Wakefield Show 2019

The 24th Wakefield Show will be held on Saturday 27th April at its usual venue of the Cedar Court Hotel.

There will be over 20 exhibitors at the show this year including a couple of new ones, covering both the 8 bit and 32 bit worlds – everything from the BBC B through to the latest 32-bit computers.

As usual a number of new releases will be appearing from CJE Micro’s and R-Comp amongst others. CJE will have a new IDE interface podule and small HDMI monitors, whilst R-Comp will have their new Titan computer, plus the latest version of NetFetch with the new AcornSSL module containing the latest security protocols.

There will be the usual Charity stall raising funds for Wakefield Hospice. The shows have raised over 20,000 Pounds for charities over the years.

There will be another Prize Draw featuring exciting prizes from RISCOSbits and Sine Nomine Software. Entry forms can be found at the WROCC Club stand (Stand 1).

There is also a full theatre program from 11.00am through to 3.30pm, featuring RISC OS Developments, R-Comp, RISC OS Open, Wi-Fi Sheep, Sine Nomine Software and CJE Micros. The schedule can be found on the show website.

Entry costs 5 Pounds, and the show is open from 10.30am till 4.30pm. Please come and support the North’s premier show.

Full details on the show site at: https://www.wakefieldshow.org.uk

Is it just me that just gets timeouts from the show website? (with RO Netsurf & Win Firefox)

Up now. I know xencentric hosting was down earlier, so guessing wakefield show website hosted by xencentric.

OK here with NetSurf #4572 and RO 5.24 on an RPi 3.

Seems there was glitch earlier, the server unexpectly rebooted, but all back online now.

Addendum – we’ll also be selling/shipping the first ARMBook at the show, all being well. Literally the first, as the rest of our big order have been delayed for a few untimely days until early May!

AMCOG will be releasing our next brand new RISC OS Game and our first new title for 2019.

Some screen shots and further information is here:
https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/5/topics/14372?page=1#posts-91545

Pictures of the show are available at https://www.iconbar.com/articles/Wakefield_show_2019_in_pIctures/index1477.html (so you can see what you are missing!) Iconbar show report will be online after the show finishes….

Report at https://www.iconbar.com/articles/Wakefield_Show_2019__Report/index1478.html – it was a great show

Thanks for the write-up.

I noticed this: Thumb extensions will be needed for future WebKit releases.
Uh, what does Thumb do that ARM can’t?

Thanks for writing this up. Do you happen to know whether anyone recorded the talks?

I mentioned in report they were recorded by vince .he is normally brilliant at trying to post soon after show

Regarding thumb stuff, the relevant webkit forum thread is here

http://mac-os-forge.2317878.n4.nabble.com/Deadline-October-30-Dropping-support-for-Arm-traditional-no-Thumb2-td368056.html#a368794

the relevant webkit forum thread is here

That’s just about dropping support for traditional ARM, not about why Thumb2 is required.
Justification: I’m under the impression (erroneous?) that Thumb is a subset of ARM.

I mentioned in report they were recorded

So you did! I’ll wait patiently :)

That’s just about dropping support for traditional ARM, not about why Thumb2 is required.
Justification: I’m under the impression (erroneous?) that Thumb is a subset of ARM.

The original Thumb extension provided the “Thumb 1” instruction set (which was very limited a subset of the ARM instruction set).

The “Thumb 2” extension added a bunch load more Thumb instructions (essentially 99% of the ARM instruction set), but also added some useful new instructions to both ARM & Thumb.

Now, the interesting thing is that they mention that they have an “ARMv7 traditional” build configuration, which is ARMv7 minus Thumb2. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen ARM docs which suggest that Thumb2 is optional in ARMv7. It was optional in ARMv6 (because it was first introduced as an extension to that architecture), but the docs suggest that it’s mandatory in all future architecture versions.

So I’m guessing the existence of a Thumb-less ARMv7 webkit build is just a clerical error when they set up the ARMv7 builds by copying the ARMv6 build configurations.

I concur – Thumb2 is ubiquitous in v7, it’s ARM that’s actually optional (Arm7M).

Perhaps it was meant as “Thumb2, not ThumbEE”?

I mentioned in report they were recorded by vince .he is normally brilliant at trying to post soon after show

I’m not, you know – I haven’t even uploaded last year’s Wakefield videos yet!

I used to be much faster, because the only editing I did was to top & tail them with a bit of text – but in recent years I’ve tried to edit them down to remove umming, scrambling around to find things to hold up, overlaying the slides provided by the speakers, and so on, as well as adding subtitles for audience questions. That can all take a lot of time, so I’ve had to fit it around other things.

However, the Wakefield videos are also recorded by Ruth, and last year they went up fairly quickly.

Meanwhile, I might go back to just topping and tailing. Easier for me, but it means longer Youtube videos that are more tedious for anyone watching. If I do, I’ll only bother with Wakefield if Ruth’s videos don’t appear (pointless having two versions, I think) – so my first batch will be this year’s SW show, which needs to be done for the show report.

That WebKit forum thread is very badly worded, suggesting the author isn’t very familiar with ARM technologies. I agree with others, there has never been an ARMv7 CPU that doesn’t feature the Thumb2 extensions that were first added in ARMv6T2.

What he might mean is “we have an ARMv7 build target that has two sub-variants, one that’s compiled to the ARM instruction set and one that’s compiled to the the Thumb2 instruction set, and we’re discontinuing the former”. How is RISC OS’s support for Thumb binaries these days? Things like lazy task swapping that attempt to restart an instruction after an on-demand page swap would be the sort of area that might have issues. Support for disassembling Thumb2 in the Debugger module would be nice to have but not as essential.

Uh, what does Thumb do that ARM can’t?

Not much, they’re a pretty close match. It should be easier to port Thumb2 code to ARM than vice versa because all the IT (if-then) instructions assemble to nothing, whereas in the opposite direction they all need to be added. But there are exceptions: Thumb2 can apply conditional execution to any NEON instruction (although that’s deprecated). Scalar Thumb2 has the not-very-useful ORN instruction. The range of available immediate constants is different. You can use shifted-register offsets in LDRH/STRH, not just in LDR/STR and LDRB/STRB. And perhaps the most likely cause of porting problems is that branch tables have to be done using TBB or TBH, rather than LDR pc,[pc,r,lsl#2].

I might go back to just topping and tailing. Easier for me, but it means longer Youtube videos that are more tedious for anyone watching. If I do, I’ll only bother with Wakefield if Ruth’s videos don’t appear (pointless having two versions, I think) – so my first batch will be this year’s SW show, which needs to be done for the show report.

Could you please just put them up without bothering to edit?

It wouldn’t be tedious to me since I completely missed the Wakefield Show and arrived very late at the Bristol Show, so have seen none of the talks in 2019. I don’t even know what the new browser project is called even though I’ve donated money to it.

Ruth’s videos from the 2019 show are now up on YouTube, here:

• Ident Computer/Wi-Fi Sheep
• RISC OS Open
• R-Comp
• CJE Micro’s
• Sine Nomine Software

Thanks are due to her for spending the time putting them together and getting them online, of course!

Hope you enjoy the WROCC 2019 Show Videos, folks! – and don’t forget to “Like” and “Share”, blah, blah! :-)

Sorry the quality isn’t great – and for the loss of Sine Nomine’s graphics! It’s all a bit fraught on the day – people turn-up with a variety of computers, and it’s very much a case of “Plug and Pray”! Some computers play nicely with my screen capture device, and some just don’t.

Hope you enjoy the WROCC 2019 Show Videos, folks! – and don’t forget to “Like” and “Share”, blah, blah!

I did! I have just discovered that I do in fact have a Google sign in after all and have therefore done some “liking”.

Sorry the quality isn’t great

However the sound quality was good. It made a change to be able to hear what was being said without the ears bleeding.

Many Thanks.

Thanks for uploading them, Ruth!

The subtle editing is also very much appreciated. It’s not really necessary to chop out the boring bits, or parts where the presenter encounters the demo effect – after all, we can fast-forward through those – but it’s nice not to have to find the window playing the video and click on the controls.