ROOL Forum: Recent Posts

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 10:02:54 -0000

When I plug my laptop into projectors it dynamically adjusts stuff (and can either replicate the same image on both the screen and projector, or have the projector show slides and notes on the screen, and similar combinations). I don’t want this to be persistent because in 30 minutes I’ll unplug the laptop and walk off.

Good points. The MacOS implementation of that has this to be persistent, but keyed on the combination of monitors. In other words it will remember the settings from last time you had monitors with a particular collection of model and serial numbers connected. That means it’s seamless when you switch between two different setups – home and office, for example. It always knows that home monitor A is to the left of home monitor B, or that the projector in Conference Room C needs SVGA. This means you don’t need to go into settings you potentially can’t see. When presented with a monitor it hasn’t seen before it dreams up some defaults, which you can then adjust.

I think the case where you truly want to forget the settings next time you plug in the same monitor are actually very few. And a ‘just this once’ button would likely cover that.

I think the current assembler Display Manager would be woefully unsuitable for this role, in any case.

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 09:43:18 -0000

Frogger & friends. Want to reconfigure for those?

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 08:32:37 -0000

Please can we refrain from posting anything that long, it’s wearing out my scroll wheel!

Please can the excessively long error log at the top of this topic be truncated, it is an absolute pain to scroll through during searches.

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 08:26:00 -0000

http://www.apdl.org.uk/ and all its resources are now gone.
Does someone has a copy of the website?

(Nota: it’s probably time to make a snapshot of riscos.com).

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 07:52:24 -0000

I was looking at Display Manager, which looks like an unloved piece of assembler. This lead me to wonder whether we need it at all.

A further dimension to consider is the roadmap item for multiple displays which we already have several hardware platforms for today, even if OS support is a little lagging.

When I plug my laptop into projectors it dynamically adjusts stuff (and can either replicate the same image on both the screen and projector, or have the projector show slides and notes on the screen, and similar combinations). I don’t want this to be persistent because in 30 minutes I’ll unplug the laptop and walk off.

Of course, that comment’s really just raising the spectre of lack of hotplug support in RISC OS.

To me this points to needing some kind of desktop widget that spots displays coming and going and lets me select which one is current on a temporary basis. Since it needs a Wimp front end (eg. for a button to plot a giant ‘1’ or ‘2’ so figure out which is the primary head) I’d guess it needs to be an application, and as it’s related to displays maybe such an application would be called ‘Display Manager’?!

That’s not to say the current Display Manager is the right tool for the job, but expending effort fiddling with the current one when there’s visibility of a much more substantial change is a bit like pulling up weeds the day before you have your drive tarmac’d. There are plent of empty sections in the multiple display design document so maybe this thread can distill some thoughts on how that might hang together.

However with the current Display Manager, it should be possible to drag an MDF onto the icon

Fun fact: you can also drag EDID data files as well as MDFs.

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 07:08:07 -0000

I actually feel a little bit bad, I have not gotten a single thing done today, not a single line of code, not even a single command on any CLI. Easy access to youtube and other information and video services can waste way more time than I would have realized. Though have found a couple of unique people, like counter scammers and such.

It is interesting that despite the number of scams that propagate through E-Mail I have never in my life received a single scam E-Mail. And I have been using Internet E-Mail since the late 1980s, so that is saying something.

I will try not to focus on the ease of accessing informative content for a while so I can get something done. Good night.

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 06:53:49 -0000

Whatever happened to the replacement RPC Motherboard displayed at some the Acorn shows?

(Do you want to be a Millionaire)

About the time of RO4?

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 23:18:18 -0000

It certainly was a good talk, and I always enjoy hearing the ex-Acorn guys talking about their work. Mike was particularly interesting because of the love many of us have for StrongArm.

However, I’ll play devil’s advocate to Druck’s post about Pheobe above. Although I was super-keen to get my hands on one, and was looking forward to the possibilities, I fear the reality might have been rather too little, too late. I think it would have been a merely “OK” computer at launch, and eclipsed quickly, merely prolonging Acorn management’s death spasms for a year or so. I remain fairly convinced that management didn’t see any value in the OS, merely desktop computers as a whole (or NCs, or STBs), so I suspect RISC OS may have been further starved of manpower/resources. What Mike achieved with limited time/manpower was quite remarkable!

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 22:00:24 -0000

Quick FYI:
At the moment the only directly bootable OS on my system is OS/2 4.52 CP2 with a number of updates and patches. The support for other OSes is provided by a early virtual machine originally developed by me as part of the now long since lost Haven OS project (there was once a web site, that I am looking to locate again). Haven OS was a project that 5 people were working on in the late 1990’s in an attempt to provide an Operating System that at its core was very similar to OS/2, though also provided APIs from many other OSes either by reimplementing the API in a VM or by visualizing the machine to run a full blown OS that we would create patches for to integrate the windowing system (if applicable) and I/O into the primary OS.

As we were modeling the Core operating system largely after OS/2, we did a lot of our development on OS/2 using a carefully selected subset of the API, with the choices looking at ease of implementing a replacement, and Todd actually got a usable version of the core system running on the HW we were testing on, Eric got a working Window Manager, the APIs implemented were identical to those used in OS/2 including the LX executable format. My only contribution to this was a graphics library, a 2D accelerated graphics driver for XGA cards (real IBM XGA) and two ATA drivers (one being a PIO mode one maxing out at about 4MB/s, the other a simple Ultra DMA33 driver). Todd did the ATAPI driver that went through my ATA Ultra DMA driver for supporting early ATAPI CD ROM drives.

Even though we never saw it at the time, Haven OS was way too ambitious of a project for 5 coders to work on. And our team was all coders, no one for business, no one for graphics design, no one for sound composition, etc. We knew how to code, not how to do any of that other stuff in a marketable manner.

As the VM I use being technically my product in creation, it belongs to the Haven OS group, a programming group that fell apart, so I can not share. Now days there are better ones available so it really is a non-issue.

TWO RANTS FOLLOW

Rant 1

Haven OS is also the project that marked the end of me trying to share any code over the internet, at least until the Raspberry Pi came along and brought back RISC OS to enough new users to get me to start a set of assembly language programming tutorials, which were truncated by the anti-assembly sentiment of those that are anti anything other than how they see the world. Not everything has to be portable, and indeed 99% of modern “Portable” code is far from portable, relying on particular non-standard APIs, some of which happen to currently be available on multiple OSes (though not all).

I think the combination of losing the rights to so much code that never saw the light of day in Haven OS do to the organization that owned the code disappearing when we went our own ways, and the way that people talk down Assembly Language coding as well as truly efficient direct to the OS C coding went to push me into my reluctant to release code phase. Finally said that for others to read, feels good to get this out there.

Rant 2

While I am at getting things that bug me out there:
How is it that there are so many kids, so young that there first computer ran Windows 3.x, Windows 9x, or worse yet Windows XP, now commenting on the world of, 1980s and very early 1990s, computer gaming, and being of the new gen focusing on the commercial titles that made up only a very small percentage of the total (most being sourceware even in the 1990s)? They will review things by how many commercial titles were supported by HW devece xyz, or OS xyz, while completely ignoring the much larger range of sourceware and freeware games and programs. They will say several hundred, when you can look at some of the sourceware sites that survive today and find millions of titles that support the device or OS that they attribute only thousands to, or in some cases they even say only hundreds of titles.

These kids also completely ignore the concept of programming for home use. Programming for home use is what got computing to the popularity where the things they remember were even possible. Yet they declare with an appearance of authority that it is the commercial market that mattered.

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 21:23:05 -0000

Windows 11 – same OS, different clothes

Will likely report itself as NT 6.5 or greater.

We shall see. Goes to show that when MS says something to be absolute, you should not believe it. MS touted Windows 10 to be the last ever major version of Windows, and now they talk of something more. I just had to take a few minutes to look at the MS press releases to verify the article that you linked, as I do not pay much attention to MS news now.

Though it also brings to question the MS embracing Open Source statements all over again.

As a side note, being on a PC/AT compatible computer (partly PC/2 compatible as well) that is fairly powerful for its usage, I do have a couple of older NT installs to play with, and I find it interesting that a large amount of “Windows 10 only” software will run on Windows NT 5.0 (Windows 2000), and some of it on Windows NT 4.0.x, some of it requires the DirectX updates, some requires the Visual C/C++ runtime libraries, though as long as you spoof a later NT version the Windows 10 software largely runs on much older Windows NT versions.

This makes me curious how much of it can run on Windows 98SE Lite (Windows 98SE without IE)? As Windows 98 is the oldest that can support the updated Unicode libraries, and it is not an NT it would definitely be interesting to test out.

The big question is then for full applications does any one use the new Metro API (or whatever they are calling it now)? It seems the only programs using that new API are the make it look like a tablet/phone peice of crap useles tile launched pseudo applications that I have never seen anyone use (with the exception of the MS-Store that is needed to install Linux on most newer PCs). It seems that all the widely used Windows 10 applications run just as well under most older versions of NT, proving that the Win32 API still rules windows, some of the applications that are x64/AMD64 only require Windows 2003 or XP as a minimum, as these were the first to be widely available NT versions for the AMD64 Long Mode.

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 20:11:53 -0000

The use case I’m not sure about is when you’ve booted without a disc present, or shift booted. But then you don’t have a valid MDF so DM won’t let you change mode anyway.

With MonitorType configured as EDID the DisplayManager Resolution menu is populated with the found modes and does work. Tested on Titanium with 24" AOC and RPi400 with 27" AOC.