RISC OS Southwest Show 2024 - Sat February 24th

It is now less than a month to go to the SouthWest RISC OS Computer Show. We hope you have it penciled into your Diary, but if not, it is on Saturday 24th Feb.

The show features lots of your favourite RISC OS developers, user groups and community members, includingD hosts R-Comp and Orpheus Internet, RISC OS Developments, RISC OS Open, Organizer, RISC OS Bits, Drag’n’Dropm, Amcog Games, Soft Rock Software, Chris Hall, Steve Fryatt, Paolo Zaino, Dynabyte Software, MUG, ROUGOL, Charity Stand, Quincey Coleman and some of the 8 bit crew too.

Rumor has it that there will be quite a number of new projects and releases, so this could be a pretty exciting show. No spoilers, of course, but if you enjoy RISC OS, we suspect you will find plenty to entertain. There will also be theater presentations too. (Thanks Charles).

Although last year saw the retirement of John Norris (Bell Ringing and tasty treats), we’re pleased to welcome Michael Grunditz over from Sweden demonstrating his OWB port and his work allowing RISC OS and other OSs to run on different CPU cores at the same time (plus some other exciting projects).

If you’d like to join the fun, there’s still time to get in touch an request a table, or just come along as a visitor on the day.

Further information can be found at https://www.riscos-swshow.co.uk/

If you’re “on the fence” about coming, please do try and visit as these RISC OS shows really need as much support as possible. They run on a financial knife-edge (both for exhibitors and organisers), and without visitors, it is hard to justify subsequent shows. In other words, if you value the shows, please come to them! We know that this gets harder for people each year, so we really appreciate your support, and the effort everyone makes to attend.

Hope to see you on the 24th!

We hope you have it penciled into your Diary

Can’t find an American pencil so have Inked it!

Would be nice if the Linux RO was on display at the SW Show :-)

Is that anyone here who can bring a monitor that I can use during the show? Needs HDMI and 720p.
I cannot bring one myself.

Sorted! Thanks!

Just a few days to go. Rev up your engines!

Looks like there will be big announcements from various companies/exhibitors. This could be one of those RISC OS shows with plenty to talk about.
If you can make it, we’d recommend it :)

In other news, the hotel has confirmed that they will have a chef on for lunches, which can be ordered at the bar.

RISC OS Developments can confirm that if you are interested in open source developments of significant things for RISC OS, it could indeed be a good show to attend.

developments of significant things

Sorry, one can’t keep secrets around here.
We already know about the 64 bit port.

We already know about the 64 bit port.

Troll baiter.

I’m hoping to have something new (to me, and to RISC OS) on display, too. Or maybe forty somethings.

It (or they) won’t be fully release ready, but will certainly be usable (or perhaps, more accurately, playable). And since my RISC OS projects are always free (and Open Source¹), you won’t need to worry about spending your money on that new hardware which appears to be on the cards for the event.

¹ I’m guessing that this doesn’t count as significant, however…

Oh dear.. we seem to have forgotten our network cables… Whatever shall we do? 😉

Whatever shall we do?

Plan A:

Well, let’s see. Get an eight port USB hub. Plug in a lot of USB to TTL serial adaptors. Hook those to the serial ports of the machines you want to communicate with. Throw together a module that uses a barely documented horrifically overly complicated packet based protocol that was written down in biro on the napkin of the late night café where you’ll be writing this. As it’s clearly going to be a star topology network, the machine with all the serial ports will be the central server.

You’ve got about eight hours until it needs to go live.
You can roughly double how much time you have by the application of large quantities of hot caffeinated beverage.

Good luck!

Plan B:

Saturday morning, stop by a shop that sells network cables (my local supermarket sells that sort of thing), grab a few.

Plan C:

Applied magic.

Plan D:

Head over to Elesar’s stand and buy all of their Econet Adapters, raid the kitchen for some potatoes; and follow the instructions in Acorn User, 1993: Potato Econet

Plan E: Announce something new.

.--/../..-./..  

Is the lunch menu the same as the dinner menu that is viewable on the hotel website?

We’re going with a little of plan C and a dollop of plan E 🙂

The menu is quite expanded since that old one. Quite a few more dishes.

Also a sandwich section too. Should give a few options lunch wise. We’ll have menus at the ticket desk at the entrance to the show room

We’re going with a little of plan C and a dollop of plan E

Do we smell a clue?
Something whiffy?

.—/../..-./..

As an old radio soldier (GDR-NVA reserve ;-)), I hope for exactly that…

Shouldn’t that be – ‘dit dar dar’ ?

Shouldn’t that be – ‘dit dar dar’ ?

That’s new, textile can even mess up morse!

I hope there are some nice recordings from the SW Show – after spending a week at ‘Hotel’ Derry Ford with a protesting ticker :-(

Reports on the wifi PinebookPro.

TIB show report at https://www.iconbar.com/articles/South-West_Show_2024_Report/index2027.html

TL;DR – lots of new hardware and software to see

So, to clarify, ROD demonstrated WiFi for both pi4 and cm4, as well as Pineboik Pro, with the major encryption mechanisms supported. Ui is still work in progress, with a little tidying up to do, but we expect it to reach those who volunteer to test in the next few weeks.

So, to clarify, ROD demonstrated WiFi for both pi4 and cm4, as well as Pineboik Pro, with the major encryption mechanisms supported.

I’m not sure that’s much clearer! Are you saying that this was the WiFi on display on ROOL’s stand, or is there an “also” missing somewhere?

The ROOL WiFi appeared to be encryptionless yesterday, although the person that I spoke to said that the code was in place, but that there just hasn’t been time to debug it before the show.

Ui is still work in progress, with a little tidying up to do, but we expect it to reach those who volunteer to test in the next few weeks.

That sounds like the timescales that ROOL were talking about, too.

And in unrelated news, please reassure me that Project N.Ex.T. is using the ROOL/RISCOSbits/Stader Softwareentwicklun NVMe stack, and not another “not invented here” one? The R-Comp announcements don’t say it isn’t, but also don’t say that it is…

And in unrelated news, please reassure me that Project N.Ex.T. is using the ROOL/RISCOSbits/Stader Softwareentwicklun NVMe stack, and not another “not invented here” one? The R-Comp announcements don’t say it isn’t, but also don’t say that it is…

N.Ex.T is using a stack developed by/for ROD but Andrew said it will be open sourced and is using the same SWIs as the ROOL stack. I do think it’s time the RISC OS community embraced the nature of open source operating systems a little more and accepted that there will be multiple solutions for the same problem -and this can be a good thing.