This Saturday sees the Midlands User Group Midlands Midsummer Mugshow in Kenilworth, Warwickshire. All the usual suspects will be there including [commence lazy cut and paste] RISCOS Ltd, ROOL, RComp, CJE, Drag 'n Drop, Soft Rock Software, Orpheus, Qercus, Steve Fryatt Software, Netsurf, MathMagical, Serious Statistical Software [end cut and paste] and of course the Midland User Group themselves.
 
Entrance fee is a pound, free to kids.
 
More info on the MUGs website - no, they really do call themselves MUG, it's not like I'm calling you saddos or something...
 

Tech-centric news site The Register have an article up that gives a brief overview of Acorn, the BeagleBoard, and the fact that RISC OS runs on it. Not exactly new news to the average RISC OS user, but the article is still worth a look just for to see the comments from old hands such as Eddie Edwards, Heyrick, and Hugo Tyson, and some extra trivia tidbits linked to by commenter jlocke.
 
Now, who wants to be the first to enlighten Peter Gathercole that adding (working) pre-emptive multitasking to RISC OS is in no way "trivial"?
 

Thanks to the Wakefield RISC OS Computer Group for putting on another great show - the turnout was good and the atmosphere was relaxed and friendly. Sorry, there's no detailed show report from me this year, but to give you an idea of what went on here's a summary of the tweets that I posted throughout the day, interspersed with various comments from the peanut gallery Scroll down for my photos from the show (and Joel Rowbottom has uploaded more here).
 

The fifteenth Wakefield Show will take place this weekend in, er, Wakefield. It runs from 10.30am to 4pm this Saturday, and a ticket will set you back a fiver (free for children).
 
There are quite a few exhibitors confirmed, including both RISCOS Ltd and RISC OS Open. The former will have the latest versions of RISC OS SIX, while the latter will be demonstrating the latest builds of the open source Beagleboard port, and possibly even a Touchbook running RISC OS. Other highlights will (hopefully) include:

• NetSurf 2.5, including all the latest improvements and fixes
• Messenger Pro 6 - lots of updates to the leading commercial email client for RISC OS
• Latest versions of MW Software's applications, including the new PostScript 3 printer drivers
• Latest versions of CashBook, PrintPDF, Organizer 2, and other apps

There'll be theatre presentations from all the usual suspects, including ROOL, ROL, R-Comp and MW Software. For more information, head over to the website.
 

Watching video on RISC OS isn't very easy. We've run an article here on how you can download and convert YouTube videos into a format RISC OS can understand. Though it's very clever, and the tools involved are actively developed, it's not as simple as clicking 'Play' in a browser window.
 
Improving this situation has been hampered up until now for two main reasons:

• RISC OS hardware has been too slow to play back video at an acceptable rate;
• RISC OS software hasn't supported popular codecs (formats), some of which are proprietary and expensive to license.

 
The first of these is already well on the way to being fixed. The Beagleboard is modestly powered in comparison to the average desktop PC, but it's perfectly capable of playing video at a decent rate. The diminutive boards have been shown running 720p video (a high-definition format) while running a Linux distribution - have a look here to see this in action.
 
The RISC OS port can't quite match that yet. All that might be about to change, though, due to the development of something called Theorarm. This is a library of routines to enable the playing of videos in the Ogg Theora format on ARM-based machines. Ogg Theora is a relatively new format, but it has some interesting features. Perhaps most importantly, it's entirely open source, so videos encoded using the technology can be played back by any suitably-written software. Moreover, Theora is one of the contenders for the [video] tag in the new HTML5 specification. That means that it may become a significant rival to the more common MPEG and Flash videos on the web.
 
Theorarm is interesting, as it's been optimised for newer ARM chips using hand-written assembly code. This makes it very fast. The developer, Robin Watts (of Warm Silence Software fame) has done some development work on the Beagleboard, with promising results: "With post processing disabled, I can play a PAL DVD sized film (720x576x25fps, 48kHz stereo audio track) in realtime with software YUV2RGB. The limited profiling I've done, along with some back-of-an-envelope maths suggests that we should just about be able to do 720p films if the YUV2RGB process is done by hardware." That means, in English, that DVD-quality film can be played back on a Beagleboard with decent audio too. If some of the complex conversions from YUV colour format to RGB could be carried out in hardware, then higher definition films could be played.
 
This is pretty exciting stuff for Beagleboard owners. If Theorarm is ported to RISC OS (and there's no reason, other than developer time and effort, why it couldn't be), then we'd have the basis of a fast, native video playback system. Some issues would require addressing, of course, since RISC OS can't handle the Beagleboard's YUV facility - see here for Jeffrey Lee's proposals to fix this - but these are all surmountable.
 
If anyone is interested in getting involved, then the ROOL project is the place to start. In particular, the proposals for working on the GraphicsV vector need attention from developers with the right level of experience, and the draft API on the ROOL site could do with some more exposure.
 
A few years ago, RISC OS lacked fast hardware, a half-capable browser and a media player capable of showing popular streaming video formats. The first two are being actively addressed - what are the chances that the last one will be as well?
 

There's been a fair bit of effort to get RISC OS software working on ROOL's port of RISC OS to the Beagleboard and other OMAP-driven boards. The shift from software that works on the Iyonix to software that works on the OMAP family isn't as big as the shift to 32-bit of a few years ago, but there are still some issues. Most importantly, the OMAP family of processors use the 'ARMv7' specification, which means that certain instructions that work on the Iyonix's IOP processor (or earlier) fall over.
 
The ease of fixing a recalcitrant application depends on how it's been written. If the app's written in BASIC, then all should be well. If it's written in C, then a recompile with the latest version of the GCC or Norcroft tools should fix it. If you've got some hand-crafted assembler to cope with, then the process is a bit more involved. There's a full list of these technical issues here.
 
As time goes on, more and more software is having fixes applied to enable compatibility. Over the last few days, David Pilling's Ovation Pro and SparkFS have been updated to work with the new hardware. The text editor Zap has also been fixed, though there's not an official release of this yet. Apps like NetSurf, KinoAMP, ArtWorks and RDPClient already work, and there's some indication that EasiWriter and TechWriter will soon join the list.
 
More details on the applications that work on the new hardware platform can be found here. Hopefully this list will keep on growing. Meanwhile, at least one RISC OS user is happy with the experience of using the BeagleBoard...
 

We celebrated the 10th anniversary of our first article on March 10th. Where were you? Come to think of it, where were we? Yeah, we forgot about it too (but we are getting on a bit).
 
In fact we even forgot to renew the domain and didn't notice until this morning when some spammers called NUTFACE tried to hijack the site. Normal service has now been resumed, so expect our next article shortly before Christmas.
 

APDL, long-time distributor of Public Domain and not-so Public Domain software, have taken the next logical step from distributing their PD/freeware collection on floppy disc or CD and have begun distributing it online instead. Apart from the obvious advantage to the end-user of being able to access the software immediately, APDL have also decided to forgoe charging any nominal download fees, making the archive truly free.
 
Of course the age of much of the software is likely to make its relevance somewhat limited (especially if it's not 32bit compatible, or even StrongARM compatible) - but by making the archive available free of charge APDL have given Acorn preservation enthusiasts a big helping hand, and for that this move should be applauded.
 
APDL point out that not all the software from their PD/freeware catalogue has found its way online yet, so some patience may be necessary if your favourite bit of software is missing.
 
Links

• Newsgroup announcement
• APDL's PD library main page
• APDL's commercial software catalogue - much of which is also available for download (although not for free, obviously!)