What better way to spend your free time this Christmas while we're not allowed to go anywhere than to sit back, relax and enjoy some interesting presentations on a variety of Acorn and RISC OS topics?
 
Since 2014, ABug - the Acorn and BBC Micro User Group - have been holding regular events featuring talks on a wide range of topics relating to Acorn and RISC OS computers, both as in-person events and more recently as virtual events. We've selected a few of our favourites in this article, but the ABug website has a lot more talks available to choose from.
 

Continuing in my quest to optimise my RISC OS port of NBlood, I've recently been taking a look at the rendering code. Specifically, the top functions in my profiler's output: the vertical line drawing routines, which are used to draw walls and sprite-based entities.
 
 

Welcome to the first in a (very) infrequent series of articles about optimisation. In this article I'll be looking at audio mixing in C/C++ using GCC 4.7.4, running benchmarks of various routines and optimisations across multiple machines in order to work out what works well and what doesn't.
 
 

If you are looking to learn about software, there is a treasure trove of source code and resources available on the Internet.
 
One of the more interesting resources is from David Pilling. He is something of a RISC OS legend (being behind OvationPro and many critical tools for RISC OS). His website lists his software and also includes several free utilities.
 
There is also an interesting section for 'retired' software here. Rather than just let the packages disappear, the source code is now available for all the ArcFax, Panorama, SparkFS and many other former commercial applications. Enjoy digging....
 
[Updated 18 January] Thanks to Sprow for pointing out SparkFS does not include source code
 
David Pilling website
 

As mentioned at the end of part one, this article about creating PackMan packages is going to look at what's necessary to generate distribution index files, ROOL pointer files, and how these tasks can be automated. Towards the end I'll also be taking a look at some options for automating the uploading of the files to your website.
 
 

At the recent London Show Chris Hall was showing his new Data Logger. Here he gives some info into the new hardware
 
Version 2.40 of my SatNav software and the compact hardware unit with just an OLED display meant I could stop trying to fix things that were still unfinished. I had full battery management, conditional data logging, robust and error-tolerant data downloading on demand and power management that avoided any SD card corruption.

Where next?

 
There were things still unfinished: I wanted the unit to be able to use WiFi to transmit data instead of making do with manual downloads to a USB pen drive; I would have liked to remove the code which drives a liquid ink display (Papirus) into a more general purpose module, where it should be, but had never tried writing one. RiscBASIC could compile an application to a module but only at 26 bit. Both these aspirations were therefore not immediate.

 
 

For this first article looking at how to create PackMan/RiscPkg packages, I've decided to use my SunEd program as a guinea pig. Being a simple C application with no dependencies on other packages, it'll be one of the most straightforward things on my site to get working, and one of the easiest for other people to understand.
 
Read on to discover how to turn simple apps like SunEd into RiscPkg packages, and more importantly, how to automate the process.
 
 

In a previous article we've looked at what software is available via !PackMan. But what if you're a developer who wants to get your software listed - where do you start?