Here's a quick roundup of everything that's happened over the past few weeks.

New software releases

NetSurf 2.8

Version 2.8 of the NetSurf browser was released last month. The major new features in this release are a new cross-platform system for handling frames and iframes, and an improved image cache.

Charm 2.4

Peter Nowosad's Charm programming language also saw a new release last month. Version 2.4 is the first version of the language to be 32bit compatible, so if you're looking for something a little bit different from your programming languages then now's a good as time as any to give it a go.

StrongHelp 2.86

A new version of StrongHelp was released to the StrongED mailing list, featuring several bugfixes, mainly for ARMv7 compatability. Download it here.

CDFaker now 32bit

Steffen Huber has released a 32bit version of Andy Armstrong's CDFaker utility, which allows you to mount ISO images and read their contents via CDFS. Apart from being 32bit compatible, this release is also fully ARMv7 compatible.

InterGIF 6.18

Martin Weurthner's popular InterGIF utility has also seen an update. The main focus of this release was to make the utility ARMv7 compatible.

DigitalCD updates

Music player DigitalCD and related modules (TimPlayer, DiskSample) have been updated to add support for more tracker music formats, along with a few bugfixes.

New C/C++ tools release

And last but not least, RISC OS Open have released version 22 of the C tools package. The main development focus for this release was on improving objasm, to add support for the full ARMv7 instruction set, and to add support for some features offered by the assembler available in ARM's RealView package (which has a shared heritage with objasm and the other 'ROOL' tools).
 
For purchasing information, see ROOL's announcement.

RISC OS 5 news

OMAP4 ROM now available to download

As mentioned in the previous news roundup, Willi Theiss has been working on porting RISC OS to TI's OMAP4. This work has now found its way into ROOL's CVS, allowing them to add a (Pandaboard-compatible) OMAP4 ROM image to the downloads page. However as this is a first release, expect to see a fair number of bugs and missing features.

Raspberry Pi port on the cards

Veteran developer Adrian Lees has expressed an interest in porting RISC OS to the low-cost Raspberry Pi computer. Previously the possibility of a port was put into doubt by the question of whether anyone would have access to the required hardware documentation, but since Adrian works at Broadcom alongside Raspberry Pi Foundation members it sounds like lack of documentation will be the least of his issues.

Bounty pot reaches £1K

The amount of money available to developers through the ROOL bounty system has now reached £1000. However none of the bounties have yet hit their (secret) target values, so it looks like any budding programmers will have to wait a bit longer before they're able to take on any of the tasks listed (unless they want to do it for free!)
 
Correction: As has been pointed out by ROOL, bounties don't have any target funding values. Instead, interested parties merely need to get in touch and say that they're starting work once they feel that the money in the pot has reached an acceptable value. For more info on the workings of the bounty system, see here.

Filesystem bounties

On the subject of bounties, developer Rob Sprowson has recently had a go at analysing all the different filesystem wishlist items and boiling them down to a list of defined bounties, which can be found here. It's probable that this list (or something close to it) will be adopted by ROOL and added to the bounty area of their website in the near future. Not to be content with just making a bounty list, Rob has also had a go at fixing a few filing system bugs recently, mainly focusing around making sure FileSwitch and the filer are happy with files between 2G and 4G in size, as well as fixing a couple of bugs in RPCEmu that stopped large files from working there.

London show approaching

And finally, this is your official reminder that the 2011 RISC OS London show is here in just under two weeks time, on the 29th of October. Apart from the usual names on the exhibitors list it's worth pointing out that there'll be a pre-release version of the Raspberry Pi board on show. And if Adrian hasn't got it running RISC OS natively by the end of the show, it sounds like the RPCEmu team will be there with a copy of the RPCEmu emulator as a fallback. Unfortunately one notable absentee from the exhibitors list is RISCOS Ltd, who are unable to attend due to a clash with another commitment.
 

André Timmermans, author of DigitalCD, has released an update to his tracker music playing module TimPlayer. The new version adds support for several new tracker file formats, as well as including many other changes and fixes.

Meanwhile, RISC OS Open have secured permission to release the SharedSound module. This should improve the situation regarding sound support for owners of modern ARMv7 powered RISC OS systems.

 

Here's a quick round up of all the interesting things that have happened over the past few months that we didn't find the time to report on.

ROOL bounty scheme

ROOL officially announced their bounty scheme, and then followed up that announcement by beginning a process of doubling-up the first £1000 worth of bounty payments - for every pound you contribute towards a bounty (except the ROOL admin bounty), ROOL will also contribute a pound.
 
Although none of the bounties are yet to reach their (hidden) donation targets, it's worth noting that the biggest bounty so far has over £300 allocated to it. So although the bounties aren't likely to come close to the average hourly wage of a professional programmer, they're certainly not going to go for chump change either.

And also

Jim Lesurf has announced that he is offering a £300 bounty prize to the first person to add USB audio support to RISC OS.

BBC Domesday site

No more hunting down rare laserdisc players - the BBC have launched a new section of their website containing the content of the 1986 Domesday system.

Show videos

Proving that online videos of Acorn shows aren't just a modern thing, Mike Cook has pointed us towards this video he uploaded of the 1985 Micro User show. Ah, the memories.

More news sites emerge

In what's possibly an attempt to plug the gap left by our lack of updates, several new news sites have sprung up:

• Vince "One C or two" Hudd has turned RISCOSitory into a news site, which he looks to be updating on a fairly regular basis.
• For those who despise reading and just want a list of links, Martin Hansen has just the thing for you - he's added a section to the RISCOScode website that he's using for quickly linking to newsworthy things.
• And then there's the newest contender, riscos.blog.com, which seems to be updating at a faster rate than RISCOSitory but with shorter articles as a result.

GCC 4.1.2 crawls closer to release

With the first prerelease being over a year ago, you'd be forgiven for thinking that we'd all be using GCC 4.1.2 by now. But to prove that good things come to those who wait, it was only in April of this year that work began on the release preperations. The GCC team are still no doubt after your feedback, so if you're maintaining a RISC OS program that relies on GCC, please have a go with the latest version and report your findings.

RISC OS 5 development

Apart from the bounty announcement, plenty of other things have been happening with RISC OS 5 recently:

• Tom Walker has sneakily sneaked some sources into ROOL's CVS: A S3C2440 HAL and a S3C6410 HAL, targeting the Mini2440 and Mini6410 respectively. Although the ports are very rough around the edges, what's interesting is that (a) the S3C2440 is the same SoC as used in the A9home, and (b) the S3C6410 is the first ARMv6 device to natively run RISC OS.
• Not to be out-sneaked, Willi Theiss has recently announced that he's been working on a port of RISC OS to the PandaBoard, a development board closely related to the BeagleBoard but with a cutting-edge dual-core Cortex A9 processor instead of the BeagleBoard's ageing Cortex A8. Although the port is currently only using one core, early benchmark results suggest that the out-of-order execution and improved VFP hardware are enough to deliver a significant performance boost over current hardware.
• TBA software have been keeping themselves busy by releasing a test version of an updated BBC BASIC with VFP/NEON assembler support.
• Chris Wraight has released test version of his revamped Calc/SciCalc application.
• Rik Griffin has also been hard at work on an improved Filer_Action module.
• And finally the IOMD (i.e. RiscPC) version of RISC OS 5 has also seen a few improvements recently, making it much more usable on real hardware (although there's still plenty left to be done)

 

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"?
 

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...
 

Ever since Jeffrey Lee began work on porting RISC OS to developer boards such as the BeagleBoard and IGEPv2 there's been interest in putting a case around them to make them into proper computers. Both ports are still firmly in progress, so a finished-off A9-style computer isn't likely to appear for some time. That hasn't stopped some hobbyists having a go at making their own. This one looks particularly impressive:
 

 
There are more pics and description here on the ROOL forums. The nutBOX comes hot on the heels of Dave Thomas's lego housing for his IGEPv2 here, first reported on riscos.info.
 
There's still some way to go before the RISC OS OMAP port is stable enough to drive a general purpose computer suitable for everyday use, but in the meantime, plenty of people are having fun with what already exists...
 

RISC OS Open have announced that Castle have given the official seal of approval to RISC OS 5.16, the new version of the shared-source OS. The most prominent feature in this new version is a fix for the much-discussed year 2012 bug, where IYONIX computers would mistakenly read their real-time clock on startup if it's an odd-numbered decade.
 
The new IYONIX pc ROM can be downloaded free of charge from the ROOL site, in either flash programmer or softload form. ROOL advise that the ROM image is believed to work in softload form on all IYONIX versions of RISC OS from 5.10 or later. In flash programmer form, it should work from version 5.07 or later.
 
To avoid any unforseen compatibility issues with third-party software, it's advised to at try out the softload at least once before running the flash programmer tool. Just remember that the using the softload won't fix the year 2012 bug (and can even result in a jump to 2110) - the only way to fix the year 2012 bug is to use the flash programmer.
 
Update: ROOL have now added to the release announcement a human-readable list of the changes that have been made since the last official release (5.14).
 
Links

• ROOL announcement
• Download page, containing both the softload and the flash programmer