Latest news

Lost for something to do this summer?

Posted by Steve Revill Tue, 12 Jul 2022 12:46:00 GMT

If you’re still circling the A642 for the Wakefield show or snoozing in the deck chair after the MUG midsummer event then unfortunately you missed both of them now. However, you can still catch the highlights of the RISC OS Open talk on YouTube.

Posted in Press release, New component, Community | 2 comments

I'm floatin' around in ABC

Posted by Steve Revill Thu, 23 Jun 2022 08:11:00 GMT

Find yourself writing programs in BBC BASIC? Do your programs ever involve floating point maths? Well we’ve got some good news for you!

The Archimedes BASIC Compiler (ABC) 5.00 has been extended with a new option to directly output Vector Floating Point maths instructions which then run on the hardware floating point unit built into many recent Arm processors. This gives a considerable speed increase compared with its predecessor the Floating Point Accelerator which is often emulated now.

Code generation selector

Posted in New component, Community | 1 comment

A second great networking opportunity

Posted by Steve Revill Fri, 18 Feb 2022 16:56:00 GMT

Following the success of step 1 of the TCP/IP stack overhaul, we’ve been watching with interest as over one hundred community donations have filled our step 2 bounty pot almost to the brim. Today we’re able to announce that the bounty has been claimed and under way.

Posted in New component, Community | 1 comment

Ping! Another one fully cooked

Posted by Steve Revill Fri, 13 Aug 2021 16:21:00 GMT

Portable Network Graphics, with file extension PNG and often pronounced Ping, is a common bitmap graphics format which offers lossless compression for faster transfer over the internet. PNG sits somewhere between Sprite, which is uncompressed, and JPEG used for photos, which uses lossy compression (throwing some information away) to shrink the file even smaller.

What do we gain?

There are two aspects to the new PNG support:

• Being able to save directly from Paint as a PNG graphic
• Being able to convert anything ChangeFSI can open and write it out as a PNG graphic

Underneath this there’s a new support module, called CompressPNG, which does the real work and which other applications will be able to make use of.

If you are a developer and you’d like to add PNG export to one of your own applications it’s simply a case of making a few system calls from whatever language you prefer to use. It’s very similar to the CompressJPEG module which has shipped since RISC OS 3.60, so much so that Paint has also gained the ability to save out as JPEG via that same approach.

Posted in New component, Community | 5 comments