Summary: Disc 5.22

Summary of changes to Disc image (5.20 to 5.22)

Enhancements and fixes

• The following are the headline changes to modules or components in the HardDisc4 for 5.22.
• For brevity only the top 17 changes have been described, the full change logs should be consulted for details of nearly 500 changes which all contribute to stability and ease of use.

!Boot

• New service calls are broadcast when the main !Boot system variables have been set, these are designed to help programmers with modules that rely on them to know when it is valid to access them.
• It is now possible to FSLock the hard disc without triggering !Boot’s read only mode, which results in a new blank set of choices being created despite there being a set already present from before the drive was FSLocked.

!ChangeFSI

• Newly accepts a number of image formats for input
• Portable Network Graphics (PNG) files
• Wireless Bitmap (WBMP)
• Icons and cursor definition from Windows 3 (.ICO and .CUR)
• GIFs with local colour tables no longer fail to open.
• More reliable conversion of formats with < 8bpp and 48bpp colours, especially on machines with large caches or requiring aligned data accesses.
• Extensions to the existing obscure bitmap formats, including improvements to handling of Sun raster files, Targa, OS/2 BMP files, 2bpp Windows bitmaps.

!Configure

• The search order for the default CMOS (used to populate the configure dialogues when the ‘Default’ button is pressed) has been changed. This also allows system integrators to provide a machine specific ResetCMOS in a
• writeable directory (Choices$Write) to override the ROM default.
• The main !Configure menu has been simplified a little.

Filer plugin

• The numerical sort option in the Filer is now settable from this plugin.

Font/Window/Mouse/Sound plugins

• These plugins have been reorganised to group the functionality by the name of the plugin.
• For example, the choice of whether to beep on an error is now owned by the sound setup, and the choice of how the iconbar behaves is not lost in the mouse setup dialogue.

Screen plugin

• New screen colour depths are now supported for setup.
• The help for screensavers is now correctly translated when the machine is no running in an en-gb territory.

Theme plugin

• This new configure plugin allows aspects of the desktop “look and feel” to be changed, such as changing the icon theme and the preferred desktop font.
• A preview window allows settings to be checked before rebooting.

Network plugin

• The interfaces window now has a ‘Status’ button to inspect the current status of the chosen interface, such as the assigned IP address when using DHCP. Changes can be made as before with the ‘Configure’ button.

!HForm

• HForm uses much less memory in normal operation, and only requests more when trying to long verify a disc.
• Attempting to format a SCSI drive larger than the FileCore limit is now warned against, and the size adjusted automatically.

!Hopper

• A new diversion, !Hopper is included which is a RISC OS version of the popular frogger game.
• Hopper also relies on the PsychoEffects and QTheMusic module, versions of which are included inside the game directory.

!Internet

• The MimeMap file includes a wider range of commonly encountered internet Mime types than previously.
• A new command line tool, md5, has been added which calculates a unique hash of a file to see if it has been corrupted in transit.

!Meteors

• Special thanks to the estate of Neil Raine for permission to publish the Meteors sources.

!MemNow

• Now correctly displays the free memory on machines with many hundreds of megabytes free, which are becoming more commonplace.

!Patience

• An overhaul of this diversion sees it gaining solid dragging of the cards in the game, improved game play, and a new setup screen to record user choices.

!Printers

• Printing system font using the DrawFile rendering module now prints correctly, rather than showing only blank, on a bitmap printer.
• Printing fonts via the bitmap printer drivers should be more reliable in certain edge cases, such as applications using memory in high addresses.

!SciCalc

• When the desktop theme is set to ‘Ursula’ or ‘Morris4’ or ‘Raspberry’, SciCalc will now automatically adjust the button design to match the rest of the desktop.
• An operator precedence bug for multiply has been fixed.

!T1ToFont

• No longer fails during font conversion process.
• A few minor Style Guide inconsistencies have been addressed.