video allows this so easily.
Unfortunately the cost of digitising a science department's VHS collection is rather high, and the time required inconvenient. Furthermore the quality of freely-available video footage on the web is often questionable. Channel 4 recently launched a range of CD ROMs that they call TV ROMs as they contain broadcast-quality video footage. These are great, but they're not cheap.
Only last month I stumbled across an amazing service called the Science Video Network (SVN). This seemed too good to be true, but it turns out not to be! For sixty nominal pounds per year, a school science department can join to gain access to a large catalogue of MPEG videos of previously-broadcast science television programmes. For the price of 4 or 5 standard VHS pre-recorded videos, what do you get?
The Starter Pack
I emailed the SVN who sent me a sample MPEG of the famous NASA astronaut dropping a hammer and a feather on the moon. This was great as I was just about to teach air resistance and terminal velocity to my year 10! I was so amazed by this that I emailed them an order number to join.
The following day a huge parcel arrived for me. It contained a rather nice CD wallet containing 30 CDs, 10 each of Biology, Chemistry and Physics. Each CD contained 2-4 programmes totalling an hour in length. 90 in total. £60 for this lot is an absolute bargain, but that's just the start...
Members are entitled to request videos from a catalogue of over 400 programmes that cover key stages 3-5 (for further information on key stages, visit the ROSES website). These can either be emailed to you, if the file size is under 15MB, or burnt onto CD and posted to you at no extra charge. Yes that's right: at no extra charge.
Fig. 1: CD of requested videos
Copyright Issues
Schools have a licence from the Educational Recording Agency (ERA) that entitles teacher to record broadcasts for the purposes of teaching. This licence also allows us to swap programmes with each other. The SVN is just a scheme that allows effective sharing of these wonderful resources. There is of course absolutely no reason why other teachers of other subjects shouldn't share broadcast videos in this way and I would hope that if anyone falls into this category, or knows someone who does, they will see what they can do.
RISC OS Compatibility
Playing MPEG video on RISC OS machines is not easy. However a basic StrongARM RiscPC can cope. My machine's specification is 202MHz StrongARM, 2MB VRAM, and 48MB RAM. KinoAMP is my player of choice, as it has a great desktop user interface and supports sound playback. My CD ROM drive is only 8×, and can just about cope with playing the videos. More recent speeds will cope admirably. Make sure your CD ROM buffer is at maximum: 512K.
Fig. 2: J J Thomson, who opened my department 76 years ago, discovering the electron
I have no doubt that a nice shiny new Iyonix would be able to play more than one video at once, but I've no idea why you would want to do this! Anyway whilst not strictly software, this scheme is the best thing ever so it gets the RISC World seal of approval.
Web link: www.sciencevideonetwork.org
Competition Winner!
Most of you will recall the tricky question we posed in the last issue coinciding with the article on CLIC software. The question was:
What does CLIC stand for?
And the answer was, of course:
"Cynhaliaeth liwgar i'r cwricwlwm" Welsh for "Colourful support for the curriculum"
There were a large number of emails in my email box with the answer, and the first out of the e-hat was Geoff Potter of Thornton Heath. Very well done to Geoff - I'll put your CD in the post shortly.
Thanks to everyone else who entered, and better luck next time!
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/ISSUE4/GAMES/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 4, Games World
Games World
Paul Brett with the latest gaming news.
Last issue I said things were likely to be a bit quiet on the gaming front, how wrong I was!
StarFighter 3000 V3
A new release of StarFighter is imminent as you read this issue. This new release not only includes a number of new bug fixes but is also Iyonix compatible, which has to be good news! StarFighter is published by APDL and I note with interest that an increasing number of their titles have been converted to 32Bit over the last few months (and there are more to come - ED). Still let the author Chris Bazley tell us in his own words.
"The game is now compatible with all modern RISC OS machines, from the humblest OS 3.1 A5000 to the next generation of 32-bit only machines such as the XScale powered Iyonix PC. On StrongARM machines with OS 4 the game takes control of screen memory caching in order to give enhanced performance. All aspects of the game that relied upon a 50Hz monitor refresh rate have long since been rewritten to use more reliable timing methods."
"A multitude of minor bugs have been fixed, including many that date back to the very first Fednet versions of the game. Two that justifiably achieved notoriety are the missiles-blowing-up-on-launch bug and the lasers-passing-through-satellite bug; both have now been fixed. In addition, the game has been enhanced by the discovery of several features that were formerly broken, such as proper runway taxiing by enemy fighters, missile launch from big ships and mouse control auto-centring."
"The game now integrates fully into the RISC OS desktop, with a comprehensive style-guide compliant user interface provided by the Acorn Toolbox. You can play the game in full screen mode, or in a window whilst other applications continue to run in the background. Standard 'save' and 'scale' dialogue boxes provide facilities to take screen shots and scale the viewing window to any size."
This all sounds like great news for RISC OS games players, as StarFighter is still one of the most popular RISC OS games ever.
XU4
Now a real treat for RISC OS gamers...
"Prepare yourself for a grand adventure: Ultima IV, sixteen times larger than Ultima III, is a milestone in computer gaming. Lord British has produced a game to challenge, not only your physical and mental skills, but the true fabric of your character. The evil triad of Mondain, Minax, and the hellspawn Exodus, have been vanquished and peace reigns throughout the land of Britannia. Evil yet abounds, but in isolated pockets and in the hearts of men. A new age awaits the coming of one who can conquer evil on all frontiers through the mastery of both magic and the use of force. Daemons, dragons and long-dead wizards still plague the countryside and must be destroyed. The seeker on the path of the avatar will faces hostile groups composed of mixed enemy types and will survive such encounters only by strategic use of weapons and terrain. Earthly victories over seemingly impossible odds lead to the final conflict, where the ultimate challenge -- the self -- awaits..."
Back cover of Ultima IV box
XU4 is a remake of the computer game Ultima IV. The goal is to make it easy and convenient to play this classic on modern operating systems. XU4 is primarily inspired by the much more ambitious project Exult. Linux is the primary development platform but it gets ported to Windows and MacOS X regularly. It should be trivial to port to any system with SDL support.
XU4 isn't a new game based on the Ultima IV story, it is a faithful recreation of the old game, right up to the crappy graphics. If you are looking for a game with modern gameplay and graphics, this is not it...yet. New features that improve the gameplay and keep with the spirit of the original game will be added. XU4 also tries to maintain strict compatibility with the original for its savegame files. You can use a game saved in XU4 with the original and vice versa.
XU4 has been ported to RISC OS by Alan Buckley and is part of the
PopCorn
Firstly, what is Popcorn? It's a library designed to help people write games in C. Programs written in C are generally faster than those written in BASIC, but much easier to cope with than writing ARM assembler. And modern RISC OS machines are fast enough that a game written mostly in C will still run at an acceptable speed. So C is probably the best choice for aspiring RISC OS games authors. Popcorn itself contains some assembler for the speed crucial parts, like graphics plotting.
Hive - a sample PopCorn game
Popcorn has four main parts, although the boundaries between them are a little blurred in places. These are:
The resource manage
The object manage
The sprite plotte
And other useful thing
The resource manager
The resource manager is not as complicated as it might sound. Its purpose is to simplify loading files that your game needs. These files could be graphics, sound effects, or anything else.
All the resources your game uses must be listed in a text file, which Popcorn reads at startup. You can organise the resources into "groups", and then request Popcorn to either load or free a particular group. There's a call to find the address that a particular resource has been loaded at, so you can then use it just like any other data loaded into memory.
The sprite plotter
Popcorn contains a fast sprite plotter, written in assembler for speed. It supports sprite masks, for transparent areas, and also can use an arbitrary clipping rectangle. The plotter uses a special graphics format, to speed up plotting, but you don't need to worry about this because normal RISC OS sprites are automatically converted to this format when they are loaded by the resource manager.
Normally you don't even need to use the sprite plotting routines yourself, as the object manager will call them for you in most situations.
The object manager
This is possibly the most complicated part of Popcorn. Understanding how to use the object manager is mainly a matter of thinking about your game design in a particular way. Take, for example, a "Space Invaders" style game. Each alien would be represented by a Popcorn object. The bombs that the aliens drop would also be objects, as would the player's missile base.
But you need not stop there. Presumably you would also want a screen display of the player's remaining lives and score. Each number in the score display could be an object too. Objects need not have any graphics associated with them, so for example in a game with a playing area larger than the screen, you could use an object as the "camera" to keep track of what part of the game area to display on screen.
Objects have certain properties, the most obvious would be their position in the game area, they also can have a velocity. They have a size, which is used for collision detection, and they have a timer which can be used for many purposes.
Objects can also have a sprite, or series of sprites, associated with them. This allows Popcorn to automatically plot the objects' sprites without the programmer needing to write any special code.
If an object does require special treatment in some way, a handler function can be declared. When certain conditions are met, Popcorn will call your handler function to allow you to react to whatever condition it was. For example, in a space invaders game, the handler for the "alien" object could be called whenever the object was about to move off the screen, and reverse the objects direction, thus making the aliens move back and forth across the screen.
Other useful things
Popcorn also contains a few useful routines that don't fit into any particular category. For example, there's a call to change the screen mode, while saving the old mode so you can restore it later. This helps to make your games "desktop friendly". There's also a call to read the keyboard, like BASIC's INKEY function.
For more details on Popcorn have a look at the documentation, including the full tutorial on how to make a "Pong" game.
Damatrix
We will finish off this issue with another great slice of infuriating gaming from Neil White (Nex), in this case all you have to do is guide a small block from one place to another, how easy can that be?
Damatrix
Signing off
That is it for this GamesWorld, see you next time.
Paul Brett
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE4/HUGHJ/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 4, The Hugh Jampton Experience
The Hugh Jampton Experience
Yes its the new disimproved Hugh Jampton column with the less is more guarantee...
My guarantee to you is that all future Hugh Jampton columns will be error free. Was last issues column error free? Well that's a very good question, it was certainly error free when it left here. (Actually it was incomplete, which is why it had errors in - ED) However by the time the last issue had been dutifully knackered by an inexperienced editor (watch it - ED) it was a mess, so let me apologise. Still look on the bright side, it was still error free, well the errors were all free! Still I suppose you can't expect much more, after all RISC World does employ the best brains that low wages can buy.
Last issues caption competition
So last issue I ran a picture, which very few people could see....
But this time you can, however some clever sparks still managed to send in some captions...
"Microsoft - cutting-edge technology."
"The latest US invasion force sets sail."
"It's full pollution ahead for Microsoft."
"Bill Gates' latest tool to surf the net."
and, because someone forgot to convert the sprite to a GIF ...
"I'm sure I left it here somewhere...."What?", "No, it's not called the Mary Celeste!"
All the above were sent in by Brian. However we have one clear winner this time, firstly for not seeing the picture and secondly for going and finding it! Oh and thirdly for making a caption that fitted the picture and the cock-up.
"How are we expected to see the iceberg when we can't even see the pic?"
Geoff Potter
So well done to Geoff and now a change of mood.
Hugh's letters corner
And now a new feature for the Hugh Jampton experience, letters!
Hi Hugh!
I noticed that you mention in this months issue that you only got on
entry for the caption competition. What happened to mine? I definitel
sent one in. Perhaps someone has forgotten to pass it on? Maybe
mysterious black hole opened up and swallowed all the other entries
I would enter this months, but some of the images seem to be broken o
your page, including the caption compo...Mmm...Mysterious things abound
methinks...
William McNee
Well I never saw it guv, I only got one entry forwarded to me so I published it, out of interest what was your entry? I suggest you have another go this issue, and if you do send an entry in I promise to publish it (provided it's clean enough). Now it's that merry antipodean Alan Shooter...
G'day
I hope someone gets a copy of the picture as mine is just the jpeg icon.
The last competition picture has shown ok but the 4 are just jpeg icons.
We then get the adverts for PlayStation and Lidl, what ever that is, ok
but the next 3 are just jpeg icons. Maybe the £50 will have to be put up
as the prize for this one just being able to spot the picture!!!!
Alan Shooter
LiDL is a chain of food shops, as is Iceland, hence the old advertising slogan "That's why mums gone to Sainsburys". I suppose we could have a guess the picture competition, I will have to think of a way of doing it so that it isn't too easy, how about guessing what picture I am thinking of now? Actually perhaps that isn't a good idea.
This issues photo
So can anyone come up with a caption for this?
Send your entries to HughJ@riscworld.co.uk and we will print those that turn up, and won't offend anyone, well anyone important anyway.
So lets's crack on with the space filling, here is this issue collection of photos lovingly swiped from the internet.
Yes RISC OS does run better without Windows. AS this chap will testify.
We have been hearing rumours about a new RISCStation laptop...
And it seems that Stuart Tyrell has released his multimedia keyboard driver for download...
...some people nearly got crushed in the rush...
At least they hadn't queued to get their money out...
Mind you is it worth using banks when this man's about?
And like all good news programs we will finish off with a cute animal photo.
Yes, its the RISC World letters page, and it doesn't show its age!
I really was asking for it last issue when I said "we didn't get a single mistake pointed out in the last issue". Well, it was asking for it, wasn't it? Volume 4 Issue 3 managed to correct the lack of mistakes in Issue 2 with a great deal of style and finesse, and it wasn't even totally Hugh's fault either. Oh well here we go....
Hello,
I dunno if you know about these, but on looking at this months RW (Vol 4 Issue 3) and looking at the Hugh Jampton page, there seems to be something wrong with some of the images, including the caption competition one. They don't display properly, and all I see is the broken JPEG symbol. Seems like it must be Hugh's fault again.
Also, on trying to open the Toolbox Directory, ARCFS seems to get a bit confused and crashed with an 'Application may have gone wrong...' error. It may well be a clash with SparkFS (1.39) which I have constantly installed on my icon bar. It doesn't really matter though. as I was able to install the latest Toolbox modules from the Select 3 disc, which arrived the day after your mag.
I like the new logo, though, and I also have to say I prefer not having the yellow background, which was in previous issues. It's easier to read the text.
William McNee
Yes, last issues Hugh Jampton went royally wrong for some people, if you were looking at the article in Browse (as I do) then it was fine, however if you used anything else it went rather wrong, in fact very wrong. It's a simple mistake, some of the graphics were sprites and were not converted to GIF images, this is is what happens when articles come in late, and editors make a mess of them. So you can blame Hugh if you like, however it's only fair of me to put my hand up and say that "yes it's all his fault". Only it isn't, it's my fault as I didn't do the normal level of file checking, sorry to everyone who wasn't using Browse.
On the subject of ArcFS and SparkFS I have often found that the pair of them get into a large scrap, which usually results in one of them crashing my machine, so I try to avoid having both loaded at the same time. Part of the problem seems to be that they both want to open some types of archive and can't decide between them which should do it. What has worked for me sometimes is to alter SparkFS's !Run and !Boot files so that it no longer tries to nab ArcFS (&3FB) archives, which one of my copies tries to do.
With regard to the new logo I think it's much better than the old one, and I still have no idea why I decided to put a nasty yellow background behind the text, still you live and learn.
Now another comment about the Hugh Jampton column.
Aaron,
It would be good if Hugh Jampton would actually put images in his article - I find silly little empty windows annoying to look at!!!
Andrew Harmsworth
Yes, alright, you could have opened the directory and looked at the sprites manually though! Now a change of mood.
Dear Aaron,
I have pleasure in attaching the zipped application !Convolve - an image processing Wimp application, for possible inclusion on your subscription disc. There is a file 'ReadMe1st' within the zip file that explains the theory behind the matrix convolution that is applied to user supplied images.
You might also give Martin Carradus
I have included Convolve in this issue along with some simple instructions, as supplied by Martin. Does anyone else have any software they would like us to include in RISC World, we will plug websites in exchange!
Dear Aaron,
Having been away on holiday, I have only just got around to opening your latest CD. Although I run a ViewFinder on my RPC SA, I have been intrigued by Stephen Morton's continuing feature on "Improving RISC PC Video". I noticed your reference to having HTMLified the MakeModes, manual and included it in this issue of RISC World. I quickly identified it as the original Acorn version of the manual. I feel that while that version is sufficient for the exercise detailed (very well I may say) in Stephen's feature article, it seems a shame to have propagated the original unmodified Acorn version which does not help the user who is unaware of the bug in MakeModes which leads to Type 5 and unavoidable exit when attempting to "create" a brand new MDF!
Perhaps you were unaware of the modified version of the Manual which I made available in June 2003, specifically to help with working around that bug which was well known to those who knew about it. Originally, I did not know and it caused me endless trouble until I learned the secret. I subsequently determined to make it transparent to the seemingly large number who wanted to use MakeModes and were having the same trouble as I had had simply because they were not "in the know".
I put it up on c.s.a.announce (copy of three parts attached) but did not think to offer the announcement to yourself or the other publishers. I think I must have been tired at the time? The current source of MakeModes (as far as I was concerned) was the Acorn legacy site (part of the RISCOS Ltd site), where ROL indicated that any changes should be discussed with them. I did email ROL and Paul Middleton welcomed my initiative, offering to host the new documents which were already available from my own website. Interestingly, I have just been browsing the Select 3 CD (prior to installation) and I find that the full collection of modified documents is in the Directory "MakeModes". This includes the also modified version of the "Application Note" which is complementary t
the Manual.
If you want to use it/them and do not want to risk being accused of ripping it from the Select 3 CD, it is still available from
Alternatively, if pressed, I could send you a CD? The download of just the HTML versions of the two documents is about 400KB. In all the formats available it amounts to just under 2.5MB.
I am feeling rather stupid about not publicising the modified documents more widely, and am considering corrective wider action.
I trust that you can accept all of the above in the spirit intended;that is, constructive advice.
RISC World is great. Keep up the good work!
With best wishes.
Frank.
Many thanks, I did vaguely recall there being an updated version around but I should have checked before we published the last issue. However I will correct the mistake this time and have included both the updated manual and the application note from your website. I am glad you are please with RISC World, all we need to make it perfect (ho ho - HJ) is a set of CD inlays...
Hi,
Here's the next set of RISC World CD inlays (a year's worth), probably just missing the deadline of the next CD. One consequence of the new logo is it's much easier to recolour, which makes doing these a bit quicker.
Matt
I have put these in this issues software directory, many thanks for your continued hard work on doing these.
Well that's all we have time for, in fact it's pretty much all we got in from readers, so why not put finger to keyboard and send us a quick e-mail to tell us what you think of this issue (and to point out the mistakes).
Text has been modified, in line with corrections expressed by various commentators, to avoid the "Type 5"errors experienced when following the original instructions for generating a new MDF file. Also, hopefully, to help a little with understanding.
More recently, it has been observed that when used with Select 2 (4.33, ) the behaviour of the main editing window, the "Mode Maker", is different in one respect from that originally observed with OS's up to 3.7 and, maybe, 4.02. See, "Testing the Settings".
(This version typeset by Frank Watkinson, Sunday 8th June 2003.
Introduction
MakeModes is a tool used to generate and edit Risc PC monitor definition files (MDFs). Before using the MakeModes application, you should take the time to read the application note 'Creating monitor definition files for the Risc PC' (available upon request from Acorn Customer Services? - NO; but available from where you obtained this file)
It is currently understood that !MakeModes will create MDFs suitable for use in the Castle "Iyonix" PCs. Check on http://www.iyonix.com/software to see whether !MakeModes has been upgraded to 26/32-bit compatibility. (NOT converted as of Sunday 23rd February 2003.
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Overview
The process for creating a new, or adjusting an existing, monitor definition file is summarised below
If it is "new", start at "A". If it exists, start at "B"
Until a bug is dealt with, if you want to start a new MDF, first open !MakeModes.MonList into a text editor and enter a new line in an appropriate position to represent the new monitor. Fill in the Type, DPMS, Line Rates, Frame Rates and Monitor Name columns. Save it back as !MakeModes.MonList
Load MakeMode
Click on the MakeModes icon
Click on the 'Monitor title' menu icon and select the appropriate monitor from the list. If your monitor is not included in the list, go back to A. Ensure the correct values have been entered and click on 'Generate'
The Mode Maker window will open and if it is a new MDF you should start by saving the newly generated mode file to a suitable directory, giving it a name which reflects the monitor to which it will apply
Next, if it is "new", the following section amplifies the above
If it already exists, go to the section on "Adjusting an Existing MDF"
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Creating a New Monitor Definition File
If you want to start a new MDF, first open !MakeModes.MonList into a text editor to see if a similar type of monitor is already in your collection of MDFs which MakeModes recognises
If not, then enter a new line in MonList, in an appropriate position, to represent the new monitor. Fill in the Type, DPMS, Line Rates, Frame Rates and Monitor Name columns, taking appropriate values from the Specification in the monitor's handbook and using the guidance immediately below. Save it back as !MakeModes.MonList
The diagram below shows alternately, the upper and lower parts of my "MonList" in the StrongEd text editor. The highlighted line is one deliberately added to start the creation of an MDF for that LCD monitor. NOTE the deliberate mistake(?); the monitor "Type" should be 4, not 5
If the new MDF is for a monitor which you know to be similar to one already known to !MakeModes (i.e. in "MonList"), it could be more efficient to follow the route described under "Creating a Similar MDF"
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Monitor type
The different types are listed below
0 50Hz TV Standard colour or monochrome monito
1 Multiscan monito
2 Hi-Res 64Hz monochrome monito
3 VGA-type monito
4 Super-VGA-type monitor AND Colour LCD (TFT?) monitor
5 LCD (Liquid crystal display - monochrome only?
Line rate (min and max)
The minimum and maximum line rates for your monitor are specified in Hz. This information can usually be found in your monitor's manual
Frame rate (min and max)
The minimum and maximum frame rates are specified in Hz. This information can usually be found in your monitor's manual
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Now start MakeModes in a similar way to other RISC OS applications, by double-clicking on its application icon. When it has loaded, it will install itself on the iconbar
Click on the MakeModes icon, this will open the 'Generate MDF' window
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Choose a monitor by clicking on the 'Monitor title' menu icon and selecting the appropriate monitor from the list. If you have satisfactorily completed the first stage above (addendum to MonList), this menu list will show all previous Monitor Titles and any new ones that you have just added. Select the desired monitor title from the menu icon list and check that the entries are correct before clicking on "Generate"
If you choose to change any values in the Generate MDF window, do beware that you may get an error message when you click on Generate. If you change the Monitor title in the writable icon to one which is not in MonList, MakeModes will Type 5 and exit when you click on "Generate"
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When you have clicked on 'Generate', if the values that you have entered do not make sense e.g. minimum value greater than the maximum value, you may get either of the above warnings: 'Do you wish to add this monitor to the monitor list?' or 'Nonsensical line and/or frame rate values.
Or, it may Type 5 and exit
If you do wish to add the monitor to MakeModes monitor list, click on 'Yes' and MakeModes will, hopefully, update its MonList file with the new monitor information. If you get a Type 5 Fatal error, !MakeModes will exit and you then know that you have to start again at "I"
If at any stage, you want to remove a monitor from the list, load the MonList file (which can be found inside the !MakeModes application directory) into your text editor and delete the appropriate line from the file
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nbsp; If you have successfully passed the "Generate MDF" test,
MakeModes will now select all the modes that are suitable for use with your chosen type of monitor and open the main display window
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Using the MakeModes main menu (click MENU over the main display window), Save the newly-generated MDF to a suitable directory, giving it a name which reflects the monitor to which it will apply. For example, the above MDF was saved as "V7-L17AS"
You now have an "Existing MDF" and can continue into the section on Adjusting an Existing MDF
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Creating a Similar MDF
This section relates to the situation where an MDF for a similar monitor is already known to MakeModes. The following procedure reduces the amount of work needed in the Adjusting or tuning phase of creation. It also allows a new MDF to be created while avoiding the bug referred to in the Overview
First, open !MakeModes.MonList and choose a monitor which already exists in "MonList" and most closely matches your "new" monitor. For example, if the new monitor is a CRT type with similar specification to that for, say, a 17-in Iiyama, a good starting point would be the "Idek MF-8617"
Then, from the menu of this window, "Save MDF", with a temporary name, to an unrelated directory
Next, load this MDF into a text editor and edit the "monitor_title:" entry to your choice of a new name which reflects the name and model of the new monitor. Save this modified MDF file
--
Now create the new line entry for the new monitor by copying the line entry for the "similar" monitor (Idek MF-8617) and changing the Monitor Name in this new line entry to be specific to the new monitor. Save MonList
Quit and re-load !MakeModes, click on the iconbar icon and select your new Monitor Name from the Generate MDF window's Monitor title menu icon. At this point, check that the other entries in the Generate MDF's window are correct in accordance with the specification of the new monitor. When satisfied, click on "Generate" and you are ready to start Adjusting your new MDF
Do not forget to Save the new MDF, with an appropriate name, for eventual inclusion in "!Boot.Resources.Configure.Monitors". And keep on repeatedly Save'ing it throughout the process of adjustment or tuning
You can now proceed to the next section
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Adjusting an Existing MDF
If you have just created a new MDF, the MakeModes Main Display Window should still be visible. If you closed it after saving the new MDF file, it can be re-opened as described in the next paragraph
To load an existing or newly created monitor definition file into MakeModes, you simply drag the file to the MakeModes icon on the icon bar. The monitor_title field of an MDF holds the name of the monitor for which the file was created. When MakeModes loads an MDF, it checks this name against its own list of monitors which it knows about. If it finds a match, that monitor's details are used to check the validity of the modes in the mode file and the Main Display Window is opened and has "Mode Maker" in its title bar
If a match is not found, MakeModes will display a message prompting you to select an appropriate monitor from its stored list. Click on the "OK" button and the Main Display Window may open. You can then click on the 'Monitor details' menu icon in the File info section of the Main display and select the correct monitor from the list displayed, as shown below. If it Type 5's, you should (by now) know where to go!
If you can not find the right monitor name in the list above, it seems likely that you will have to go back to "Creating a New Monitor Definition File" or to "Creating a Similar MDF"
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Using the main display window
The main display window consists of six distinct areas
File info
Mode Info
Screen RAM
General Info
Mode timings
Timing diagnostics
We shall deal with each of these areas in turn
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File info
This area displays information specific to the mode definition file as a whole
The following DPMS states can be used
0 DPMS disabled - screen blank just blanks vide
1 Screen blank enters 'Stand-by' mode
2 Screen blank enters 'Suspend' mode
3 Screen blank enters 'Off' mode
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Mode info
This area displays information on the currently selected mode. To see a list of the modes available, click on the 'Current mode' menu icon and select a mode from the list. Although it is possible to give screen modes different textual name's e.g. 'DTP Mode', the modes are listed in the menu by their resolution and frame rates e.g. 800 x 600 (60 Hz)
When you have selected a screen mode from the list, the mode info area will be updated accordingly
One of the main items that you will want to edit in this window is the 'Pixel rate'. By altering the pixel rate, it is possible to increase or decrease the Frame rate for a given mode. Please note though that increasing the pixel rate will also increase the line rate and bandwidth required
You can alter the 'sync polarity' using the arrow (bump) icons. The possible values for the sync polarity are as follows
0 hsync normal, vsync norma
1 hsync inverted, vsync normal
2 hsync normal, vsync inverted
3 hsync inverted, vsync inverte
When MakeModes creates a new screen mode, the name it uses for that screen mode is derived from its resolution and frame rate. You can give any screen mode a new name using the 'Name' icon. To do this, simply type a new name into the 'Name' writable icon and press Return. If you do not want the mode to appear in the Display Manager's mode list, simply ensure that the option icon beside the Name icon is not ticked, e.g
The current preference seems to be for a name of the form: "1280 x 1024 (75Hz)"
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Screen RAM
When MakeModes is loaded, the amount of VRAM present in the machine is shown in the Screen RAM area of the main display window
The amount of VRAM available dictates the machine's video bandwidth limits. The more VRAM available, the higher the bandwidth. If a screen mode exceeds this bandwidth limit, the Display Manager will refuse to allow the mode to be used. To help prevent this happening, MakeModes will inform you if this limit has been exceeded by turning the 'Bandwidth' field red (see the General info section later in this document)
However, in a recent case, the bandwidth field was observed to turn red at a level well below that set for a 2MB VRAM RPC and yet did not result in a refusal to use the mode involved. Perhaps the moral is to look at the red value and compare it with the appropriate value set in !MakeModes.Limits. For example, for 2MB VRAM it is set at 152MB/sec
If you wish to check that a mode will work on a machine with a different amount of VRAM, click on one of the VRAM icons in the 'Screen RAM' area
Clicking on one of the VRAM icons will set the amount of VRAM that MakeModes believes is available. Doing this will also update the information in the 'General info' area, i.e. the 'Memory' and 'Bandwidth' fields
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General info
The General info area of the main display window shows mode diagnostic information
The number of bits per pixel (bpp) selected is shown in the 'Bits per pixel' icon. This number can be changed by clicking on the Bits per pixel menu icon and selecting a new value from the menu. The bpp setting affects the screen memory and bandwidth calculations e.g. an 800 x 600 screen mode in 8 bpp (256 colours) takes 468KB of screen memory and has a required bandwidth of 36MB/sec. The same mode in 32bpp (16 Million colours) takes 1875KB of screen memory and has a required bandwidth of 144MB/sec. If the memory or bandwidth fields turn red, the limits have been exceeded. That mode will not work at the selected pixel depth. For more information on pixel depths, please refer to the section below on the Application Note
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Mode timings
The 'Mode timings' area of the main display window is used to alter the horizontal and vertical timings for the selected mode. The timings values can be updated by using either the arrow (bump) icons or by clicking on one of the writable icons and typing the new value
As timing values are altered, MakeModes will recalculate the Pixel, Frame and Line rates automatically. If any of the timing values are incorrect, MakeModes will show the changes that need to be made in the Timings diagnostics area
NOTE: Because the 'Memory' and 'Bandwidth' values are not updated automatically, you must click on one of the VRAM icons when changes have been made to the Pixel rate or the mode timings
When you are happy with your mode timings, you may wish to centre the picture on screen. This can be done by increasing or decreasing the 'porch' and 'border' values. If the 'Keep porch and border' totals icon is ticked, MakeModes will retain the overall totals by subtracting or adding the same amount to the opposite porch or border. e.g. increasing the Left border by 12 will decrease the Right border by 12. This option only works when the arrow (bump) icons are used to alter the timing values
NOTE from the "Application Note" document: The horizontal left border and horizontal back porch values can be altered to position the picture correctly in the horizontal sense.
The aim should be to get the "Screen Display Area" positioned correctly for each mode defined in the MDF, so that when that MDF is operating, a change of screen mode (from the iconbar Display Manager) should not require any adjustment of the Monitor controls to centre or size the display
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Testing the Settings
When you think that the adjustments are about right, you need to test them. This is done by clicking on the "Test Mode" button seen in the Mode info area of the Mode Maker window
This applies the variables of the test mode shown and pops up a new button to click on
The appearance should be checked for all requirements before clicking on this button. When you do this, it does what it says on the button provided you are operating on an OS up to 3.7 and, maybe, 4.02. Repeat the modifications until satisfied.
If you are using Select 2 (maybe Select 3), it does not return to the original mode. Moreover, if you click on the Display Manager icon on the Iconbar and attempt to change the resolution, you will find that only one resolution is available: that of the Test condition. All is not lost! You can continue to tune the mode you are in, until satisfied. Then you can continue to tune other modes by way of the Current Mode menu icon in the Mode info area
The fundamental difference when using one of the Select OS's, is that you can no longer change screen mode through the Display Manager, except for the colour depth. If you are using ViewFinder, you will probably find that also appears to be disabled, at least in respect of choice of colour depth and resolution. Consequently, when you have finished tuning different modes and have saved the resulting MDF, you will feel the need to re-boot
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Application Note
For more information on the functions within MakeModes and in particular the meaning of its different variables, please refer to the "Application Notes - Modified". These are available from where you obtained this document. If you have followed the directions in the "Instrucs" file, clicking on Application Note should open that HTML file in a separate window
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The iconbar icon
The iconbar icon responds to the mouse in the following ways
clicking Select on the icon opens the 'Generate MDF' window if no MDFs are currently being edited. If an MDF is being edited, clicking Select on the icon will bring the main window to the front of the window stack
clicking Menu on the icon opens the MakeModes menu
clicking Adjust on the icon has no effect
dragging an MDF to the icon will load the MDF if no modefile is currently being edited.
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The MakeModes icon bar menu
Info displays the 'Program Info' dialogue box.
VESA selects VESA standard mode timings
Quit exits the program. When you quit the application, a warning box may be opened if there is any unsaved data
Clicking on Discard will discard any unsaved data
Clicking on Cancel will cancel the request to quit the application
Clicking on Save will open the normal RISC OS Save as dialogue box allowing you to save your data
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The MakeModes main menu
This is accessed by clicking the menu button with the pointer over the Mode Maker window
Save MDF leads to a 'Save As' dialogue box that will allow you to save your MDF to disc or to another application using the normal RISC OS method
Generate list leads to a 'Save As' dialogue box. This option will allow you to save a list of modes that are present in the current MDF. This list is saved in TAB separated plain text format that can be loaded into any text editor or desktop publisher
Monitor info leads to the monitor info dialogue box. The Window info dialogue box displays information on the currently selected monitor
New mode will make a copy of the currently selected mode. If you are intending to generate a completely new mode, it is always a good idea to choose an existing mode that most closely matches the mode that you wish to create
Delete mode will delete the currently selected mode. This operation cannot be undone
Comments will send any comments that were found in the current MDF to a text editor such as !Edit where they can be edited and dragged back to the 'Comments' icon in the main display window for inclusion in the saved MDF
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Disclaimer
The software is provided "as is"; Acorn Computers Limited ("Acorn") makes no warranty, express or implied, of the merchantability of this software or its fitness for any particular purpose. In no circumstance shall Acorn be liable for any damage, loss of profits, or any indirect or consequential loss arising out of the use of this software or inability to use this software, even if Acorn has been advised of the possibility of such loss
Acorn are unable to provide any support for this utility. (Not surprising, really - FW, in 2003!)
Limited help may be available from frank at aaug dot net, who also echos Acorn's disclaimer
The original documents from which the attached modified versions were developed, were produced and copyrighted by Acorn Computers Limited in 1994. Whoever now holds the copyright, there does not appear to be any maintenance of the original documents or the application to which they refer, i.e. !MakeModes. Please note the the changes to these documents were made with good intentions and if anyone is aggrieved at the action taken in making these modifications, they should contact the under-mentioned so that appropriate action can be taken.
This application note describes in detail Risc PC monitor definition files
It should be read in conjunction with the !MakeModes revised Manual, which should (hopefully) be found in the same location as this document
!MakeModes is an application which assists in the creation and editing of Ris
PC monitor definition files
The !MakeModes application and this application note assume a degree o
technical knowledge concerning video display generation and is not intende
for use by those unfamiliar with display technology. (User BEWARE!
Applicable Hardware:
Risc PC range
Understood to apply also to the Iyonix PC
Related Application Files:
!MakeModes v:0.25
Also available as version 0.26, but both versions have the same date in the 'Info' panel: "14th December 1994".
Revised Manuals are available in HTML, Ovation Pro, EasiWriter and Impression formats (and as raw text and image files for the do-it-yourselfers), dated 8th June 2003
Original Copyright (C) 1994 Acorn Computers Limited
Every effort has been made to ensure that the information in this leaflet is
true and correct at the time of printing. However, the products described i
this leaflet are subject to continuous development and improvements an
Acorn Computers Limited reserves the right to change its specifications a
any time. Acorn Computers Limited cannot accept liability for any loss o
damage arising from the use of any information or particulars in thi
leaflet. ACORN, ECONET and ARCHIMEDES are trademarks of Acorn Computer
Limited
The above aims are reflected in this modified version, in respect of trying to make explanations clearer
The same aims were in view when making the latest modifications ... FW, 8 Jun 03
Introduction
The Acorn Risc PC, unlike any previous Acorn machine, does not hav
information on screen modes built into the operating system. Screen mode
are instead defined in a Monitor Definition File (MDF) which is loaded whe
the machine boots up. This provides the user of a Risc PC with a muc
greater degree of flexibility when it comes to choosing a monitor as scree
modes can now be individually tailored to suit the facilities offered by th
monitor
Overview
A Monitor Definition File which normally resides in th
!Boot.Resources.Configure.Monitors directory is a plain text file whic
defines all of the parameters necessary for the Risc PC to generate an
display RISC OS screen modes. An example segment of an MDF follows ..
file_format:
monitor_title:Acorn AKF6
DPMS_state:
# 320 x 250 (70Hz
startmod
mode_name:320 x 25
x_res:32
y_res:25
pixel_rate:1258
h_timings:36,14,12,320,12,
v_timings:2,109,0,250,0,8
sync_pol:
endmod
# 800 x 600 (75Hz
startmod
mode_name:800 x 60
x_res:80
y_res:60
pixel_rate:4950
h_timings:80,46,42,800,42,4
v_timings:3,21,0,600,0,
sync_pol:
endmod
# 1024 x 768 (60Hz
# High ban
startmode
mode_name:1024 x 76
x_res:102
y_res:76
pixel_rate:6500
h_timings:128,36,60,1024,60,3
# VESA:136,160,0,1024,0,2
v_timings:6,29,0,768,0,
sync_pol:
endmod
Each screen mode that you wish to use should be defined as above within th
monitor definition file. The application !MakeModes can be used to generat
monitor definition files from data supplied by the user. It should be available from your Acorn Dealer and maybe your local I.T. Centre (if there is one!) The application originally consisted of a disc containing !MakeModes, a ReadMe file and an accompanying manual. Otherwise you may have to seek !MakeModes on a website where such antiquities are stored. (Version 0.26 of !MakeModes is currently available on
You are advised not to edit monitor definition files directly. One possible exception which should not cause a problem is changing the number alongside "DPMS_state:" which is 2 lines below "file_format:1". Even so, it is recommended to make a backup copy of the original before attempting the change
The parameters "file_format", "monitor_title" and "DPMS_state" are set only once at the beginning of an MDF. The command "startmode" tells the machine that a mode definition follows. All lines beginning with "#" are treated as Comments and not acted upon. Below is a summary of all of the commands used in a
MDF
file_format: forma
monitor_title: titl
DPMS_state: stat
# A comment, usually the mode resolution and frame rate (Hz
The spacing shown, immediately above and below, between ":" and the designation or abbreviation is normally absent in real mode definitions. (See the first example nearer the start of this note.
The following explain the abbreviated terms above
mode_name: is a textual name for the mode that will b
used in the Iconbar's Display Manager's mod
menu. It is possible to prevent defined scree
modes from appearing in the modes menu b
simply leaving this field blank. Mode name
are limited to 19 characters in length and ma
contain space characters
x-resolution: is the number of pixels displayed across th
screen
y-resolution: is the number of rasters displayed verticall
(pixels)
hsync: is the width of the horizontal sync pulse
hbpch: is the width of the horizontal back porch
hlbdr: is the width of the left border
hdisp: is the number of pixels displayed horizontall
(which is normally the same as the x-resolution).
hrbdr: is the width of the right border.
hfpch: is the width of the horizontal front porch
vsync: is the width of the vertical sync pulse
vbpch: is the width of the vertical back porch
vtbdr: is the width of the top border
vdisp: is the number of rasters displayed verticall
(pixels)
vbbdr: is the width of the bottom border
vfpch: is the width of the vertical front porch
pixel_rate: is the pixel rate in kHz
sync_polarities:is a number indicating what kind of syn
signals are required. The kinds of syn
signal are as follows
0 hsync normal, vsync norma
1 hsync inverted, vsync norma
2 hsync normal, vsync inverte
3 hsync inverted, vsync inverte
All values on the h_timings line are in units of pixels, and all values o
the v_timings line are in units of raster lines
Note: VIDC20 imposes restrictions on these parameters. In particular, al
the horizontal timing values must be in multiples of 2, and the horizonta
total (hsync + hbpch + hlbdr + hdisp + hrbdr + hfpch) must be a multiple o
4
The diagram below gives a graphical representation of the above information
Glossary of terms
Before describing in detail how these parameters can be used to define a ne
screen mode, it is necessary to understand some of the conventions that wil
be used in this application note.
Video Bandwidth:
Video Bandwidth is the term used to describe the amount of vide
information that a Risc PC can process over a specified time period
Typically, video bandwidth will be specified as megabytes per second e.g.
Risc PC fitted with 2MB VRAM has a maximum video bandwidth of 156MB/sec.
Dot Pitch:
The dot pitch is the physical spacing of the phosphor dots that a monito
uses to generate a screen display. The smaller the dot pitch, the cleare
the picture. Some high resolution screen modes may appear blurred if the do
pitch is not small enough to cope with the size of the pixels bein
generated by the computer
Line Rate (Horizontal frequency):
A monitor's line rate defines the speed at which a monitor can scan on
horizontal line. The line rate is normally specified as a range in kHz, i.e. the AKF60 has a line rate range of 30-50kHz
Frame Rate (Vertical frequency):
The frame rate is the speed at which the monitor can refresh the screen. Th
frame rate is normally specified as a range in Hz, e.g. the AKF60 has a fram
rate range of 40-90Hz
The frame rate has a significant effect on the usability of any given mode formulated for use with a given cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor. If the frequency is too low, the screen will appear to flicker and this can have a profound effect on the person viewing the screen over a period of time. A general guide would be to aim to use not less than 75Hz. The minimum apparently varies from one person to another and also depends on the persistence of the phosphor used in the CRT. Some people claim to be able to work satisfactorily at a frequency as low as 60Hz, whereas some others claim to need at least 80 or 85 Hz
The problem of flicker does not affect LCD/TFT display monitors and modes are usually more constrained by the need to follow the internally programmed modes in respective monitors
Pixel Depth:
Pixel depth dictates the number of colours that can be displayed on th
screen. Pixel depth is measured in bits per pixel (bpp). The following tabl
describes how bits per pixel relates to the number of colours that will b
displayed
Bits per pixel Number of colour
1 bpp
2 bpp
4 bpp 1
8 bpp 25
16 bpp 3200
32 bpp 16 Millio
Limiting Factors
Before creating a new screen mode or a new monitor definition file using the !MakeModes application, you should be fully aware of the factors limiting the display of a screen mode and the inter-relationship of the variable parameters
The following describes these interrelationships and offers guidance on the limits for the screen mode definition. As values are changed, the MakeModes application automatically checks that the mode will be displayable, if it is not, MakeModes will inform you. However, much time will be saved when attempting to create new modes if you understand and work within the limits imposed rather than using a 'trial and error' method
Listed below are the three main limiting factors which are discussed in this document
• Monitor Limitation
• Memory Limitation
• Bandwidth Limitation
Monitor Limitations
The screen mode must not exceed the monitor's line rate (horizonta
frequency), frame rate (vertical frequency) or its maximum pixel rate.
monitors line and frame rate ranges can normally be found in it
accompanying documentation. Please see the MakeModes manual for informatio
on how to enter this information
The Pixel rate is one of the principal variables that you will use in th
MakeModes application. It can be used to increase or decrease a modes Frame rate. Because a modes Line rate is directly affected by its Frame rate, altering the Pixel rate will change this value as well
The Risc PC can have up to three different screen memory configurations, n
VRAM (DRAM only), 1MB VRAM or 2MB VRAM
With no VRAM fitted the Risc PC will be forced to use DRAM which has
slower access time than dedicated Video RAM. This greatly increases th
amount of time spent by the processor updating the screen and therefor
limits the amount of memory that can be used as screen RAM. This limitation in turn limits the maximum resolution and pixel depth that can be used. On a machine with 1MB VRAM, the maximum amount of screen memory that the system can process is 80MB/sec, with 2MB of VRAM, this figure doubles giving a maximum video bandwidth of 160MB/sec. Without VRAM the maximum video bandwidth is 40MB/sec. In order to provide a safety margin, the bandwidth limit file stored in the !Boot directory on the Risc PC hard disc (and in !MakeModes.Limits) sets the maximum bandwidths to 38MB/sec, 76MB/sec and 152MB/sec respectively
Is is important to be aware of both the memory and bandwidth calculations as it is possible to define a mode that fits within the available video RAM but exceeds the machines maximum video bandwidth. The MakeModes application will warn you if a proposed screen mode will exceed either of these limitations
--
Calculating required bandwidth for a screen mode
The bandwidth used by a screen mode increases according to the number o
colours being used. The calculations necessary to find the bandwidth fo
each bits per pixel (bpp) mode are listed below
bpp Calculation use
1 bpp Video Bandwidth = (pixel_rate / 1000000) /
2 bpp Video Bandwidth = (pixel_rate / 1000000) /
4 bpp Video Bandwidth = (pixel_rate / 1000000) /
8 bpp Video Bandwidth = (pixel_rate / 1000000
16 bpp Video Bandwidth = (pixel_rate / 1000000) *
32 bpp Video Bandwidth = (pixel_rate / 1000000) *
These calculations will give results in MB/sec
Calculating memory requirements for a screen mode
Besides bandwidth limitations, another factor that one must also conside
when creating a new mode is the amount of screen memory that will be needed
To work out how much memory a screen mode will need you must first find ou
how many pixels will be displayed in total. Multiplying the x_resolution b
the y_resolution will give this figure
pixel_total = x_resolution * y_resolutio
This total is then used in conjunction with the number of bits per pixe
(bpp) to calculate the amount of memory required
bpp Calculation use
1 bpp VRAM = pixel_total /
2 bpp VRAM = pixel_total /
4 bpp VRAM = pixel_total /
8 bpp VRAM = pixel_tota
16 bpp VRAM = pixel_total *
32 bpp VRAM = pixel_total *
Examples
The following table gives an example of how much memory is required for some standard screen modes at various colour depths (bpp)
As can be seen from the table above, not all screen modes can be displayed at every pixel depth, e.g. only machines with 2MB VRAM would be able to display 800 x 600 at 16 Million colours. Machines fitted with only 1MB VRAM could only display those modes that require 1024KB or less.
What the horizontal and vertical timings mean
The horizontal sync width (hsync) value is the time, in units of pixels of the horizontal sync pulse. If the hsync pulse is not wide enough the monitor will be unable to sync correctly
The horizontal back porch (hbpch) and and horizontal front porch (hfpch
values define the time, in units of pixels, from the end of the hsync pulse to the start of the horizontal left border (hlbdr) and the end of the horizontal right border to the end of the horizontal scan line
respectively. Amongst other things the hsync+hbpch time period is used by the VIDC20 to switch between cursor and video data. If the combined time period is not long enough, the screen display will be corrupted as the VIDC20 will be unable to fetch video data before the screen display starts
The horizontal left border and horizontal right border values define th
time period, in units of pixels, for the left and right screen borders
NOTE: The horizontal left border and horizontal back porch values can be altered to position the picture correctly in the horizontal sense.
The horizontal display (hdisp) value is the horizontal screen resolution, i.e the number of pixels displayed across the screen
The vertical sync (vsync) value is the width, in units of raster, of th
sync width pulse. If this pulse is not wide enough, the monitor will b
unable to sync to the signal
The vertical porches (vbpch, vfpch), vertical borders (vtbdr, vbbdr) are the vertical equivalents of the horizontal values but are all measured in units of raster, not pixels
I recently needed some new speakers for my main computer, well to be honest the word "needed" could be replaced by the want "wanted". Not that there was much wrong with my old speakers, but I am doing an increasing amount of music writing and I am getting a bit miffed that what sounds OK upstairs on the PC, sounds awful when written to CD and played on the big Hi-Fi downstairs. Anyway I wanted a surround sound setup, with plenty of bass, and a nice rounded sound. Many computer speakers sound far too sharp and clipped to my ears, and I can't work with them. My usual source of computer bits an bobs is e-buyer, but of course you can't hear speakers over the Internet, so you need to see and hear them in the flesh.
Every month or so there is a computer fair in Bracknell (perhaps I ought to go one week with a pile of VirtualAcorns and see what happens), this is the ideal venue to buy speakers, as you can see and hear them. A trawl round the show left me with a choice of one, there were plenty of speakers available, but none of the others were better than my existing ones.
Anyway the ones I selected were a set of Niveous 2100-SA's. without even hearing them I was half sold, anything that is big, silver and has proper buttons on is off to a good start. When I say buttons I don't mean ones you press in and out, but big chunky metal ones that you turn. The sort of buttons you used to see on Stereos almost 30 years ago. The setup comes with a subwoofer, a centre speaker and 4 satellite speakers, it also comes with a remote control, which would save me reaching over those extra few inches to grab the volume control when the phone rings. As the computer show was drawing to a close I was able to wave a pile of money under the stall holders nose and get a 10% discount, taking the whole kit and kabodle to exactly £50. I have since discovered a couple of other companies selling the same set for £80 so I am quite pleased with myself.
The full surround sound set
As as aside I assumed that Niveous was a made up word, like Mondeo and Customer Care Line, but no according to Webster it means snowy, resembling snow or partaking of the qualities of snow. Now who said RISCWorld wasn't educational.
So what are they like? First impressions are good, they are well packed, and very well made for what is a cheap set of speakers. All the speakers are made of wood, not plastic like my old set, and have a reasonable weight (a lot of weight in the case of the subwoofer). All the speakers are connected by phono sockets and a full set of leads is supplied, including all the leads from the computer to the subwoofer. The remote control, feels a little cheap in comparison, but does its job well enough. The speakers can operate either as a full surround sound set, or as a normal 2.1 (stereo + sub) setup, which is how I currently have them.
Set up in stereo mode
The first job was to connect them up, so where is the manual? Help I can't find it, but wait, what is this nasty single bit of printed paper in the bottom of the box, it claims to be a manual, but it's worse than useless, oh well how hard can speakers be to connect up? Actually quite hard when you see the number of connections on the back of the subwoofer, luckily everything is clearly marked so its a matter of a couple of minutes to wire everything up. So what do they sound like, well they must be good as I can hear lots of detail on music that I couldn't hear before, including some subtle mistakes on my own compositions. In fact I spent the whole of the next day playing different pieces of music to hear what they sounded like, and the results far exceed my expectations. .
I have also had a long play with the remote control, since this is undocumented. It includes separate volume controls for each channel, so you can control front, centre, rear and sub independently, as well as all together if you want. It has a mute button and a really funky 3D mode, that fakes surround sound with just 2.1 speakers, this works very well on dance tracks, but don't try it with heavy classical music as it makes a mess, it does sound good with a piano though.
Conclusion
So am I happy with these speakers, oh yes, very much. I actually prefer the sound to my office Hi-Fi, which looks like that might get made redundant after 3 years of constant use. I would safely recommend these speakers to anyone, they sound great for the money, they look great, and even at low volumes produce a warm well rounded sound with lots of detail, at higher volumes they shake the house, oh and in the summer you can use put your face in front of the sub woofer and use it as a fan. If you are interested in listening to or composing music then these speakers will do the job admirably, indeed I am just about to try them with the copy of Rhapsody supplied with this very issue. The only negatives are the very poor instructions, and the slightly nasty looking remote, but then I bought these for the sound, and sound for pound they are a bargain.
A silver PC with a silver speaker
Product details
Product:
Niveous 2100-S
Supplier:
Vivatech Lt
Price:
£55.00 inc VA
Address:
Shambria, Woodvill Road, Leatherhead, Surre
Tel:
01372 37736
Aaron
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE4/PCWORLD/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 4, RISC OS in a PC World
RISC OS in a PC World
Dave Holden introduces the great debate...
There has been great debate in recent months over the merits of both RISC OS hardware and the VirtualAcorn emulation route. Since there has been so much discussion about it we thought it would be a good idea to pitch both side of the argument. We aren't saying that either argument is correct, or indeed incorrect. We have asked two RISC World contributors with different viewpoints to put their points and Aaron isn't going to edit either one (beyond spelling and grammer - ED).(see my editorial on opinions - ED) but he will not let that influence any part of this. However before we see both points of view I think it would be wise to review a little of the history of PCs and Acorns.
The past...
From the very early days Acorn always tried to run other operating systems on their hardware. Even the BBC computer had 'add on' second processors which enabled it to run CPM and DOS. In fact it was actually designed with them in mind.
When the Archimedes was launched Acorn appreciated that a significant proportion of users also needed to use DOS. They therefore produced the PC Emulator, which was nearly as fast as the 'industry standard' 4.99 MHz PC XT of the time. Later the ARM 3 gave this a speed boost but it had fallen behind in both speed and the model of the hardware it emulated, although it was still a useful tool as many businesses were still running DOS software (Lotus, Wordperfect, etc.) on something like a 12 Mhz PC AT.
There were, of course, also the machines intended to run a version of UNIX. As these were really intended for specialist use I'll not go into details here, but it's worth remembering that there usually was (and is still) a UNIX-like alternative to run on the hardware.
As PC performance increased Acorn and Aleph 1 worked together to supply a hardware solution, and various PC cards were produced. Most of these were 'podules', but some were designed to be fitted to the A3000, A3010, A3020 and A4000 machines. The problem with all of these was that they were extremely expensive, which is hardly surprising as they were, in effect, a complete PC on a card. So much so that they were often dearer than a PC system of equivalent power. They were also limited in performance, both in terms of processing power and RAM, since they couldn't share RAM with the host processor and, particularly with some models of computer, the amount of power that could be supplied to an expansion card was limited.
By the time the RiscPC appeared Acorn were aware that something better was needed now that Windows (at that time 3.1) was rapidly becoming the norm. A major selling point of the new machines was therefore the PC card. At 33 Mhz it was capable of running most of the contemporary Windows and DOS software at usable speed, and at just £99 the price was right.
So up until this time RISC OS users who also needed to run DOS or Windows as a second OS could do so without too much cost and at a reasonable speed. From this point on, however, things were not so rosy.
Desktop PCs began to take off in a big way. By now they had 'escaped' from the office, and were finding their way into more and more homes. Prices were falling, and, with newer and faster processors, performance was rapidly increasing. In the space of a few years the 'standard' PC went from something like a 33 Mhz 386 to a 330 Mhz PII, and, now that the machines were being used more and more in the home rather than just for business, there were corresponding increments in graphics and sound capabilities.
Meanwhile we got the Strong ARM, with its big performance improvement on the RISC OS side, but the ability to run Windows on a RiscPC (by now DOS was effectively obsolete) was becoming more expensive.
After the original PC card there was a 66 Mhz 486, then a 100 Mhz 486. These were quite a bit quicker than the original, and then 100 Mhz and 133Mhz 586 cards followed and were even better for Windows. For a short time the RiscPC's performance was snapping at the heels of a basic budget PC, but not for long, and there were other problems.
The biggest problem was cost. The original 33 Mhz PC card was a complete package. For your £99 + VAT you got the card, the software to run it, and a copy of DOS. Because DOS was neither memory hungry nor required large hard discs, that was pretty much all you needed. Once Windows became the PC standard, particularly Windows 95 and later, things changed. Firstly the faster cards were quite a bit more expensive, rising to over £250 for a 586. Secondly the standard software wasn't good enough if you wanted to run Windows. Aleph 1 produced much improved software which did allow PC card users to run later versions of Windows reasonably well, but it added more cost, another £70 or so. At this time most RiscPC owners were happy with 16 or 32 Mb of RAM and something like a 400 Mb hard drive. It was possible to use Windows 3.1 with 16 Mb of RAM allocated to the PC card and a few hundred Mb of hard drive space, but with Windows 95 this wasn't anything like enough. By the time users had added enough RAM and a bigger hard drive (and these things weren't always as cheap as they are today), and purchased a copy of Windows it was costing more to add a PC card to a RiscPC than to buy a complete stand alone PC system, often well over £500.
There were some advantages in having both systems in a single box, but it wasn't long before PC performance was leaving the PC cards way behind, not the least because of the 32 Mb RAM limit, and this was happening while PC prices continued to drop. By the end of the 90's the RiscPC PC card was no longer a viable alternative to a real PC for any serious user.
The present...
This is pretty much where we were until recently. If you needed to use a PC, and more and more people did, then if you wanted to use RISC OS you really needed two computers. This wasn't as bad as it sounds, because the RiscPC and PC could share a monitor and keyboard, and these are the components that take up most space. Also low PC prices meant that cost wasn't a major factor.
This was made even more attractive by the fact that there wasn't any new RISC OS hardware, so most users weren't forced to make a choice between spending money on a new PC or a new RISC OS machine. They could continue running their RISC OS software and still have an up to date PC, or as up to date as they felt they needed, without any penalty. Another 'pro' is that now that so few RISC OS computers are used in schools the release of these machines onto the secondhand market meant a dramatic drop in the cost of a secondhand NIC card, which makes networking a RiscPC and PC much cheaper.
Now the situation has changed, there is new RISC OS hardware, there are the Iyonix and the Omega. There is also VirtualRPC-SE, which allows users to run RISC OS 4 and RISC OS Select on PC hardware. It's time to make a choice. Do you choose the hardware route, or do you choose the emulation route? It depends on what your priorities are. The next two articles in this feature are designed to put the case for using VirtualAcorn and the case for using a real RISC OS computer.
Dave Holden
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE4/PD/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 4, PD World
PD World
Paul Brett with the latest freeware and PD releases for RISC OS.
BogoFilter - Stefan Bellon
Bogofilter is a Bayesian spam filter. In its normal mode of operation, it takes an email message or other text on standard input, does a statistical check against lists of "good" and "bad" words, and returns a status code indicating whether or not the message is spam. Bogofilter is designed with fast algorithms, uses the Berkeley DB for fast startup and lookups, is coded directly in C and is tuned for speed, so it can be used for production by sites that process a lot of mail.
Bogofilter treats its input as a bag of tokens. Each token is checked against "good" and "bad" wordlists, which maintain counts of the numbers of times it has occurred in non-spam and spam mails. These numbers are used to compute the probability that a mail in which the token occurs is spam. After probabilities for all input tokens have been computed, a fixed number of the probabilities that deviate furthest from average are combined using Bayes's theorem on conditional probabilities. If the computed probability that the input is spam exceeds a cutoff determined at compile time (currently 0.95, for the Robinson-Fisher algorithm), Bogofilter returns 0 if spam, 1 if ham, 2 if unsure.
BogoFilter
While this method sounds crude compared to the more usual pattern-matching approach, it turns out to be extremely effective. Paul Graham's paper A Plan For Spam is recommended reading.This program substantially improves on Paul's proposal by doing smarter lexical analysis. In particular, hostnames and IP addresses are retained as recognition features rather than broken up. Various kinds of MTA cruft such as dates and message-IDs are discarded so as not to bloat the wordlists.
CDRip - R.W.Darlington
CDRip will convert a directory full of WAV files into mp3 files. Just drag the !CDrip application into the directory containing the WAV files and double click on !CDrip. The new MP3 files will be saved in the same directory. Files other than WAV files and other directories are perfectly safe in these directories, it only converts WAV files. Needless to say with MP3 files, hard drives with long filenames and large directories are preferable.
The Shine, Blade and Lame enclosed within work on a SA-RPC. In accordance with the rules for distribution of these MP3 encoders, the documents are enclosed.
FontMGR2 - Tom Tanner
!FontMGR2 was designed to give a better interface to you for your fonts. It is fair to say that it performs this task very well. In addition to this, !FontMGR2 allows you to group fonts and turn those groups on and off. So that applications you are using can have those fonts hidden from them. This means no more five yard font menus eating up your screen when you go to change font. It also allows you to store setups and its display features are not only configureable, but also a pleasure to use.
FontMGR2
Font Manager requires RISC OS version 3.7 or greater with the nested Wimp. If you have very few fonts then installing !FontMGR2 may seem to be a bit unnecessary. In this case you are probably right, but if you have more than 10 fonts it will most likely be useful and if you have more than 25 then it will most likely be invaluable. Some users may wish to install !FontMGR2 with few fonts in order to use the utilities such as FontView, FontPages and MaTricks.
Help2 - Rik Griffin
Help2 is an interactive help display program, similar to the !Help supplied with RISC OS. It is very similar to the version of !Help in RISC OS 4 (and 5), but better.
Help2
To run Help2, double click the !Help icon. The application will load to the right hand side of the iconbar. Whenever the pointer is over an object that provides interactive help, the help text will be displayed in a pop up window near the pointer. Clicking Select or Adjust on the iconbar icon will toggle Help2 on and off. Click Menu over the iconbar icon for the application menu. The only item that should need any explanation is "Configure". This opens the configuration window. Note that the configuration window is actually a separate application, which needs the Toolbox modules to run. If you haven't got the Toolbox, you can edit the file "Help2$Choices" by hand. To see what the various configuration options do, run Help2 and point at them.
Png2Spr - Tom Tanner
Png2Spr allows conversion of graphics in the new "PNG" format to Acorn sprite files, and vice versa. Note that due to the Acorn sprite formats, the program converts 16 bit RGB colours to 8 bit RGB colours. Also, transparency is supported as an on/off mask. The PNG web pages (specifications & example files) are to be found at
Png2Spr
To convert a PNG file (type B60), double click the file, or drop the file onto the program icon on the icon bar. To save the file when converted, click the menu button over the displayed picture, and drag the sprite to where you want to save it, or type in a path name and click OK. To convert a sprite to a PNG file, drop the sprite onto the iconbar icon.
VCache - 7th software
VCache is a RISC OS relocatable module designed to simplify access to large files and blocks of memory by acting as a cacheing system. If you are not a programmer, then VCache will be of little interest. When dealing with datasets or files which are larger than the free memory in the machine, there is often a requirement for virtual memory: a process of swapping subblocks of the data in and out of memory to a file on disc as and when they are required.
However, virtual memory has a couple of drawbacks. The first being that it really needs support in the OS in order to work well. RISC OS does not have any support for virtual memory. The second drawback is that virtual memory requires you to set-aside a block of logical address space as large as the dataset to process. On a 32 bit RISC CPU, there is only 4 GB of logical address space and substantially less with RISC OS running. Thus, a program could not efficiently process multiple multi-gigabyte files simultaneously, even with virtual memory. What VCache does is to indirect the access to the file through a set of routines. This is clearly slower than direct access but means that a virtual address, anywhere in the 4 GB range, can be used to access data and a (virtually) unlimited number of VCache areas of these sizes can exist concurrently.
Signing off
That is all I have for you this time, as usual if you would like your software featuring in RISC World send it to the editorial email address.
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.
Rhapsody is supplied under licence for use on one computer at a time. The user may copy the program for backup purposes only. Please contact APDL for details of site and network licences.
This version of Rhapsody is supplied with RISC World and is Licensed for use only by RISC World subscribers.
While every care is taken, the publisher cannot be held responsible for any errors in either this product or documentation for this product, nor for the loss of any data or consequential effects from the use of this package.
APDL
39 Knighton Park Road
Sydenham
London
SE26 5RN
Telephone: 020 8778 2659
Fax: 020 8488 0487
Email: info@apdl.co.uk
Web: www.apdl.co.uk
Chapter 1 - Loading, Playing and Saving
Loading a score
Playing a score
The Options menu
The Play from menu
The Go to: menu
Saving a score
The Score menu
The Save window
The Headings window
Chapter 2 - Setting up a new score
The Stave menu
Adding more staves
Deleting staves
Deleting a whole score
Chapter 3 - Editing a score
The Display menu
Moving the cursor about
Editing a score
Adding notes and clusters
Deleting notes etc.
Use of icons and symbols
Altering the appearance of the score
Chapter 4 - Deleting, Clearing and Copying
Selecting a score
Selecting a Stave
Marking a block
Removing a block
Selecting a block
Deleting all or part of a score
Clearing all or part of a score
Clearing a score
Clearing a stave
Clearing a block
Copying a score
Copying a stave
Copying part of a score into another part of the s
Castle Technology Ltd announce that after nearly ten very successful years the RiscPC is shortly to cease production. Once current RiscPC supplies have been exhausted the RISC OS market will be based on the Acorn A7000+ and IYONIX pc, both produced exclusively by Castle, and other RISC OS machines from independent manufacturers.
The RiscPC was announced by Acorn early in 1994 and went on sale in the spring of that year. At the time it was the worlds fastest desktop computer based on RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) technology.
Originally using the ARM600 processor this was subsequently replaced by the ARM700. A major step forward came with the advent of the StrongARM processor in the autumn of 1996 giving a significant boost in performance. The StrongARM processor remained the basis of the RiscPC from then on.
After Acorn pulled out of the desktop computer market in September 1998 Castle took over the production of the RiscPC and A7000+ computers, and RISC OS Ltd released RISC OS 4 the following year. In the autumn of 2002 Castle announced the all-new IYONIX pc, running on an XScale processor and with a new, updated, version of RISC OS, RISC OS 5.
Given the short lifespans of so many other computers it is a striking affirmation of Acorn's original design for the RiscPC that it has remained at the centre of the RISC OS world for nearly ten years.
Customers benefited from a string of upgrades that meant the RiscPC could be continually upgraded to the latest specification.
With the successful launch of the IYONIX pc, now a year old, it will have been obvious to market watchers that the RiscPC could not continue indefinitely. The time has now arrived when no more RiscPCs will be manufactured, but RISC OS will continue on the IYONIX pc, now the preferred platform of choice among RISC OS users.
Jack Lillingston said, "The demise of the Risc PC is the end of an era.
It has served the RISC OS market for an incredibly long time and proved a wonderful tool for those who appreciate RISC OS systems. The increasing difficulty in obtaining components and its relative lack of speed in today's demanding markets, make it no longer viable. As far as Castle is concerned the future of RISC OS computing now lies with the IYONIX pc and the continuing development of RISC OS 5. Nevertheless, the Risc PC will be greatly missed for what it has allowed users to achieve during its long lifetime."
Issued by Akalat Publishing on behalf of Castle Technology Ltd.
Editors note - this is a bit of a sad moment all round, but it was going to happen eventually, the RiscPC is simply too slow and too expensive to manufacture. Still the future is bright and I am sure that users will continue with their RiscPCs for many years to come and lets hope potential RiscPC owners buy a more modern machine such as the Omega or the Iyonix, or one of the many VirtualAcorn powered machines that are now available.
Castle Technology
ÿÿÿÿVOLUME4/ISSUE4/RUP/INDEX.HTM Volume 4, Issue 4, Round up
Round up
Aaron tried to round up the debate...
Well, there we have it, and it wasn't what I asked for. To recap we asked two regular RISC World contributors, one who uses VirtualAcorn and both of whom have an Iyonix, to write a lucid well constructed argument to support their choice of the way they run RISC OS. This would hopefully help kickstart an intelligent debate to allow readers to make up their own minds with the help of experienced professional journalists. Some hope.
What was delivered to us was two badly constructed rants. Instead of explaining the benefits of their choice they both decided to simply bash the alternative, brilliant. To me the argument that A is better than B because B is rubbish doesn't carry any weight. What I want to know is why A is actually better, not why the author doesn't like B. I suppose it was a bit much to hope that both would deliver the goods as requested, but for both of them to make a mess of it was rather a surprise.
This left me with a problem, I couldn't edit the articles because I am not independent, nor would I embarrass the authors concerned by putting their names on the articles. So I was left with two choices, either dump the whole feature, or try and make something useful out of it. After a bit of a think I decided to publish the articles as is, but also write this short additional article to accompany them.
The articles
At least the articles do provide a fair representation of the views that have been expressed in various public forums over the last year or so. Why people get so polarised into one camp or another is completely beyond me. If you don't like A, or it's not suitable for your needs then don't go down that route, chose B instead. Or perhaps choose a completely different option that suits your needs. Not everyone has the same requirements and people do make different choices. The "tribal" thinking of "he choose different to me, he's wrong, lets attack him, loot his village, steal his women and his food" doesn't seem to fit in the 21st century.
So I don't actually agree with either article and I will try to explain why. Firstly emulation and real machines, well it's a bit like comparing chalk and wildebeest. I seem them as complimentary, and as far as I am concerned they serve different purposes. Let me give you a real world example, can you take your Iyonix into work and plug it into the network, no, most IT departments would run a mile. By the same token can you plug a RISC OS podule (for example for data logging) into a PC running an emulator, no. So in order to do both you need both (now I know some smart alec will pop up and say they take their Iyonix to work, good for you, well done, but you are the exception). I think having access to both is a good idea, use an emulator when its the best/only tool that will do the job and use a real machine when it is the best/only tool for the job.
The problem is simple, we have two polarised (but small) groups, one at each end of the spectrum and large number of people in the middle who see the views expressed by both camps, and are none the wiser as a result. It's a shame that both articles that were submitted to RISC World ended up with a "playground" mentality, on reading one of them I was waiting for the alternative to be called "a big lump of poo". Both alternatives have advantages and disadvantages, but why can't you simply have both?
If you do want to express an opinion about either of these articles then please send an e-mail to the editorial address and I will get the authors concerned to respond in the next issue.
If you have read this issues GamesWorld column you will know that XU4 is a version of the original Ultima IV game updated to run on modern computers. Ultima IV was a classic game at its launch in 1985, and went on to spawn many more versions over the years.
At the start of Ultima IV
You need to fulfil a major quest and must explore the lands of Brittania, and explore a number of deep dark and above all dangerous dungeons. Even above ground you aren't safe as hoards of rouges and cutthroats are ready to attack you at a moments notice.
Time for a fight
Ultima IV is a big game, and you will need all the help you can get, so we have reproduced the supplied documentation, and the original history of Britannia below, good luck, you are going to need it!
Running XU4
The actual data files from the original Ultima 4 are loaded at runtime, which means that a copy of Ultima 4 for DOS must be present at runtime.
Fortunately, Ultima IV is available as closed-source freeware on the internet (legally). A copy is mirrored at xu4.sourceforge.net.
In this RISCOS distribution the Ultima4 file has been downloaded and place in the sub-directory Ultima4.
The Ultima IV VGA upgrade has been applied to the provided files distributed here.
At the title screen, a configuration menu can be accessed by pressing'c'. Here, the screen scale, filter, volume and other settings can be modified. Note: the game must be restarted for the new settings to take effect. These settings are stored in the file UnixEnv$HOME/.xu4rc.
xu4 also accepts the following command line options
-f- fullscreen mode
-g- german keyboard - swap y & z
-i - skip the intro, go directly into the game
-q - quiet mode - no music
-scale n - scale the original graphics by a factor of n
-filter n - use a filter on the scaled images; point, 2xBi, 2xSaI
and AdvanceMAME can be specified
-v - verbose output; prints out information useful fo
troubleshooting
Ultima IV Documentation
Included with Ultima 4 for DOS, as downloaded from one of the above sites, are electronic copies of the printed documentation from the original Ultima IV box. HISTORY.TXT contains the "The History of Britannia", a general introduction to the world of Ultima IV. WISDOM.TXT contains "The Book of Mystic Wisdom", which explains the system of magic and provides descriptions of the spells and reagents.
Version of these documents converted to HTML are included with the RISCOS Version.
You may also find the following map of Britannia helpful.
The world of Brittania
There is also a HTML version of the keyboard references converted from the original MS Word format document
PDF versions of these books may be available from
An image of the cloth map from the original Ultima IV box can be found at either of these sites:
Misc
See
Please send me a mail at andrewtaylor@users.sourceforge.net if you are interested in helping.
This original README document that this file is based upon is supplied in the games main directory.
Copyright Source code: GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, version 2. See the COPYING file for details.
Copyright Ultima4 files (in ULTIMA4) sub-directory: Closed-source freeware.
This RISC OS port
Ported to RISCOS by Alan Buckley October 2003. This program is 32 bit compatible and requires RISCOS 3.6+. Digital Renderer module (available from
The !UnixHome application (available from
You will also need to have installed the SharedUnixLibrary 1.0.2 which is available from the Unix Porting Project (
Part of the Unix Porting Project. Support for this program under RISC OS is only offered to subscribers. See
Status/Compiling
Version 0.7 - see the ReadME file for details
The source code provided here has had minor changes to the original to support RISC OS.
