Sibelius on Raspberry Pi?

Hi everyone, I’m new to the forums but have been dabbling with RISC OS on and off for a few years, mostly to do with music.

Does anyone know if it’s possible, now that Aemulor is out, to get Sibelius running on the Pi (or any modern hardware for that matter)? I’ve tried various approaches but can’t get round the issue of Sibelius reporting that it’s corrupted on launch. The main problem is that it needs to be installed properly using !InstallS7 on floppy 1, which needs to appear to the system as ADFS::0 for !InstallS7 to run.

Also I’d be interested to know if others are still using Sibelius on RISC OS.

Never used it myself, although played with a demo beards ago. I’ve been hoping to track down a cheap secondhand copy to experiment with, but don’t have the time to experiment for the moment anyway. Sorry, and good luck bypassing the copy protection.

There is a demo on Risc Disc 3, I mean. I not sure if I have this CD. I can take a look tomorro.

Good luck seeing a modern version on a modern RISC OS.
http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2012/07/sibelius-staff-announce-their-dismissal.html
Not closing, Avid owns it now and apparently laid off the UK guys.

I use MuseScore http://musescore.org/ – not for RISC OS but it is open source so maybe some day? It isn’t up to the level of Sibelius but it is in active development.
Oh and if your PC struggles to play basic MIDI tunes without crackling and faltering, RTFM, that is a known issue and fiddling with the sound controls makes the problem go away.

I also used Sibelius “beards” ago on my RiscPC but now use !PMS (Philips Music Scribe) on my Raspberry Pi.

We still use Sibelius 7 on a RISC PC. With Aemulor Pro I suppose we could in theory use it on the Beagleboard but installing it is the problem with no floppy drive access.

The demo is also aviable from the StrongARM CD or download the demo .
It works with Aemulor on my Beagle xM.

Which of the new boards ie pi/beagle/panda – display low colour modes – ie 4 colour?
Are you running Aemulor after the machine is booted?

I running Aemulor after boot by doubleclick. It is necessary to drop every music-file (partititur) to Aemulor. And on my Beagle xM it works with 640 × 480 but not with 1440 × 900.
It switched automatic to the 4 color mode. After you use the overview option, you can change the color mode.

The only way that I can think of Installing a full copy of Sibelius would be to ‘share’ the floppy and try installing from that.
One of the first things it does is to check that the disc is not write protected which I guess is an ADFS call. Maybe a dummy ADFS could be written…

How about imaging the disc and using ADFFS? Maybe ADFFS needs to run under Aemulor ;-)

Maybe ADFFS could be helpful here? http://www.iconbar.com/forums/viewthread.php?threadid=11846
(Beat me by 9 minutes, Steffen ;) )

Did something go horribly wrong for me? I downloaded and unpacked the demo version. The score it makes it quite nice looking, and some of the examples are so complex I don’t even know what some of the symbols mean…
…however the editor. OMG. Running on an emulation of an older RISC OS machine, it appears to switch to a lower colour lower-resolution mode that is bordering on being embarrassingly crude (if the original Ovation could anti-alias in a window on the fly, what’s Sibelius’ excuse for the almost-teletext-style drawing?).

Not to mention the MIDI file I tried to import was – for some obscure reason – rendered on three staves (instead of two, it’s a piano transcription) with the additional stave playing a note “every so often” with the rest of it being rests.

Oh, and it is only 17 years old! ;-)

It was very fast on the hardware of the time.

The ease of use and quality of the manuscripts it generated was why people spent £2000+ on a system just to run it.
Many users still use it in preference to the later PC versions!

I still use Sibelius 7 on a RiscPC occasionally. On the newest version you ‘only need the floppy drive’ to install the program. After this it is locked to the hard disk (something with changing the creation date of files in !Boot). You can de-install it using the floppy again and no, you can not copy the floppy easily, it’s formatted in a strange way.

There is a trick to copy it to multiple machines on a network. Install it on machine A, copy it to machine B. It doesn’t work there, but you can de-install it from B to the floppy. Install in on machine B, copy to C etc.

I am afraid that one day my machine will fail and would love to be able to use it on modern hardware.

After this it is locked to the hard disk (something with changing the creation date of files in !Boot). You can de-install it using the floppy again and no, you can not copy the floppy easily, it’s formatted in a strange way.

Ovation (original) did this, but it used certain features of how RISC OS 2 dealt with floppy hardware in its protection mechanism. I don’t know if it was David Pilling being clever or Beebug being paranoid. It went epic wrong when RISC OS 3 was introduced.

David Pilling now has no protection on OvationPro. Instead, when you “unlock it” it has either from registration file or burned into the executable (don’t remember, I only looked briefly) your name and address.
I could zip up and mail you a copy, it’ll work just fine on your machine… only every time it starts it will display my name and address. No prizes for guessing the origin of that copy!
All in all, it is a pretty effective deterrent against being a skanky pirate, whilst at the same time not having a protection measure that causes the legitimate end users more grief than its worth.

There is a trick to copy it to multiple machines on a network.

Hahaha! Verification fail! ;-)

I am afraid that one day my machine will fail and would love to be able to use it on modern hardware.

I assume you have a ‘primed’ floppy disc; so if your machine dies, ask around or eBay for a replacement and then install Sibelius on that?

It is more amusing in the UK. In British law, you have a legal right to make a backup copy of software (section 50(A) of the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act). It is, however, unlawful to circumvent copy protection mechanisms (section 296 of the 2004 CRRA).
The only logical conclusion that can be reached from this is that applying copy protection mechanisms themselves to software media is in fact illegal (it is not legal to deprive a person of a specific given right). I don’t think this has been tested in court yet, but it would be a grab-the-popcorn moment if somebody tried to sue a person for hacking their oh-so-clever copy protection, and they turned around and sued back for putting it there in the first place! In a way this sounds a bit like the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Under European Law, you have a right to make a backup copy. There are certain rights of examination/decompilation that are to do with interoperability, however you may be entitled to perform likewise in order to exercise your right to make backup copies as you are legally entitled to do.
http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/internal_market/businesses/intellectual_property/mi0016_en.htm
Sadly the full boring text talks about the user not being able to be contractually prevented from making backups, and doesn’t mention such things as copy protection technologies.

If I am to guess by your name that you are Dutch, I think the law as it is in your country is “Wet van 07.07.1994”.
If you’re the Dutch side of Belgium, the law is “1994063036” but good luck finding it because http://www.juridat.be/ kept on throwing loads of PHP errors. Okay, I was clicking stuff randomly ‘cos I don’t speak any Dutch, but really…
[and this is where you say “actually, I’m in New Zealand” ;-) ]

David Pilling now has no protection on OvationPro. Instead, when you “unlock it” it has either from registration file or burned into the executable (don’t remember, I only looked briefly) your name and address.

It’s a file. David sent me a replacement when I moved house, though having moved since I just assume my name hasn’t changed.

no, you can not copy the floppy easily, it’s formatted in a strange way.

If it can be read it can be copied.

I am afraid that one day my machine will fail and would love to be able to use it on modern hardware.

Which is why I always remove copy protection from everything I buy. Allegedly.

Under European Law, you have a right to make a backup copy

You have a right to a damn sight more than that:

Decompilation

The authorisation of the rightholder is not required where reproduction of the code and translation of its form are indispensable to obtain the information necessary to achieve the interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, provided that the following conditions are met:

* those acts are performed by the licensee or another person having a right to use a copy of a program;
* the information necessary to achieve interoperability has not previously been readily available;
* those acts are confined to the parts of the original program which are necessary in order to achieve interoperability.

In particular, what is disallowed is “putting into circulation, for commercial purposes, any means the sole intended purpose of which is to facilitate the unauthorised removal or circumvention of any technical protection device.”.

So actually one can remove the copy protection if it prevents interoperability, one just can’t describe how, or provide any tool to do so (or at least, not for “commercial purposes”!).

Read the grizzly details here.

no, you can not copy the floppy easily, it’s formatted in a strange way.

If it can be read it can be copied.

Yes, but, like I said, not easy.

Problem is that even if I have a valid floppy disc with the program the new hardware can not read it.

And even if it can read floppies, I doubt this will get the disc errors correct to make the copy protect work. It would be much easier to remove the copyright protection in the first place.

The dutch law 7.7.1994 was changed a few months later :-)

There was a program for RISC OS that allowed you to copy discs with “errors” on them that worked with nearly all disc protection.
For the life of me I can’t remember what it was though, but it was darn good!
I seem to remember it failed on saloon cars, but worked with all the other games i had

Procopy from APDL can do it.