ROOL Forum: Recent posts

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 18:57:48 +0000

Hi both, we’ve actually identified the issue and patched it – there will be 1.1.16 heading out soon; we’re putting it through testing at the moment; sorry, we didn’t catch the problem with 1.1.15; we’re using VM environments (Parallels, VMware, etc) and everything worked fine there. :-/

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 18:34:01 +0000

So, how do you explain that?

I can’t. But if you can attach a wired keyboard, that will provide a temporary workaround, at least.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 18:21:18 +0000

I’m also running on Windows 11 Home but with a USB wired keyboard and mouse, without problems, so presumably the wireless aspect is the issue.

Maybe. But my wireless mouse is working. So, how do you explain that?

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 18:04:57 +0000

@Paul Sprangers: I’m also running on Windows 11 Home but with a USB wired keyboard and mouse, without problems, so presumably the wireless aspect is the issue.

Upgrading to 1.1.15 from 1.1.13: I’ve had a quick peek at the latest zip but can’t see any instructions how to upgrade an existing installation. I presume more than simply replacing the recompiler is required?

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 15:19:29 +0000

I’m running the extended version on Windows 11 Home. It looks very great, but unfortunately I can’t get the keyboard to work. It just does nothing, while the mouse just works. Keyboard and mouse are wireless HP devices.
I tried both ROMS, but to no avail. What am I missing?

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 14:35:07 +0000

I’ve exchanged emails with David about the above. For some reason I don’t (yet?) know my machine doesn’t seem to play nicely at present with the relevant items. e.g. “pdftocairo -h” doesn’t work as expected.

However the good news is that my attempt to write a ‘stand alone’ file that can debrown any type of input file that ChangeFSI can cope with and then output a debrowned jpeg seems to be getting near my goal. (Sod’s Law, of course means that now I’ve written that a wheel will fall off my attempts!) But I hope to have a simple demo in the next day or few. Fngers Krust…

Idea being that when that works it can simply be re-run, for each page jpeg. Act as the meat in a sandwich as pages from an input pdf can be obtained, processed, and then poked into a cbz.

At present focussing on using the ‘b’ colour for the scaling, etc, but I have wondered if r or g or some combination might work better. So have a version where the user can choose this sort of thing to suit best for any given input pdf of scanned pages. However at present I’m just curious about that. Once/if I can get it to work I can then experiment.

Also, I use a linear slope for the conversion. It may well be some other conversion surve will give better results, as per what David does IIUC.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:41:09 +0000

!SysMerge should be used.

“!Boot > Configuration > System Merge must not be used”

Perhaps a useful change would be to have an Obey file to cater for just the exceptions which then prompts the user to finish off with a System Merge as they may expect to do.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:21:09 +0000

The PlingSystem archive does contain a 26-bit version of TextGadget

So it does, I swear I did perform a file search for it before posting! It looks like where I ran SysMerge in PlingSystem it created the folder for it, but didn’t copy the Module across.

I never normally use SysMerge because of its flaws – not sure why I decided to use it this time.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 11:58:11 +0000

Download from here:

https://github.com/andrewtimmins/rpcemu-extended/relea…

The recompiler works on Apple Silicon and arm64 Linux. This is the one worth upgrading for. The arm64 recompiler had never booted, so anyone on an Apple Silicon Mac or an arm64 Linux box was stuck on the interpreter. Three separate faults, each fatal on its own, are fixed: the IRQ test overwrote a register holding a value just loaded, a generated block could run past the end of its slot, and block chaining jumped without checking the target was still valid. RISC OS 3.71, 4.39, 5.30 and 6.20 all reach the desktop on it, and the macOS and arm64 Linux downloads ship it.

There is a 26-bit correctness fix that affects every backend with it: switching between 26-bit and 32-bit modes left the block cache holding code compiled for the old word size, so a program that changed mode ran blocks computing the wrong addresses.

The Machine Inspector is one window instead of three tabs. Registers were on one tab, the code on another and the memory on a third, so following a fault meant tabbing between them and holding the other two in your head. They now share a window on draggable sashes: registers and status on the left, disassembly above memory on the right, and the debugger, trace and peripheral pages below. SP, LR and PC are named rather than numbered, a value that moved since the last refresh is drawn in amber so a step shows what it changed, and the flags are decoded as N Z C V I F T instead of leaving CPSR to be read in hex. Two decode faults went with it: the mode was masked with 0×1f, which takes the 32-bit bit as part of the mode number, so every 32-bit mode read “Unknown” and 32-bit User was reported as privileged.

Display settings. Four switches that contradicted each other are now two: a screen size, chosen from a list filtered to what the machine can actually show, and how to draw it (actual size, or whole multiples for sharp pixels). The guest’s screen is drawn by the GPU rather than rescaled on the CPU, which brings idle CPU use down noticeably on Apple Silicon.

Closing a machine asks first, and offers the machine list so you can start another without relaunching.

macOS keyboard and mouse. Caps Lock and Command no longer stick down from the guest’s point of view. The pointer stops fighting you at a screen edge, and the option to capture the mouse in the window is back, so RISC OS mouse speed and acceleration settings apply again.

ShareFS. Large transfers were being silently corrupted. The receive buffer was 8192 bytes while ShareFS sends bulk data as 8200-byte payloads, so every data datagram quietly lost its last 8 bytes: a 64MB file arrived at the right length, with no error, and thousands of corrupt runs in it. Fixed, along with fragmented datagrams carrying the NAT gateway’s address instead of the real sender’s.

Packages. The database now lives where PackMan and RiscPkg keep theirs, instead of somewhere no RISC OS tool looks, so the two managers no longer overwrite each other’s files. An existing database is used as it is.

Thanks to Charles Ferguson for the read-only VNC password and the host interface documentation, and to David Ramsden for the MCP server fixes and the CI rework.

Thanks also to everyone who reported a fault with enough detail to act on; your feedback and support is very much appreciated.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 10:51:00 +0000

Occasional clear skies here in Leeds, and here are The Pleiades:

As always, more info and many more pics on the ROAST blog

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 09:55:26 +0000

I grabbed TextGadget v0.49 from a working machine, which ironically fails reporting “Module Toolbox too old”.

V0.49: This is the module for Risc OS Six
I no longer use it, to remain compatible with other machines.

The Gadgets module manages: Scrollbar, ScrollList, TextArea, TextGadget

For Distribution of !System extension modules for use with pre-RISC OS 5 machines. resources.
https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/common
I downloaded and installed it once by mistake on RO 5.xx :-(