Dip your hand into our bonus bin
Posted by Steve Revill Sun, 04 Oct 2015 14:35:00 GMT
Frequent visitors of the popular Miscellaneous downloads might have spotted the recent introduction of a bonus binaries archive.
If you’re not a developer, it’s probably safe to stop reading now – the HardDisc4 archive contains everything that end users could ever want. Those more adventurous or technically inclined can read on…
CC-BY Chris Parfitt
What’s inside?
Inside are a few missing applications and modules that were once hosted by ROOL, but that were in fact generated by hand – not the best use of time strapped volunteer time. Since those dark days of 2007 the behind the scenes setup has improved in leaps and bounds, something that’s easy to forget when a new set of downloads appears after breakfast every morning.
It provides the following occasional applications
- !MakeModes – for creating VIDC20 compatible mode definitions
- !FontEd – for editing RISC OS outline fonts
- !WinEdit – a simple Wimp template editor
- !SrcEdit – the big brother to the built in text editor, Edit
- !ResCreate – part of the Toolbox
- !ResEdit – part of the Toolbox
- !ResTest – part of the Toolbox
And a few modules too
- DebugButton – dump useful information when an application explodes
- DebugTools – various very low level diagnosis tools
- Territory modules – for several regions
Caveat utilitor
It should be noted that some of these binaries lack the polish of the items in the mainline HardDisc4 download, for example they may not be internationalised, might crash, or contain some other historical baggage. For example, !MakeModes assumes that a Risc PC with 2MB of VRAM is top of the range.
May the user beware.
Donate
Should you find these useful, spare a thought for the server that delivers these to you every morning. You might like to donate to help with the upkeep either monthly or to a bounty of your choice.
I’ve just added a recipe to the GCCSDK autobuilder to grab a copy of this file and provide the applications and debug modules as packages.
They should appear sometime over the weekend.
This is a stop gap measure as hopefully at some time in the future ROOL will produce their own packages.
It will be very easy to produce these packages in future, I’ll just need a reminder to run the process when the versions have changed.