ROOL Forum: Recent Posts

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 12:03:20 -0000

For anyone who hasn’t noticed. At least the Iconbar pages (as per above) give a reference for the main composcript commands.

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 11:58:58 -0000

BTW The other main ‘issue’ for me is that I have my printed copy of the manual. But so far as I know, there hasn’t ever been an electronic file version. So unless one can be found I’ll have to scan all of what I have. Tedious, and means a directory of loads of bitmap files.

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 11:55:22 -0000

I can’t yet be sure. But for !Compo itself the sources may now be ‘lost’. Although this is complicated by it being to a fair extent an assembly of ‘proglets’ that ‘co-operate’ via calling each other as needed.

Frustratingly, I did once have a copy of the (then) sources which Rob sent to me. This was IIRC back in either late RiscPC or early Iyonix days. I kept it I think on a 2nd HD on my Iyonix. I’ve been trawling my Optical Disc backups seeing if I can find what I had. But no cigar as yet! :-/

It took me some days to find the sources for one of the neater Composcript items that lets the user plot directly onto a chosen object on the canvas. The idea – for me – being to use it to generate some types of ‘graph plotter’ to do types of graphic that aren’t covered by normal graph-plotting software like !Tau.

All that said, my other distraction at present is experimenting to see what I can get to work on my copy of RPCemu which fails on my current machine.

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 11:53:12 -0000

I have taken a snapshot of the 530 Pi rom and updated my Pi to 5.30 for the show.

In case anyone else wants to do this, I have uploaded the firmware here – just copy it over your !Boot and it will update the rom and firmware and add the RO530Hook directory.

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 11:40:11 -0000

R-Comp is pleased to announce a new version – v2 – of its Genealogy software. This is a major update to the software making it easier to use,
and capable of producing many new charts and diagrams. This is surely the most comprehensive family history software available for RISC OS.

Key new features include:

• Six new types of Ancestor charts, including hourglass-style and a seven-generation chart, each with new styles

• New menus, icons and shortcuts to improve navigation

• Revamped operation to focus on a single window for data entry, with additional colour-coded information windows as needed.

• New easy-to-use search menus for all data screens, tailored to each window.

• New data transfer capabilities

• New layouts with “3D style” look

• New 96 page manual

Additional changes:

• Date style can now be altered to personal preference (useful for overseas users)

• The flag system used for tagging records is now extended to cover families as well

• Access to all references is available via a menu

• Record the date of changes made to all aspects of your data so that you can tell when you last worked on things

• Data transfer available for an individual, family, source or reference to other databases

• All Ancestor charts now available with coloured or plain boxes

• Reporting now includes a ‘partner list’

• More keyboard shortcuts added to allow continuous data entry from the keyboard

• Locations database now incorporates button-click access to maps via either !RiscOSM or !MapView, and location searches via !Nominatim

• Bibliography database has a new look with new icons. Now includes expanded data transfer capabilities between Records and other databases.

The software is available on !Store, and low cost upgrades are available for existing customers to v2.

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 11:36:00 -0000

As predicted, the latest Beta is out; it requires the associated Boot files. If you’re unsure, it’s probably best to wait for the Official 5.30 releases. ;) But hey, what’s the fun in that!

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 22:34:47 -0000

However I’m hoping that people who have better computer skills than myself may be willing to see if they can fix some of the bits that need updating.

I’m seeing a lot of crunched BASIC and lumps of machine code, but not much that’s easy to work with.

So, as Rick asked, is the source going to be made available? And will it be somewhere collaborative, so that fixes can easily be pooled and we don’t have several people all reverse engineering the same bits independently?

Oh, and… how does the licence cover people modifying the code — it’s not exactly unrestrictive in other ways?

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 21:38:58 -0000

Andrew, I sent you some ZP logs on 27th March – they are still happening, usually in batches of 61 at a time, I have not checked the latest version is exactly the same though – I will try tomorrow.

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 21:15:58 -0000

If you could email us zero pain logs for NetManager and/or how to reproduce, I’ll forward them on to the programmers to get sorted. That’s exactly the sort of feedback that will be very helpful to produce improved versions.

Very glad ADFFS issues are solved – perhaps just a bit of good luck there, but we’ve been tidying things up a lot as we go, and trying to smooth the edges.

Network Manager and Wifi into one app. Well, the thing there is that (by design) they aren’t exactly apps. (gasp). Instead they’re module tasks designed to function as modules both outside the desktop and inside. Essentially the logic is that you shouldn’t need to be in the desktop for important stuff like detecting network connections and switching wifi profiles to happen seemlessly.

So, they will likely remain separate modules. However, there has been quite a bit of discussion about perhaps unifying the UI so that there only needs to be one icon on the iconbar. Internally there’s a fair bit of debate on this – some people like being able to see both the Profile and the Wifi network at a glance, and regard this as better than other OSs. Indeed, if you have a lot of networks and several profiles, I can imagine it being useful. By contrast, other folks only use a single wifi network and really don’t care about profiles at all. Also, it kind of goes without saying, but a machine without wifi doesn’t need a wifi icon.

So, yes, we have plans to make both camps happy, although probably not in the next two days :)

Incidentally, it is worth saying that whilst the current version of NetManager probably seems quite tied in with Wifi, the intent is for it to manage both wired and wireless connections. It already allows for pretty much plug’n’play handling of interfaces – open the profile window, plug in a USB network adapter, watch it pop into existance in the interfaces list. (Guess what I’ve been doing this afternoon) :)

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 20:39:54 -0000

Ohh, this sounds jolly useful and just in time for 5.30! :)

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 20:34:42 -0000

You also need to check if it’s looking at the size of the free pool as returned by Wimp_SlotSize as well – if it’s on an 8Gb+ system then that could easily be a 64bit value.
And it’s worse in BASIC as it uses signed integers and so anything between 2Gb..4Gb is a negative value.
Number too big sounds like it is multiplying the number of pages by the page size – and the result is 2Gb+; and whilst the result will fit into a 32bit unsigned integer, it is too big a value for a signed integer to hold as a positive value. Print 2*1024*1024*1024 and see the difference between just printing the value (which will be a floating point number) and printing it as hex which will give you the same error.
The fix is to replace the multiply with a left shift of the number of pages by the log2 of the page size: number_of_pages% << (LN(page_size%)/LN(2)), which will get rid of the error but then you also need to see if the code can handle the number of bytes being negative.
Though that doesn’t help at all on an 8Gb+ system (bit 21 on OS_PlatformFeatures 0 will be set) – for that you definitely need to work in pages rather than bytes. As far as I’m aware the 8Gb systems use a 4K page, which wont be a negative 64bit signed integer until we have 8Tb. And for them you’ll need to replace any Wimp_SlotSize calls with Wimp_Extend 15 (Available from RISC OS 5.28+).