Euclid and friends at ROUGOL, Mon 15th June 2020

The next meeting of the RISC OS User Group Of London (online) is:

Euclid and friends, presented by Tony Cheal, Ace Computing

Monday 15th June 2020, 7.45pm

Online via Zoom, meeting open from 7.30pm

http://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/

Ace Computing produced a suite of graphics applications for RISC OS from
1989 until the mid 90s. Even if you never used the programs yourself you
probably saw many AceFilms, either played using Ace’s Projector
application or embedded in other multi-media displays.

Closely following the RISC OS style guide and philosophy, each program
performed a distinct task and integrated with the others and the standard
applications (Paint and Draw), making extensive use of drag and drop, to
provide an easy to use modular animation system.

The applications included:
- Euclid, a 3D design tool
- Mogul, takes Euclid files and creates 3D films
- ArcLight, creates ray traced version of Euclid files or films
- Tween, calculates inbetween frames to morph one Draw file into another
- Splice, imports sprites or existing films for individual frame editing
- Apollonius, a parametric design tool!

Tony Cheal was the programmer of all these applications and has kindly
offered to tell us the history of Ace Computing and how the programs were
developed, and to answer your questions.

This will be our first meeting held online via Zoom. Please contact us to
receive a link to the meeting on the day.

http://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/contacts/

I still own Euclid, thanks for sharing the event and the link! :)

Sounds like this is going to be a good one! Thanks for sharing!

I used the Ace products for many years, though sadly lost my copies of Euclid, Mogul and Arclight in a house move. I’m not going to miss this talk! :)

I recall helping someone get Apollonius PDT working on TiMachine last year, or the year before. It was essential for him, as he still uses it for designing sculptures.

Does anyone have any good example Ace Films, or links to them? I’m sure there were some fancy ones on magazine cover discs BITD but I don’t know how to find them now :-(

Also is there a version of Projector later than 1.27 that scales films correctly? All the mode 15 I’ve got display half the window height! It is in Basic so I could probably hack it myself, but wondered if it had already been done.

Andrew – you’re welcome to join the meeting and ask him about it! I think he is trying to find his old backup discs.

Thanks,
Bryan.

I found some clips on Armclub CD1, Armclub CD2, PDCD2, PDCD5, and Acorn user CD9. As these discs seem to be removed from www.archive.org I uploaded what I can find to www.tellima.nl/riscos/ace.zip (if this does not work then goto www.tellima.nl/riscos/ and goto to the very last entry, and click on the blue text). hth

Thanks Jan, those are great :-)

I did recognise a lot of them, so I must have had them previously. They probably got moved off onto a backup somewhere to save space, as my hard disc at that time was only 43MB!

I remember getting Euclid with the A3000 “Jet Set Pack”. I used it to do a 3D model of my bedrooom which we were redoing with some fitted units. I drew up the room and various units and moved them around to get an idea what it would look like.

I din’t model the general mess on the floor of a teenagers bedroom though :)

The recording of the talk is now available – https://youtu.be/yIbIEDpxTqY

I remember getting Euclid with the A3000 “Jet Set Pack”

Funny you should mention that, because in the talk Tony said he sold just over 1000 copies, but realised afterwards that was only the ones he personally sold. It didn’t include those sold by Acorn, or Oak/Dial Solutions, or all the school site licenses!

Working on RISC OS 5?

Well that was interesting.

I liked the mention of Tony’s work on ICL’s OPD as we used them to do remote access repairs of customers systems using them around the time Tony mentioned.

The trial we were part of eventually led to the setting up a whole new department.

Mind you we had to do a lot of backups as the MicroDrives were a little suspect.

Happy times.

Bryan,

Thankyou very much for posting the video. It was brilliant. You seem to be continuing to pull all the stops out with your historical guest speakers! I am in Teesside, and would never get to a London show/meet, so it is really great having the content viewable online.

I loved hearing Tony’s stories, and it is great that others are interested in preserving the old software. There are so many one-man bands from the past that getting hold of code, manuals etc. is only going to get harder. I take my hat off to anyone involved in the preservation efforts.

The stardot crowd have also put on some amazing video content recently. Mainly modern retro content, but also some stuff covering the past. Well worth a view too.

Bryan, any chance of putting your square pixel compatible mod of !Projector anywhere. I also need to work out where the 32 bit compatible version of the Euclid module came from, which makes !Euclid fly on an ARMx6.

@ David J. Ruck

I also need to work out where the 32 bit compatible version of the Euclid module came from, which makes !Euclid fly on an ARMx6.

That was super cool and thanks for sharing the info and quick-demo! Any chance you could share the module? Obviously after you’ve figured out where it came from and if it can be shared.

Thanks in advance! :)

Is that the 32bit EuclidX (free renderer module)? If so, I have a feeling it was Martin W. I know that one of the earliest uses was 32bit DataPower, but I have a feeling we sourced it via Martin who had done it for Easi/Techwriter.

This reminds me. I may have to patch ClearView for square pixel modes. I’d rather like to do it while retaining backwards compatibility, if such a thing is possible.

Andrew — yes, the 32bit EuclidX came from Martin Wuerthner. It’s downloadable as part of ClearView (github.com/philpem/clearview) if anyone would like to play with it.

thanks to both Andrew and Phil! :)

EuclidX 32bit – it so long ago :-(
It would be nice if Andrew R could be allowed to place 32bit versions of the Progs in !Store.

I do have a 32 bit version of the EuclidX module; version 1.06 (25 Aug 2004). The previous 26 bit version being 1.05 (30 Sep 1994).

But that’s not the same as the Euclid module in !Euclid itself, the 32 bit version being 3.10 (09 Jan 2006). As far as I can tell, that module has not been supplied in any other application. The old 26 bit versions I have from various other members of the Euclid family, are:-

2.09 (13 Nov 1989)
2.11 (25 Feb 1990)
2.16 (07 Dec 1990)
2.20 (19 Aug 1993)

The 32 bit version being labelled 3.10 up from 2.20 suggests it isn’t just a simple 32 bit port with a minor version number bump. Looking at the dissassembly, the service call handler has been moved to the end, and now has a RISC OS 4 service table. There are also some minor code differences over and above the 32 bit changes. However, the real clue is that there are embedded symbol names in the 32 bit version, indicating that it has been produced by someone with the source code, rather than being hacked around from the binary by someone like myself.

So did Tony forget he made a 32 bit compatible version back in 2006, or does someone else have access to the sources?

Just had a look on the Iyonix – seems to be my patched version – how the years have flown.

It would be nice if Andrew R could be allowed to place 32bit versions of the Progs in !Store.

Hell yeah! It really would :)

So did Tony forget he made a 32 bit compatible version back in 2006, or does someone else have access to the sources?

First thanks a lot for all the details David and interesting finding indeed…