What do you use RISC OS for?

Hello,
Sorry if there’s already been a thread like this.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, these days, a lot of people who are doing stuff with RISC OS (like me for example) are only using it for fun & non-essential side projects. But it seems like there are also still people who use RISC OS (or systems running RISC OS) for serious & important work.

So I’m asking, what do you personally use RISC OS for?

DTP mainly.
And programming, of course.

Largely programming, but I’ve started using it more for DTP.
Impression-X is really good, Artworks is another amazing product.
There are plenty more.
“Internet Radio” off the !Store is an amazingly simple idea, but it’s probably one of the most useful programs I use.
So relaxing, checking the news (newsuk – which is a pile of **** at the moment).

Pretty much how I used to use my Linux PC.

Fun and non-essential side projects. That is how it has always been for me. Serious and important work has eluded me, though I am not sure that I would recognize it if it came knocking at the door.

I have little experience of how other people use computers, but I usually find that their habits differ markedly from my own. I like simplicity. I rarely have windows open on the desktop unless I have immediate need to refer to their contents. I do not cram everything into one directory; I feel that the filing system is there to be used. I am no commandline-extremist. I only use the keyboard when I must. I would be happy if I could think content into the computer, without use of my body at all. To be able to use the computer when immersed in a hot bath, that is my ideal.

I use RISC OS for programming, DTP, and writing technical documents using TechWriter and other tools (including particularly Tau, which is a very flexible tool for producing graphs).

As its raining and I have nothing better to do, I thought I’d write a few words about how I once used RISC OS.

Back in 1998 I got a job in company that developed a system for displaying menus and information on the TVs in hotel rooms. The existing system used a teletext chip built into the TV to display the info, and that obviously didn’t look very fancy. Each TV had a builtin microcontroller that controlled the teletext chip and intercepted the remotecontrol so that we could control which TV channels the guest was allowed to watch. The microcontroller communicated with a central server via a small cabelmodem which was connected to the antenna network. The antenna network had a bandwidth of approx 120 kbaud, which was shared between all the rooms, sometimes as many as 600 rooms.
The idea was to use the RISC OS based Network Computer (NC), as these had a good quality TV output, were reasonably cheap, and were quite fast – in 1998 a 36MHz ARM3 wasn’t that bad, especially for company used to working with 8 bit microcontrollers.

Initially we used the NCs to provide internet access from the hotel rooms. The NCs were located next to the central server, the TV output of each was modulated and sent to a dedicated TV channel. When a guest wanted to use the Internet, an NC was allocated to the room, the microcontroller was told to switch the TV to the TV channel for that NC, and all buttonpresses on the remotecontrol was then sent via the cabelmodem+antenna network to the server which forwarded them to the NC. It was even more complicated than it sounds. If I remember correctly we initially used the Fresco browser, then switched to Oregano. It was never a huge success, the NCs were too slow and the browsers lacked too many features.

Next step was to replace the teletext based menu/info system with graphics provided by the NCs. Some of our competitors used a browser based system, but even though they used somewhat faster hardware this was still terribly slow. We developed a dedicated application for displaying information pages using a homemade markup language. The pages could contain animations, fullscreen background images, multiple fonts and were rendered in less than 1 second, without any of the hideous flickering that was common in web browsers in those days. Whenever the guest pressed the MENU button on the remote control, an NC was allocated just as for internet access, and a suitable page was sent to the NC and the TV was switched to the channel displaying the video output for that NC.
This was a huge success, and in the next 2 years or so hundreds RISC OS computers were installed in hotels all over Europe and in the Middle East, usually about 10 in each hotel. They were installed in hotels in London, Manchester, Glasgow and a few other UK cities. I don’t know the exact number, but I believe we shipped more than 500 NCs.

Having a dedicated program to handle all graphics allowed us to replace Oregano with a VNC client which connected to a fast PC running several VNC servers, each displaying an instance of Mozilla. A spin-off from this was a VNC viewer for RISC OS, called !ViNCe , which was developed further by Vincent Lefrevre. The webserver !WebJames (now maintained by Alex Waugh) was actually also a spin-off, intended to be used to allow technicians to control the NCs, but it was never put into use.

We also developed a bunch of games for the NC: Snake, Chess, Reversi/Othello, card games and more. But these were just for show – the important thing was the fast menu system and the internet access, which the NC could do better than most of the competitors.

Not everything was a success. We tried selling the NCs for home use – about 50 NCs with built-in modem were sold via a supermarket chain. They had a big EEPROM with several games and other stuff, and came bundled with a dialup internet connection, but they failed miserably.
Oregan had developed an NC with a built-in MPEG decoder card. Since the most important purpose of the whole hotel system was to sell access to pay-tv this sounded like an excellent opportunity for switching from VCR movies to digital. But the MPEG streams provided by the movie distributors were usually at such high bitrates that the NCs struggled to display them.

In 2002 or so we switched to a much smaller, faster (and better) computer from Cambridge based Amino. The Amino was the size of the Raspberry Pi and had a 200 MHz PowerPC CPU, ran Linux and could display a page in less than 0.1 seconds. The days of RISC OS in the hotels were over.

Very interesting. Thanks Henrik for the write up.

The days of RISC OS in the hotels were over.

1998 to 2002 is a good four years. I remember in those sorts of days the “power” of an x86 processor doubled practically every other month and some motherboards were awful as manufacturers couldn’t keep up with developments and didn’t want to be saddled with a lot of stock they couldn’t shift. By the time Phoebe was cancelled, a typical x86 machine outstripped the Acorn design in every possible way.
So, to have a good four years in that period is no small thing.

Thank you, by the way, for WebJames. I’m running it on my Pi right now. While it didn’t suit David with riscos.fr, it is a good choice for a small system doing simple things where the complications of Linux would be overkill.

What are you using for 3D modelling – with RO?
What sort of 3D printer are you using?

What are you using for docs on Gerber files?

It seems very serial printer type output – move to a point – drop pen – move again etc.

What is ‘Blender’ found a 3D modeller prog – is there a RO download available?
Good stuff!

Henrik, thanks for sharing your interesting story. It’s good to know the NCs were used for something useful, after all. Did you ever encounter any of the competing operating systems that were being developed for NCs, and especially for the other ARM-based systems?

David, no, we never saw or heard anything about any other OS. RISC OS was perfect for our requirement, so it wouldn’t have mattered much.

DavidS – Is there a RISC OS version of Blender 3D available for download?

Blender? The CGI modeling/animation software? On RISC OS? Are you sure about that?

@DavidS

Are you sure you’re not getting mixed up with Ray Blender by Clares?

Ray Blender by Clares?

Render Blender by Clares!
In stock here:-

Blender 3D

Ray Blender

Render Blender

Render Bender, even?

https://www.blender.org/

Home of the Blender project.

Free and Open 3D Creation Software

A RISC OS Version?

Render Bender, even?

Doh.
Actually I think I like the name ‘Render Blender’ better. Maybe they couldn’t use it or just have different tastes to me.

!Draw. There may be programs for my Mac that are as good as !Draw for the kind of drawings I do, but all the candidates are EXPENSIVE.

BBC BASIC, with occasional heavy crunching in ARM Assembler, to write quick (and usually dirty) little apps to process all sorts of files in all sorts of ways. Far easier to write little apps this way than to try writing anything for the Mac. http://clive.semmens.org.uk/RISCOS/index.html

Not recently, but maybe one day again: !FontEd, together with some of my own apps, to design fonts, and then convert them to TrueType or PostScript for use on the Mac.

(There are likely to be more quick (and usually dirty) little apps – some of them that I use already, that are currently too dirty to release but might get tidied up (a little, not squeaky clean! But enough to be useful for folks who can’t be expected to learn all the quirks I’ve not yet ironed out.))

There were issues with some of the apps on my website that I linked to above – now all hopefully resolved. There may still be memory allocation issues if you’ve not got much memory on your machine, or if you’re processing very large files. Feel free to poke around in the BBC BASIC runfile and fiddle if you know how, or to contact me to sort things out for you. I don’t promise to be quick but I’ll generally help eventually!

I might eventually fix the memory allocation so they actually calculate what they’re going to need when they see the file you’ve sent them, rather than making crude guesses, but don’t hold your breath.

I use it as half of my flip flopping between OSes. When I use Linx on the Pi 3 it feels clunky and besides the GPIO the desktop can do everything it can do, but better, except for BT audio. So I get frustrated with it and flop over to RISC OS.
I like using it. In fact I am now. However I keep attempting to reinvent the wheel. My wheel is square and doesn’t turn but at least it’s interesting.

In short I enjoyed the challenge of getting RISC OS working well on the Pi Zero then the Pi 3. I like writing programs using it, surfing the web with it and generally goofing around. It agrees more with my philosophy of software. OSes and programs needen’t be huge to work well and be nice to use.
I also really like being able to work a little closer to the metal than OSes like Linux allow.

I wish I could say I do more with RISC OS but I can’t. I lack knowledge of it’s inner workings. It’s something I’m still trying to learn. Once I’ve solved accessing hardware with the Pi 3 I’ll be doing a lot more with it.