Wakefield 2021 - Saturday 24th April

The Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club are pleased to announce that the 2021 Wakefield Acorn & RISC OS Computer Show will be on Saturday 24th April.

As a result of the continuing pandemic, which forced the cancellation of last year’s event, Wakefield 2021 will be following in the virtual footprints of the London Show and will be taking place on Zoom; there will also be a live stream on the WROCC YouTube channel throughout the day.

The event will open at 10.00am, with a series of 30 and 60 minute presentations from developers and companies in the RISC OS market starting from 10.30am. The final slot should finish around 6.00pm, after which the Zoom meeting will remain open for anyone who wishes to hang around and chat.

The provisional schedule is available to view on the show website along with details of the virtual ‘exhibitors’, and will be kept up to date with any late changes. Each slot should contain time for a Q&A session at the end. There could still be few places left in the schedule, so if you would be interested in one, please contact the organisers as soon as possible.

Entry to the event is free: either through the YouTube live stream, or by registering in advance for the Zoom meeting details. For the latter, simply email zoom@wakefieldshow.org.uk from 1st April.

The latest news of the event, including the schedule of talks, can always be found at www.wakefieldshow.org.uk — keep an eye out there for updates, as well as a link to the YouTube stream. If you have any questions which aren’t answered on the site, contact the organisers with an email to show2021@wakefieldshow.org.uk

For those who would like to help spread the word about the event, banner graphics can be found on the show website.

The team at WROCC are still watching the situation closely to see when we can welcome Acorn & RISC OS users back to Yorkshire in person, and will publish a new date as soon as we can. In the meantime, put the ‘virtual’ one in your diary, and we’ll see you on 24th April!

Should this be a sticky? (until end of April)

Duly enstickened.

Register for the Zoom details now:
email zoom@wakefieldshow.org.uk

The 2021 Wakefield Acorn & RISC OS Computer Show has gone online to beat the lockdown, and will be taking place on Zoom in just over one week’s time — on Saturday 24th April. It will also be streaming live on YouTube and Facebook throughout the day, for those who don’t wish to join in with the questions and discussion.

The event is free to attend, and will consist of a virtual “show theatre” with presentations currently booked from the following companies

• AMCOG Games
• CJE Micro’s
• Cloverleaf Project
• Elesar
• R-Comp
• RISCOSbits
• RISC OS Developments
• RISC OS Open
• Sine Nomine Software
• Soft Rock Software

Talks are multiples of 30 minutes, and each should contain a Q&A session at the end with questions being taken from the Zoom audience. As we don’t have a hotel bar to retire to, the meeting will remain open after the last talk for informal chat.

The schedule, which will be updated if things change before the day, can be found at https://www.wakefieldshow.org.uk/theatre

To receive the Zoom meeting details, please email zoom@wakefieldshow.org.uk

Links to the WROCC YouTube and Facebook pages, for the live streams, can be found at https://www.wakefieldshow.org.uk/

The team from WROCC look forward to seeing you on the 24th!

Hi,
I have a new game out in beta at the moment and will be releasing it via the !Store at the show.

Story:
-—
You are an MI7 spy that was sent to investigate the notorious Dr. Atom and what he was doing in his Antarctic base. You found that he was developing a miniature nuclear engine that has energy shielding capability as well as autonomous robots. Unfortunately, he captured you and was planning to drop you into a shark infested tank. However, given all Dr. Atom’s goons are robots with pretty low intelligence, you were able to escape.

Desperate to get back to your personal submarine, you ran into Dr. Atom’s store room and found a modified experimental car that was powered by one of Dr. Atom’s miniature reactors. You decided that this could provide a means of escape and also could be taken for study. However, whilst you discovered the car was armoured and weaponised, it also seemed to be fairly slow as well as lacking a reverse gear. Crashing the car or being shot at doesn’t damage the car at all, due to the special shielding capability. However, when the shield was operating you noticed the reactor pressure increased. After a short while the pressure dropped back again. The siren worried you slightly – “Could this mini nuclear reactor explode if the pressure got too high due to the energy demands of the force shield?”.

Can you escape through the caves, blasting past Dr. Atom’s robots?

Technical Details:
-———————
– Contains procedurally generated caves (consistent for each re-played level) with program configured level stages.
– Soft scrolling with backgrounds that accumulate damage
– Indestructible mine robots, boss robots (that show damage as you hit them)
– The game employs software scrolling allowing bits of cave wall and some obstacles to be blasted away and changes to be made to the game screen.
– 3 selectable weapon types with different behaviours are available: gun, laser and shell.

1. All weapons require repeated key presses to fire.
2. Lasers melt ice and are not stopped by a single object hit
3. Shells cause more blast damage to the cave
   – Be careful not to shoot the ammunition boxes in the cave.
   – Features original in-game music including electric guitar as well as original sound effects via RDSP.

Screen shots from the beta:
-———————————-

Original Music examples:
-——————————
Track1
Track2
Track4

With The 2021 Wakefield Acorn & RISC OS Computer Show now just a few days away on 24th April, details of what will be on the agenda during this Saturday’s presentations has now been published on the show website at https://www.wakefieldshow.org.uk/exhibitors

Taking place on Zoom, or streaming live on YouTube and Facebook throughout the day for those who don’t wish to join in with the questions and discussion, the event is free to attend.

To receive the Zoom meeting details, please email zoom@wakefieldshow.org.uk — although we will do our best to respond to requests on the day itself, we would encourage everyone who is considering attending the event to apply for the details now.

Presentations are currently booked from the following companies

• AMCOG Games
• CJE Micro’s
• Cloverleaf Project
• Elesar
• R-Comp
• RISCOSbits
• RISC OS Developments
• RISC OS Open
• Sine Nomine Software
• Soft Rock Software

Talks are multiples of 30 minutes, and each should contain a Q&A session at the end with questions being taken from the Zoom audience. As we don’t have a hotel bar to retire to, the meeting will remain open after the last talk for informal chat.

The schedule, which will be updated if things change before the day, can be found at https://www.wakefieldshow.org.uk/theatre

Links to the WROCC YouTube and Facebook pages, for the live streams, can be found at https://www.wakefieldshow.org.uk/

The team from WROCC look forward to seeing you on the 24th!

Looking forward to the event.

One point I would like clarifying is how long after requesting the Zoom call details will they be sent out or is it a case they will be bulk sent out on a predetermined day.

The reason I ask this is that I sent in an email a few days ago and have yet to recieve the Zoom call details and it may help set expectations for others to know that time frame.

One point I would like clarifying is how long after requesting the Zoom call details will they be sent out or is it a case they will be bulk sent out on a predetermined day.

They’re being mailed out in batches, usually every 24 to 48 hours; the last lot went yesterday evening.

The reason I ask this is that I sent in an email a few days ago and have yet to recieve the Zoom call details.

A mail was sent to you three or four days ago and didn’t bounce; I’ll put you back on the list for the next batch, which will probably be sent late this evening.

A mail was sent to you three or four days ago and didn’t bounce;

I think Doug has a pretty aggressive spam trap setup.

I think Doug has a pretty aggressive spam trap setup.

Hmm, how about a hyperactive eight year old girl ¹ who understands that every fifty messages deleted equals one Mars bar?
That sounds like a perfectly aggressive spam trap.

I have Mars. Just need to find a suitable candidate…

¹ It’s “a computer thing”, why should boys get all the fun?

A mail was sent to you three or four days ago and didn’t bounce; I’ll put you back on the list for the next batch, which will probably be sent late this evening.

Hi Steve

Thanks for the update.

I checked my spam folder and nothing in it and also checked blocked addresses and again nothing that has WROCC in it.

I have had emails from WROCC recently but perhaps my ISP has decided to silently stop them.

If I don’t see anything on Thursday I will send a request from another email address that I have.

As to agressive spam trap I will leave that to my Viking cousins and their freemason mate Mr Wiggin..sorry for adding more spam to this thread.

It might be a little unfair to blame Doug’s spam trap, since it looks as if the mails that we’ve been sending out¹ have been disappearing into a black hole before reaching our outgoing mail server.

We’re doing some tests this evening, to make sure that emails can now escape safely into the wild, then we’ll re-send all of the registration details to everyone on the list. Apologies to anyone who gets them twice, though I suspect there won’t be anyone in that category.

¹ Very specifically the emails with the Zoom details in them. Other emails from the account have been unaffected, and there were no bounces back, so it’s taken a while to spot that things were amiss. The reasons why are complex, and have nothing to do with RISC OS.

Hi Steve,

Good news in that I recieved my Zoom details about 5 minutes ago on the original email address so the problem seems to have been resolved.

Thanks to all those involved in organising the event.

I received my Zoom details yesterday; thank you, Doug, for raising the issue and the WROCC organisers for the information. :)

We’re getting some reports of people having problems with the live stream on Facebook, although it’s not showing any issues at our end. If you’re not watching the show on Zoom today, it might be safest to watch on our YouTube channel.

There is info on the 2021 show on the IconBar site plus notes on Rick’s site (bit at the end)

Was there any info on the RO Laptops Pinebook 1 & 2?

plus notes on Rick’s site (bit at the end)

The reason it took forever to write that article is because I was paying more attention to the show broadcast.
Except Steffen Stefan’s speech. Could barely make out anything. Between the low volume and the frequent corruption (his bandwidth must be akin to mine!), it was a hard slog.

Shame. I would have like to have known more about ArtCube (which is a gallery in Paris, by the way). I do most of my photo editing on either Android, or PhotoImpact5 on a PC because what I want to do is either too advanced for Paint, or PhotoDesk is overkill. Stuff like reframing, cropping, fiddling with tone levels, rotating to straighten, (rarely) stretching to ‘fix’ taking a photo at a weird angle, and minor spray-copy or spray-colour to touch up things like dust specks, red eye, etc.

BTW, quick question. I had a sprite saved as 8bpp that I wanted to save as PNG or JPEG. I think it might have been the screen grab from Vince’s game that I dropped on my blog a short while back. PhotoDesk flat out could not do this. It refused to export as the format was wrong. I couldn’t see any option to change the data format to 32bpp. And, as an aside, the spray can (nudged accidentally) was horribly wrong. Can I assume that PhotoDesk isn’t actually capable of dealing with 256 colour images?
In the end, I used DPScan or whatever ImXXXXaster is called nowadays. That did the job in about three mouse clicks.
[no, my Paint doesn’t export PNG directly, I need to update as that would be useful…]

Except Steffen’s speech.

Stefan. Stefan Fröhling. Not to be confused with Steffen, that’s me (I think I am currently the only active Steffen in RISC OS world, while Stefan Fröhling might still be confused with Stefan Bellon).

It’s not half as difficult as handling the multitude of Steve’s!

It’s not half as difficult as handling the multitude of Steve’s!

Steve, Steven, Stephen, Stephan, Stefan, Steffen

I think it loses a little in translation ;)

It’s not half as difficult as handling the multitude of Steve’s!

Huh? It’s just Steve in another language… :-p

Perhaps I should mention that “Steve” is a nickname arising from Steve Zodiac being popular when I was young.

Can I assume that PhotoDesk isn’t actually capable of dealing with 256 colour images?

Correct. When I resize an image I convert from 8bpp to 24bpp via DPlgScan, then use PhotoDesk, then convert back.

Has anyone published a written summary of highlights or similar yet?

Has anyone published a written summary of highlights or similar yet?

I agree that would be a worthwhile thing to do, but the u-tube video should give you what you want but will take you over six hours to view.

There are some notes at iconbar
– posted at 6pm Saturday!