Risc OS Software that Made Your Jaw Drop

I’m wondering what software on Risc OS that people were amazed by, at the time is was released.

For me:

1) Zarch/Lander. I think many of us were amazed by this. Especially since many of us were using the BBC B/Master one day and the next day this happened.

2) TechWriter. Although this was a normal DTP application, the ability to easily make maths equations was such a good idea, a good addition. It worked well. I never had the need to use the equations but I know a few maths teachers that did.

3) Sibelius. The one that made Zarch look dated. Lack of colours, full screen mode did not matter. Steep learning curve was helped with a good manual and function key layout strips. Unbelievable speed, makes some modern software on Linux/Windows feel a bit slow. This, for me, was the best piece of software ever made for Risc OS. I bought it. I did not buy a lot of software because I didn’t have the money. I was paying for my Risc PC on the 20/20 deal – pay 20% deposit and 20 months payments. Still, I had to get the MIDI interface which was useless because I then had to upgrade my non-MIDI keyboard to a MIDI one.

Other peoples interest must be different. What software did I miss that made your jaw drop?

I started with an A3000 running RISC OS 2.

A big draw for me was Ovation. The ability to have appear on a page the same thing that I was looking at on the screen.
This was mind blowing when you consider the contemporary was the likes of WordPerfect with its “this text is in colour and colour means stuff so use your imagination” along with really rubbish previews that were basically a “serving suggestion”.

Another one was a fully graphical user interface. This wasn’t unusual, Mac and Atari had it, but RISC OS 2 looked slick. I think the sanitised palette and moving away from the garish colours helped. It was also pretty good that the machine would start up and just work, didn’t need a boot floppy to get itself going. Stuff was built in. RISC OS 3 took that up to eleven with the inclusion of The Standard Utilities, that were therefore always available.

BBC BASIC. With its built in assembler. And 65Host/65Tube for dealing with the older things. The I/O podule, the provision for Econet. The new machines were designed to coexist with what came before.
But mostly BASIC. I think to all the people that never used our version of BASIC, they wouldn’t understand how powerful it was that it had a freaking assembler built right in. No more ridiculous piles of PEEK and POKE using opcode charts and many pages of squared paper. Just, you know, write it in assembler. Readable. Let BASIC do the translation.
It was impressive with the Beeb. RISC OS just took it to the next level.

Want a RAMdisc? Just pull open the complicated looking list of memory assignments and drag it out to the desired size. Instantly, it was there, like a little virtual floppy. Instantly it just worked and integrated with the rest of the system.

I actually really like the RISC OS filesystem paradigm. Partitions/drives pertain to a filing system, which is separate in namespace (SDFS, RAM, SCSI, ADFS…) but FileSwitch can handle mashing them together so it’s more flexible than DOS/Win device letters, plus the heavy use of paths (Blah$Dir) mean that the names are more aids for you than anything else.
While at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of the Unix-like filesystem where everything hangs off of a master root directory.
I don’t like how DOS/Win does it, and I think Unix / is a nightmare. RISC OS, to me, strikes the perfect balance. And with RISC OS 3, this was extended to things that aren’t filing systems. So I can walk into a FAT partition, a floppy in the FileStore, a CD-ROM, or a zip file just as if it was another directory to rummage around in.

I was also impressed by Lander, but never really went Zarch-ways because I totally sucked.
But I can’t think of Lander without blue savannah song! popping into my head. I just got that Erasure tape and listened to it nonstop for about seven hours as I tried valiantly (but unsuccessfully) to not suck at Lander. I think the mouse was a bit of a double edged sword. An easy and responsive control method right there with the machine, but for those of us where fine coordination was an optional upgrade that was never selected, it’s a bit of a trauma congo trying to control a sensitive-a-f spaceship using it. Kinda wish the thing had optional damping, or maybe a stabiliser. Training wheels? Anything to avoid the depressingly regular head-dives into the ground.

(can’t believe I didn’t even need to Google that!)

I guess what impressed me the most wasn’t any specific piece of software so much as the machine itself and the opportunities that it made possible.
All of this before Windows 3.1 was even a thing.

My next machine was an A5000 with a 1GB harddisc (which was MASSIVE in those days).
That was followed by a RiscPC via a CJE scheme.

Following that, when I came to France, were years of PCs because Acorn was history, not a lot was happening, and sort of basic functionality (like watching a DVD) was normal on a PC. I watched a lot of DVDs, what with my weekly visit to the library to use their internet…

But as powerful and capable as Win98SE and XP were, they were still missing a lot of obvious functionality that RISC OS just did right straight from the beginning. Shall we talk about how weird and broken Edit’s scroll bars are, and observe that Windows’ scrollbars aren’t really that much better? Or the lack of two dimensional scroll? Or the insistence on putting menus on the screen, that some things (some builds of Firefox) try hard to make go away? Ora task bar that fails to allow you to drag files to an app to load? (does that work yet?) Or……. the need to find and flick a setting in order to be able to change screen resolution without a reboot! Not to mention that nasty one in XP that should be turned off that, when a problem happens, the machine automatically reboots. Seems back then Microsoft really had their priorities back to front. Either that or they figured “rebooting fixes most quirks so let’s reboot as much as we can!”.

I don’t use a PC much any more. Mostly Android. I’m writing this message on my phone And while I can’t compare a desktop machine to a phone due to very obvious paradigm differences, it does depress me somewhat that I don’t have proper access to àççêñtëd characters when using a Bluetooth keyboard (British English layout). FFS, this is something RISC OS had sorted three decades ago. Even XP (British International layout) can manage it.

Nice to watch ‘Zarch’ play itself inside a muti tasking window in a largest screen mode.

Sib ran in multi tasking mode – switching to a 4 colour mode for editing.

So very close to being able to fully multi task – as when the pointer is dragged to the bottom of the screen the Icon bar is automatically drawn/shown.

My initial favourite was the original StrongEd. The full-screen one. It had such a smooth scrolling…coming from an Amstrad CPC, that seemed very cool.

Later on, I loved FidoMail by Thomas Olsson. Compared to what my DOS-loving friends had to use, that was quite incredible. Made up for the lack of (free) terminal software with the cool file transfer protocols like ZModem and BiModem and the crap 6551 serial port.

And the initial Zap, version 0.70 IIRC. Instant switching between the various modes and the lovely syntax colouring for each mode.

And SparkFS!

Ah, yes. Fidomail. One of the few programs I’ve used, like ever that had coherent and logical quoting.
Not this lame ass lazy crap of dumping the entire message at the bottom or, worse, at the top.

It saddens me that I have to jump through hoops to do inline quoting on Android. Even K9 Mail makes it harder than it should be.
Kudos, at least, to the Apple mail client. It buggered up everything else ¹, but did manage to do decent quoting without freaking out about it.

¹ iOS7, IMAP server, yes let’s just keep on downloading messages and never expire anything… Mom’s mailbox must be pushing around 3GB (photos and such sent to/from friends). There’s no reason for the tablet not to hold the last X days worth of messages and pull others from the server if needed, but no, it has them all.

I liked the spinning pictures on a StrongARM RiscPC. So fast!

@ Graeme

On my A310 with Arthur 1.20:

1) Zarch, I mean the speed of that game with all those colours were not seen before (and never happened on an Amiga thought!)
2) Maestro, yes feel free to laugh at me, but the smoothness of the score scrolling on the first maestro was unprecedented (yup the Atari St couldn’t do that!)
3) (ok this one is personal, but it was before Pro Artisan, so!) My own Giotto a Paint program we added to Arthur distribution in Italy (because of the lack of software for the Archie), which was capable of 256 colours with 640 × 256 screen resolution and written in BBC BASIC, unseen to that point on an home computer
4) BBC BASIC, I mean who had seen a faster BASIC at that time? ;)

On my A310 with RO 2/3

1) Sibelius, it was raw and had a stiff learning curve, but oh boy if it was powerful for the time. It has been my main tool for quite a long time in the pro music business, and I still love to use it on ArchiEmu
2) Euclid, that 3D software was so fast compared to what I have seen previously on my Amiga, that it was mind blowing for me
3) Acorn DTP, Impression, Ovation (in non particular order), I have lost count of all the music gigs brochures I have made with them, another set of big tools for the music business of the time
4) Sibelius To Draw, that silly utility could convert Sibelius scores into draw format for more precise legatos and, obviously, to export the score in Acorn DTP, Impression etc.
5) StarFighter 3000 (how not to list it?!?!?!), as a comparison, there are still folks these days running StarGlider 2 on the Amiga with various accelerators to see if it can do a smooth gaming experience on 3D Space shooters and we had it back in the days with StarFighter 3000!)
6) SolidCAD, SolidRENDER and SolidTOOLS from Silicon Vision, that were some serious 3D stuff back then, I always wondered if they used the FPA, and if so, how fast they could get on an A5000
7) RiscBASIC Compiler, I mean this is more like a coder thing, but BBC BASIC was already pretty fast and RiscBASIC compiler could make it even faster and use it to build System Modules and whatnot, it was impressive for me. Back then I started to write a game engine for it, but I believe I have lost the sources in one of my many moving from one place to another
8) AlphaTrack and ArcPCB schematics, that is because for me it was the first time I came in contact with this type of software, and so it was amazing to see how much easier they made designing PCBs. Also, AlphaTrack was really useful to learn a lot about ArcPCB

On My RiscPC (from the 710 to the StrongARM time)

1) The PC Card, I mean, we basically had “Virtualization” before it was a thing. Sure, also the Amiga 2000 had a 386 card, but the performance of the 2nd processor card on a RiscPC were way higher!
2) WinRISC, a piece of software that allowed to run Windows 3.1 apps in RISC OS UI, that was fascinating and also made them more integrated with the rest of apps on RISC OS, I found ti very useful to run Borland C++ on it
3) My own Forth interpreter executed on a StrongARM, oh boy that was fast :) (but also RiscFORTH and the few that worked on the SA were really good)
4) Rhapsody on the SA had a really good latency for the time, so definitely a big thing for me back then

StarFighter 3000 (how not to list it?!?!?!), as a comparison, there are still folks these days running StarGlider 2 on the Amiga with various accelerators to see if it can do a smooth gaming experience on 3D Space shooters and we had it back in the days with StarFighter 3000!)

I certainly loved Star Fighter 3000 (not the graphics – ARM2 A3000, so needed low details to be playable, but it was very addictive), but it was released in 1994, and compared to what a fast PC could do back then, it was optically (and musically and sound-wise) underperforming wrt the competition beyond 16bit home computers. Games already released in 1993 like Wing Commander, Strike Commander, Comanche, Syndicate, Ultima Underworld the various Star Wars games…all a lot more impressive than Star Fighter 3000.

The PC Card, I mean, we basically had “Virtualization” before it was a thing. Sure, also the Amiga 2000 had a 386 card, but the performance of the 2nd processor card on a RiscPC were way higher!

People without knowledge of the Risc PC’s two processor card concept were always fascinated when I had Doom running in a window on the RISC OS desktop. But then…no Pentium, no support for Windows NT and OS/2, late support for Windows 95, only half-hearted Linux support, and having to run with the Risc PC’s slow I/O…another thing in Acorn/RISC OS world that was nearly breathtaking in 1994, still good in 1995 but hardly usable in 1996/1997.

nearly breathtaking in 1994, still good in 1995 but hardly usable in 1996/1997.

That applies to a lot of things of that era, as the 486 became the Pentium and then clock speeds just went gonzo. It was frequently said that the lead time between designing a motherboard for a new processor and it being actually created meant that it would be out of date by the time it actually hit the shelves.

I certainly loved Star Fighter 3000 (not the graphics – ARM2 A3000, so needed low details to be playable, but it was very addictive), but it was released in 1994, and compared to what a fast PC could do back then, it was optically (and musically and sound-wise) underperforming wrt the competition beyond 16bit home computers. Games already released in 1993 like Wing Commander, Strike Commander, Comanche, Syndicate, Ultima Underworld the various Star Wars games…all a lot more impressive than Star Fighter 3000.

True, the PC games were starting to be quite good in 94, althought if the majority of games released at that point were still heavly sprite based. “Star Wars: TIE Fighter” had a very similar graphics to StarFighter 3000 if you look at it, however I agree, the palette were better and the combination of the sprite based console and then the early 3D graphic with a better palette made it more good looking. But on the screen (in many many schenes) there was much less than in StarFighter 3000 (the dark space helps ;) )

But then…no Pentium, no support for Windows NT and OS/2, late support for Windows 95, only half-hearted Linux support, and having to run with the Risc PC’s slow I/O…another thing in Acorn/RISC OS world that was nearly breathtaking in 1994, still good in 1995 but hardly usable in 1996/1997.

The RiscPC bus is a long story. The community is divided in 2, who says that it was a good delta between the original ARM 610 clock vs the bus speed, it was ok with the 710 an dit was definitely too slow for the SA and who (like me) says, but well the PCI standard was released in 1992, sure it was very expansive, but the delat between the bus speed and the CPU speed was more future proof than what the Acorn did on the RiscPC. I think that was a misatke, but on later analysis of the ARM chip itself, turns out that some of the RiscPC bus speed limitations may have been imposed by the way the ARM 610 was originally designed. So, at this point, not sure if it was an Acorn mistake or if it was an ARM/Apple mistake.

The lack of proper 32bit support on the PC Card seems to be more a PC Card design issue, however, IIRC, one could run “OS/2 for Windows 3.11”. I believe I managed to make it run on my RiscPC, need to check if I have the partition image somewhere still. I defo managed to run W95 ok and also W98. But you’re right, the video performance were poor compared to any Pentium PCs.

@ Rick

That applies to a lot of things of that era, as the 486 became the Pentium and then clock speeds just went gonzo.

This is generally true, but as I have mentioned, the PCI standard was fully released in 1992 and lasted a long time, so, IMHO, the RiscPC bus problem is a more complicated argument especially given some of the limitation the original ARM 610 had, that may have imposed the Acorn Workstation team to design the RiscPC in the way they did, which wasn’t future proof.

For me it was Saloon Cars. That racing game was way, way ahead of its time. Pretty nice 3D graphics considering the limitations of the hardware – yes it’s technically vector graphics but it’s so detailed and combines them with sprites so well that you almost can’t tell! And I’ve not seen many other games where they crammed so many details and features in. You had to manage a budget, you could tune your car, you had practices and qualifying sessions, and you could even build a wheel and pedals if you had an analogue port. You could break almost anything on your car as well, even the starter motor, which many driving simulations are barely catching up with even now. I played it for countless hours and I want to write more but I’ll save it for another time.

Oh, I also liked the look of the Topographer 3D demo. I wonder whatever happend to all Clares Micro’s software.

Saloon Cars and Mig29M

The lack of proper 32bit support on the PC Card seems to be more a PC Card design issue, however, IIRC, one could run “OS/2 for Windows 3.11”. I believe I managed to make it run on my RiscPC, need to check if I have the partition image somewhere still. I defo managed to run W95 ok and also W98. But you’re right, the video performance were poor compared to any Pentium PCs.

It should be remembered that the PC Card wasn’t a full PC, it was only a CPU and a few other bits. A lot of the rest of the work was done by the BIOS handing things over to the RISC OS side, in a similar vein to the Master 512. Anything that assumed a real PC compatible and tried to talk to the hardware rather than making 16-bit BIOS calls was out of luck. I think the Gemini ASIC was not particularly quick in Arm<→x86 communication, although neither was the bus anyway.

You could fix that with specific drivers, which is what happened for a few things (video drivers in Win95 IIRC), but it wasn’t really a sustainable solution. There was no 32-bit version of BIOS (until much later with UEFI): Windows/Linux/etc would just talk to the hardware – which meant somebody had to write and maintain those drivers. That never would have been feasible long term.

The 386/486 podules were I think more like real PCs in that they had their own floppy and hard drive controllers so you didn’t need host drivers for those, but you still needed graphics (and networking, I believe) drivers, and you still need drivers to exchange data between RISC OS and the PC world.

The PC card predated VMware by quite a few years, if it had been contemporary a solution to the drive problem would be to have made them look like the VMware para-virtual drivers. The the guest OS would have thought it was running in a Virtual Machine, which it sort of was.

Yes, these days there’s VirtIO allowing generic drivers for that. We use it for various FPGA<→host communication: it’s not really very well intended for that use case because there’s some circumstances where it expects you can stop your ‘VM’, do some fiddling behind the scenes, and then resume the VM. That doesn’t work with physical hardware (you can’t pause the world) but I think the Gemini ASIC actually offered that – you could do a read or write of an I/O port on an ISA peripheral, it would pause the x86, interrupt the Arm to handle it, and the Arm could resume the x86 later.

Anyone fancy writing VirtIO support for !PC? ;-)

(Unlike PCI, I’m not sure PNP ISA VirtIO is a thing, so you wouldn’t have automatic guest driver support sadly.)

I had forgotten about Euclid and Saloon Cars.

Euclid, I got a demo or something from a cover disk of a magazine. Wherever it came from I tried it a few times and did not understand it, possibly because I did not have a manual to help.

Saloon Cars was great but frustrating using a mouse when playing games. Other games like Lemmings and Zarch had the same issue – when you get dirt on your ball, it stops responding!

I liked the GUI and the concept of it.
Also tha i was able to run Dos and windows in a window, without affecting the normal use of the RPC-600 at the same time.

And my most used and liked programms were Impression Publisher, and ZAP.

And my most used and liked programms were Impression Publisher, and ZAP.

Snap!

But I never used Dos or Windows in a window…

And my most used and liked programms were Impression Publisher, and ZAP.

Ditto. And the native vector graphic format provided by the Draw module. And MakeDraw which allows me to take a Draw file and add precise lines and shapes to it.

And the native vector graphic format provided by the Draw module.

Absolutely! I should have mentioned that too – !Draw and !Zap (and BBC BASIC) are my reasons for still having RISCOS around.

My wow moment the first time I laid my hands on an A3000 was realising that “Lotus Turbo” was using “Amiga Pro-tracker” files with converted samples for it’s in-game music. I was over the moon that I could use amiga music on my Archie, and very quickly learned how to convert my own modules, and modules from my Amiga owning friends, then play them from basic using the TEQMusic relocatable module.

This unhealthy obsession continued with “Cocanizer” and ultimately QTM player, taking in Desktop Tracker and Digital Symphony along the way :-)

The Amiga paved the way for tracker music. It would make sense to support it under RISC OS, just doing some conversions for the differences in sound hardware.
I remember Coconiser. It’s a shame such a thing isn’t available (on RISC OS) for MIDI.
What I’m currently doing is playing stuff on my keyboard (note – I suck) and getting Rhapsody4 to turn that into notation so I can see how it looks as “music” rather than as a sequence of events. It’s a slow process, hindered by my inability to track down the power brick, with USB connected the keyboard doesn’t half eat the batteries…
(probably be cheaper to just get a replacement from Amazon, no?)

Most of those home user midi keyboards will quite happily run off of a standard centre positive 9V barrel jack. I lost the power brick off my Yamaha PSR series a long time ago, and these days I use an old Sega mega drive power-brick, which I chopped the old plug off, and soldered a new one to fit the socket on the keyboard on.

You can get a replacement PSU from amazon, but I’d head caution, I’ve had several over the years, and all came from the cheap Chinese market. One went bang, one caught fire and another the plastic cover came away in my hand as I was pulling it out of the wall socket, almost resulting in me grabbing hold of the live transformer inside.

I did once, a long time ago, think about writing a tracker like editor for the archie that also allowed midi usage. At the time I was still just a poor student :-) Didn’t have a midi podule for my arc, but I did have a yamaha MU10 that could be driven off of serial, so I set about writing a relocatable module that used the block drivers, and implemented the same SWI interface as the official Acorn module, in the hopes that soft-loading that would then allow me to run siblieus7, maestro and other midi aware apps, and use them without the podule.

Alas, life got in the way, university took up more and more of my time, and I just drifted away from the Acorn world.

As I got more involved in the world of Windows & Linux, I started using the apps there and largely forgot about stuff, so a lot of things sat around on the hard drives in my A5000 and never got finished.

Sadly, my A5k is now dead, and the HDD’s in it were not in the best of shape either, but I’ve managed to recover them into image files which I can mount with RPCEm and have progressively been sorting through recovering stuff, using an rPI running RiscOS to assist me.

I may continue with some of my projects as I head towards retirement now :-) Who knows, I might actually (Eventually) realize my soundtracker with midi idea :-)

Need to check if my RiscOS/NutPI compiler tools still work however.

Serious software: ArtWorks, Photodesk, Ovation Pro, TopModel, SparkFS, ArcFax

Diversions: Elite, Mig29, Starfighter 300, ChocksAway.

Offtopic: Spent weeks on a friend’s Amiga 500 playing the Amiga version of Elite. Doesn’t hold a candle to ArcElite, mainly re. NPC flight “AI”.

Probably not the intention, but TrueANSI made my jaw drop. In frustration.

A nagging “Register Me” window that kept popping to the front, and sporadically locking the machine solid requiring a Ctrl-Reset.