USB Emulator Sticks at London Show

I’m not going to make it to the show, so is there anyone who could pick up a couple of these for me ?

I live in Doncaster.

At the risk of asking a stupid question, and assuming I’ve missed something, what are they?

That said, I can’t make it either, so I can’t help you out, Dave.

I’m sure the guys won’t mind me saying this (I had expected something from them), and apologies if I’ve let the cat out of the bag early.

> RISC OS Open will be attending a show in London on Saturday
> and we’re preparing a USB memory stick which contains all
> sorts of stuff that’s useful for RISC OS users, notably a
> boot sequence and disc image, emulator software for Windows,
> Mac and Linux, and other goodies

Well, given we’ve not announced it in our News section, you can probably guess whether we’re at a point where we are ready to announce this… ;) Right now, I’m not 100% sure of whether or not we actually will have any USB sticks ready for the show. Keep your eyes peeled for further news…

This sounds excellent: if I manage to get to the Show, I shall definitely want one (assuming they’re available, of course).

And of course we ran out of time to actually make the announcement ;) Mind you, it wasn’t until Sat morning we had the images ready to put on the USB sticks…

:)
Hello, fellow nighthawk, was the after show party good ?
So, did you have any left ?

We couldn’t stay for the after-party. We were all exhausted – we were working very long days every day for the week prior to the show and the show day itself was (pleasingly) very busy. But we don’t get paid a single penny for any of this, remember; ROOL pays for e.g. the cost of show attendance, any overnight stays in hotels or whatever, but we don’t take any kind of salary or payment. So, all we wanted to do was get home and get some sleep!

We pretty much sold out of USB sticks. I think we had 4 or 5 left in the end. We’d expected to sell about 40% “native” sticks and 60% “emulate” sticks, but we ended up with far more emulator sales. The sticks were mounted on cards saying “emulate” or “native”, with 60 and 40 of each printed, respectively, so we ended up trimming off the word “native” so we could carry on selling emulator sticks without confusing people by the wording on the card!

We do intend to make a few things available not the site soon:

• A cut down emulator package, without the new background images or the source code to keep the size down.
• An upgraded backdrop images archive – we squashed the JPEGs quite heavily to reduce the size of the backdrops but they still came to > 100MB in size. At 1:1 on a high resolution monitor they looked fine, but we saw that the JPEG artefacts were very obvious at the show on larger monitors in low screen resolutions. I’ll re-export the collection from Aperture with less aggressive compressionand upload the result in a 200-300MB archive for people to download as an upgrade if they wish. There may not be room on the USB stick for those images – it was only 512MB to keep, in particular, mount time for the FileCore format ‘native’ stick down to a sensible value on a BeagleBoard.
• We’ll have the Emulate and Native USB sticks for sale from the web site for those who just want to “plug in and go”.
• Probably a bunch of other stuff I’ve forgotten…

The busy show meant we came away with quite a long post-show to-do list, but we deferred quite a bit of “real work” before the show that needs to be treated with priority from Monday. So you might have to bear with us for a few days of delay until we can find some spare time to catch up on the various post-show tasks.

Sorry if the above is a bit rambling, but I’m still quite tired. Not realising the clocks had changed and having to get up at 7:30am for rowing (read: 6:30am, but I didn’t realise) didn’t help! Doh.

Andrew,
Thanks very much for the explanation.
You think that’s rambling, you should see me when I get going :)

Hope the rowing went well.

Keep up the good work, all of you, it’s really appreciated, though I know that sometimes it doesn’t seem so.

I’ll be watching for the announcements.

Excellent news about RO on a stick (Though I’ve been running RPCEmu from a USB memory stick for a while, including a 0.8.8 RPCEmu on RO 5.17)

I only have one query about this. How is Networking going to work?
At present the Bridge method used by RPCEmu is, … how can I put it, just about usable on Win XP and very unreliable on Win 7 requiring a lot of repairing.

Will this mean, everytime you want to use the RPCEmu stick on a different computer, you’ll have to do the Win setup process?

Install Openvpn client etc ?

Dave

Hi. The emulation stick we produced does not have networking configured for any platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) for a couple of reasons. Mainly, it’s a very specific thing that different people have set up differently. We’ve included full source code to each build of the emulators and directions to the documentation so if you want you could always get the networking set up. Different platforms will have different levels of difficulty.

Mmnn! That’s interesting, so in theory, on the Win Platform, it shouldn’t be that difficult to get it networking.
My Memory stick installation RPCEmu 0.8.8 and RO 5.17 (Which obviously I’ve done the RO Networking requirements on) works okay when shoved in either of the two Win computers I use here, one W7, but the most used is the XP-SP3 and that Network bridging is somewhat more reliable than the W7 bridging.

I just wish Emu could get away from that infernal Network Bridge business and go the route of VRPC, but that’s another matter entirely.

Dave

Also on the stick is another RPCEmu 0.8.8 install running RO 4.39 and that also networks quite well.

Interestingly though, the RPCEmu install I have on my Ubuntu box, despite advice and assistance from a few knowledgeable folks, has Never Networked, so I’m wondering if a ROOL Emu on a stick for Linux might be easier to setup…
D.

Please see this page for updated backdrop images.

Why would we want to see/download 210 Mbytes of large Digital images in a forum tread discussing RPCEmu and ROOL RO on a stick?

Well, that’s what I came here for… Guess it’s time I went somewhere else for a chat. :-/
D

Just ordered mine from the ROOL Store.

Why would we want to see/download 210 Mbytes of large Digital images in a forum tread discussing RPCEmu and ROOL RO on a stick?

Erm, because these were included as bonus material on the USB sticks?

Yep. We noticed at the London show that on our big monitors and at low resolutions, the JPEG artefacts in the background images were really obnoxious. I didn’t see any such severe issues on my own machines at home (even when zooming in), but in view of the behaviour of the monitors we had in London, it’s clear that others may see problems too. So, I exported the whole collection again from Aperture but at a higher quality setting and uploaded the results.

Is possible to have the prices on the webpage please ?
I’d rather not use paypal, and I do already have your
bank details.

TIA

the price is £10 plus £1.50 postage, I understand some peoples dislike of paypal but if you trust the the seller in this case ROOL there is problem with paypal and it would cost a lot of money to setup a secure shop taking direct credit/debit card payments.

With Ref to the London Show – what sort of resolution were the large LCD monitors running at?

1280×720. We’ve seen a huge bandwidth spike this month from the background image archives so they seem to have been popular :-)

Got my ROOL usb stick now and have rpcemu running on osx 10.6 without too many problems, just trying to get networking sorted out as currently it pings ok just after boot and NetSurf will occasionally browse to a site but it’s very unstable still.