Recursion 2018

The date is now known for the next Recursion Computer Science Fair

That date has moved significantly from the early July date of the last few years, to mid February: It will be taking place on 17th February.

That puts it exactly one week before the Southwest Show, which takes place on 24th.

For those unfamiliar, Recursion isn’t a RISC OS event – it’s largely platform agnostic, and for the past few years there have been a small number of RISC OS exhibitors.

Obviously, with the next one taking place a week before a main RISC OS event, there’s a risk the small number will reduce to almost (but not quite) none. Not quite because the MUG chaps have already said they’ll be there.

I’d like to see more (and varied) RISC OS exhibitors at the show, if possible – despite that unfortunate timing.

It’s doubly difficult for me to attend, because not only is it a week before the SW show, it’s also the day after I return from a holiday – but I haven’t ruled it out; I’m considering how I can make it possible. I want to attend if I can.

An important point to consider is that Recursion should be treated as a non-commercial event, with a heavy focus on education: Sparking the interests of the (mostly young) visitors in computing and related fields.

And the possibility of getting them interested in trying out RISC OS can’t be a bad thing.

Discuss.

Or ignore. Your choice.

Edit: Forgot to link to the site.

Or ignore. Your choice.

I’m not an exhibitor so this doesn’t really apply to me, however…

I think this would be a good idea. Why? Because I’m guessing that the visitors to the RISC OS shows are frequently the same people. Those who already know and use the platform.
This show should be seen as publicity to help make more people aware of RISC OS, and that can only be a good thing, right?

This show should be seen as publicity to help make more people aware of RISC OS, and that can only be a good thing, right?

Perhaps if one or two people had a little demo of the ease of modifying or extending RISC OS.
Unlike other items they might come across the base setup is simple¹ to alter, break etc.

¹ In this instance school kids are perfect because their minds are not yet limited by all the things we adults “know” to be difficult or “impossible”

This show should be seen as publicity to help make more people aware of RISC OS, and that can only be a good thing, right?

Exactly, yes.

Not only from the point of view of expanding the user base – which, to be fair, is likely to only be a small gain, if any. (But a fair number of people did take away the leaflet I produced for last year’s show about installing RISC OS – and I gave a bunch to the girl that organises the Staffordshire Raspberry Jam).

But also: Some of these kids will be tomorrow’s programmers. RISC OS will need tomorrow’s programmers to continue what today’s programmers are doing.

I’m not an exhibitor so this doesn’t really apply to me, however

However we could facilitate you as a virtual one by showcasing !Manga etc on our stand and rolling presentation.

Let us know what you may wish to showcase and we will see what we can do unless you want to put something together for us to use :-)

But also: Some of these kids will be tomorrow’s programmers. RISC OS will need tomorrow’s programmers to continue what today’s programmers are doing.

So with this in mind MUG could have a RISCOS coding club type event.

We could have a demo of RISCOS !Python and perhaps how to compile or change the ROM build etc.

Again if anyone in the community has any ready made demo’s we could use then happy to see what we can do though bear in mind most MUG members are not coders so it would need to be easy.

The south midlands venue makes if feasable for us northeners :)

King edward VI School, Warwickshire CV37 6BE

We could have a demo of RISCOS !Python and perhaps how to compile or change the ROM build etc.

Visible changes can be done by tweaking something like the messages file for the Filer, actually making the action match the resultant menu is pretty easy for some¹ items. For portability you could use a RPCEmu install for the coding demo(s)

The south midlands venue makes if feasable for us northeners :)

Public transport – Chiltern line out of Birmingham, change Leamington for Stratford, 15 minutes walk (google says 13 and most could probably do it faster) or Chiltern line out of Marylebone for the people in the great smoke smog. Probably quicker than the two buses required from my domicile 39 min plus change plus 90 min.

It’s a tourist town so, even though it’s out of season you could make a weekend of it and visit the spots that are open.

¹ Thus demonstrating how simple ARM assembler can be. Plus reminding other folk how much is in the source already that didn’t actually make it to accessible function.

However we could facilitate you as a virtual one by showcasing !Manga etc on our stand and rolling presentation.

Feel free.

A nice manga that people might have “seen the film of” is Summer Wars.

A recent animé series that is also available in manga form is Coppellion.

A very nice story is “Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso” (Your Lie in April). Spawned an animé and a live adaption, though the artwork is a bit…Beano.

I would avoid Azumi for demos. It’s a very nicely drawn “historical” manga, but a bit NSFW in places (Azumi did not grow up with a concept of girl vs boy (makes sense in context), so her being less than dressed is both a recurring theme and something of a running joke). If you know Azumi (shown on FilmFour a bunch of times) as the small chick with the big sword that pretty much single-handedly wipes out an entire town of mercenaries… you will know what to expect.

Hmm… What else have I written worth mentioning… hmm… hm… <scratches head> My stuff (REdit, Harinezumi, BreakAid, MoreKeys…) are more “small utilities for a purpose” rather than full applications. Perhaps my last major application was “!Teletext” (even had a script interpreter built in!), but I doubt anybody has the hardware these days given it’s a 5V chip (as opposed to modern 3.3V) and nobody much broadcasts teletext any more… Oh yeah, and I wrote a nifty little replacement front-end for Argonet’s Voyager, but nobody does dial-up Internet any more. ;-)

Some time ago (perhaps from 1995 to 2005) I regularly exhibited at the local Stuttgart computer show and showed Acorn and RISC OS to the masses. Not sure it was really a success overall (apart from being able to help and meet existing RISC OS users).

In the early years, people were quite impressed by the Risc PC with a PC card inside – I usually started the demonstration showing Artworks and Impression and OvationPro while having Doom running in the PC card window. People usually lost interest as soon as they heard the price for the hardware. But the software and usability was seen as “maybe worth the price”.

In the late (IYONIX) years, the browser problem became usually a point of discussion (most people assumed that a Firefox port was available). And still the price for the hardware of course. But the software lost its edge. While people still were impressed by the usability of the overall system, it became very difficult to find impressing features. And it became clear that Linux and MacOS were enough “alternative” for most people, and it was extremely difficult to point out the specific selling points of RISC OS. Windows since XP was mostly considered “good enough”.

My last show was the “Classic Computing” in 2016. We had a MIST, an A9home, a BeagleBoard, a Pi and an A3000 on show. People visiting Retro shows are of course a completely different bunch. Most knew the “Archimedes” as a dream machine from the late 80s they couldn’t afford, having to put up with an Amiga or Atari ST instead. Most were surprised that the OS is alive and well thanks to the Pi and various dev boards, but immediately did not understand why they should use it today.

So to sum it up, you have to think very hard about today’s RISC OS unique selling point. Easy tinkering with the OS? Well, you need to buy the DDE to build a new ROM… Easy access to the hardware? Is it really easier than e.g. using Linux with any old lib? Easy software development? Is BBC BASIC really easier than say Python on Linux, as well as the many other languages not available for RISC OS? As I said: RISC OS is very difficult to “sell” these days. The users miss the cutting edge software which they get for free or very cheap on other platforms. The tinkerers miss the flexibility and power they experience using Linux.

Fortunately, at least the price of hardware is no longer the issue!

So to sum it up, you have to think very hard about today’s RISC OS unique selling point. Easy tinkering with the OS? Well, you need to buy the DDE to build a new ROM

Well it is probably easier building individual modules using Builder, but assembler in a BASIC wrapper using works just as well as raw assembler and a compiler to put together the module.
You’re forgetting that RO is a collection of modules and twiddling one module to produce a softload version was all I was talking about.
Surely that’s what everyone does when prototyping?

Surely that’s what everyone does when prototyping?

I usually just rebuild the ROM and boot it, but then my twiddles are fairly minor.

The tinkerers miss the flexibility and power they experience using Linux.

While there is flexibility and power in the available libraries and languages to make things simple, what if you want direct control of the hardware? Can you kick Linux out of the way and “own” the hardware yourself? The last I was aware, the only way to do something like that was to write a kernel module and jump through hoops. On RISC OS, some assembler in BASIC…

RISC OS isn’t good for media or games or whatever, and one might say that these days a 1GHz machine with ~1GB and no swap might struggle with the web regardless of the OS in use. Where we may find a place for RISC OS is a lightweight system for tinkering that is not resource heavy and is pretty easy to understand (unlike the mess that is a modern Un*x system).
Maybe.
It’s worth putting the suggestion of there.

Rick

So are your “tinkering” changes to timezone/video on Pi etc in a form that is a step by step guide or could you get it in such a state so that we could trying a replicate it for Recursion as that may be a good demo.

Surely that’s what everyone does when prototyping?

I usually just rebuild the ROM and boot it, but then my twiddles are fairly minor.

1. I don’t see the point in rebuilding the whole ROM each time when it’s a small set of incremental mods to one module I can build and softload. How long does a ROM build take?
2. I’m not that confident that I’m not going to screw everything. Given the thing I’ve mostly been twiddling with is the Filer module softloading something broken only stops me working until the next reboot, a broken ROM could be a lot more “entertaining”

Where we may find a place for RISC OS is a lightweight system for tinkering that is not resource heavy and is pretty easy to understand (unlike the mess that is a modern Un*x system).

Might struggle a little getting a full working system on the PCMCIA cards I’ve got here – the large ones are 64MB¹ the small ones are 16MB.

¹ I’ve got 4 × 64MB flash sticks too. Not sure where they’ve hidden the other 100+ awaiting disposal.

So are your “tinkering” changes […]

https://www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=20160326

There’s also how to write a module, how to write a dumb server, etc etc.

How long does a ROM build take?

Honestly? No idea. I set it up and then go out the kettle on. ;-) A full build is quite slow so I only do the last bits to actually build stuff and join the ROM. I could possibly get away with less, but the build process is a bit arcane so I’d rather it so too much than not enough.

a broken ROM could be a lot more “entertaining”

Never roll without a backup plan. Previous ROM is called riscos_prv/img. If there’s a problem, pop the card into a USB reader, find the OTG adaptor, shove it into my phone, delete riscos/img and rename the previous. Simple. :-)

Might struggle a little getting a full working system

Same with my PVR. Used to run a customised Linux with Nano UI. They moved to Qt4 and it was way bigger than the 16MB Flash, so they took over the CF slot (and supplied a 128MB card) just to hold the libraries and junk…

RISC OS? 16MB? Well the entire core OS would only need 5MB (half that of compressed), so…

You’re forgetting that RO is a collection of modules and twiddling one module to produce a softload version was all I was talking about.
Surely that’s what everyone does when prototyping?

And this works without buying DDE? “Building a new ROM” was just a convenient shortcut without going into the details of building the ROM, parts of the ROM or whatever.

Wrong continent, but a stall or whatever could be good perhaps. Trouble is the elephant in the room will be brightly illuminated. I bet most questions will be about Wi-Fi. Guaranteed.

I may have been asked about WiFi that once at Recursion – but for the most part the reactions are:

• Wow I never new BASIC could be this fast or do all this stuff
• I’ve never heard of this operating system – seems pretty cool.

For me personally as a RISC OS user of 3 and half years, I like the fact that RISC OS lets me take control of the system rather than the OS pushing me out of the way so it can sort itself out. I also like the fact its harks back to the time when computers were fun and not just corporate grey identikit boxes.

I’ve used Linux a fair bit over the last 20+ years at university, home and work, but it feels very serious by comparison… And honestly tends to have a rather soulless UI at least to my personal taste.

I should mention that I’ve programmed professonally in C/C++ (including C++ 11), lua, python, proprietary languages on OSs from VxWorks to Os400 & PalmOs. PalmOS (the 68k version) was quite fun..

So what is the unique selling point of RISC OS for me? The fact I find it fast and simple to be creative upon it – writing up sketches and concepts quickly without worrying about layers of OS and libraries getting in the way. I worked out I’d written around 40 something games over the years (not all of which still exist or are any good). Currently 8 on RISC OS, 6 on the Amiga, 2 on Windows, 1 on unix and the rest on various 8 bit systems. I didn’t find unix especially fun to program… But maybe that’s just me.

I’m now able to confirm that I’ll be at Recursion. I’ve modified my holiday (still coming back on the 16th, the day before the show) to make it more practical.

FWIW, the leaflet (with installation instructions for the Pi) I was dishing out at Recursion 2017 is here (I can’t remember offhand if that was the final version – but if not it should be close to it).

I’ll take another batch of the same this year.

And thinking about some comments above, another with a very short, simple BASIC program (with explanatory text) might not be a bad idea – but it would need to fit on four A5 sides, and be interesting. Something to think about.

You’re forgetting that RO is a collection of modules and twiddling one module to produce a softload version was all I was talking about.
Surely that’s what everyone does when prototyping?

And this works without buying DDE?

Simply taking a set of assembler source for a module and repackaging for BASIC? – yes

Taking a set of assembler source for a module and compiling using GCC? – yes (only done that a couple of times)

Never tried GCC for a complete ROM build but I gather it is possible. I’m presuming you’re concentrating on the DDE aspect because of the cost element.

Never tried GCC for a complete ROM build but I gather it is possible.

Nope. It used to be possible to use asasm as a replacement for objasm, for at least some ROMs, but that falls far short of being able to use GCC for the full build.

Anthony:

For me personally as a RISC OS user of 3 and half years,

Wait… what? You’ve been writing these great games, and the audio module… and you’ve only been around here for three (and a half) years? Damn!

:-)

Vince:

And thinking about some comments above, another with a very short, simple BASIC program (with explanatory text) might not be a bad idea – but it would need to fit on four A5 sides, and be interesting. Something to think about.

People like visual stuff. Remember the days when you’d pick up an AU at WHSmith and the first thing you’d do is flick to the *info column, or just the yellow pages, to see if there was a creation of Jan Vibe’s to type in? Or was that just me?

Nope. It used to be possible to use asasm as a replacement for objasm, for at least some ROMs, but that falls far short of being able to use GCC for the full build.

Oh well, probably good that what I was advocating was minor alterations of specific modules to demonstrate how easy changing some elements of the OS can be and getting people looking at the detail rather than the ‘fluffy’ “look I’m coding” type of things.
That last bit could be more usefully rephrased as “look I’m bloating some code”

And thinking about some comments above, another with a very short, simple BASIC program (with explanatory text) might not be a bad idea – but it would need to fit on four A5 sides, and be interesting. Something to think about.

Perhaps this? https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/5/topics/3718?page=3#posts-47565

It might be a bit long, but there is at least one easy way of making it shorter (PROCpoly could be reduced to just the “Hard case, plot 2 triangles” code path, at the cost of the demo running a bit slower on some machines)

Maybe you can have a challenge to see who can beat me to adding trees and cars (so far, two years and counting)