ROOL Forum: Recent posts

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 19:27:51 +0000

In case it is not videoed by the MUG group. WROCC will be having the author/developer of TWimp himself doing a talk/presetation of the software at our next meeting on Wednesday 7th May and it will be recorded.

I would like to emphasize that my presentation is in no way meant to compete with Graeme’s. It’s an end user perspective on how I have used TWimp, and I am very much looking forward to seeing Graeme at the wrocc meeting.
Btw I am writing this on a mobile phone from our holiday shack in east Sussex and have to say that the dark mode rool site looks and feels as the French used to say “Dan le vent” merci

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 11:04:26 +0000

The plan will be to record the meeting and upload this some time afterwards to our dedicated Youtube channel RISC OS MUG Zone

Of course we encourage everyone to attend the meeting if they can to make the event a success.

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 11:01:19 +0000

Thank you, I will watch out for it.

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 10:49:27 +0000

In case it is not videoed by the MUG group. WROCC will be having the author/developer of TWimp himself doing a talk/presetation of the software at our next meeting on Wednesday 7th May and it will be recorded.

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 10:41:47 +0000

Can I ask if a video of this talk will be available? I would watch it on Zoom but I dare not miss choir practice.

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 09:45:53 +0000

I am bored because in the meantime I built a utility to display scores. There is no ring bound or a page turn.
I borrowed your idea and the program also uses Draw files (!PDF export naming). !Rhapsody can export also Draw files, just to be renamed.
I also use the reception of message to advance the pages. I built a small utility to do the tests using the mouse (Adjust Clic)
If you want to test … !ScoreAff
https://jeanmichelb.riscos.fr/AppliTBox/AppliToolBox.h…

Note: the duration before the display varies according to the other already loaded applications. Your program has the same problem.
I already discover this problem with TextDVI…
For example when leaving! Sargasso the problem disappears, but it may also be !Netsurf and others.
My program uses the command *Render to display a page in an icon.
An idea?

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 08:16:24 +0000

The next meeting of the RISC OS Midland User Group (MUG) will take place via Zoom at 7:30pm on Tuesday 29th April 2025.

At this meeting MUG’s own John Rickman will be demonstrating using TWimp to update his blog and to pose the question “do we need the Toolbox” by showing how to develop Wimp based applications using it.

If you have previously attended a MUG Zoom meeting then the same call details can be used, otherwise please contact the MUG team for the details or keep a watching brief on our website for further information.

MUG

We look forward to welcoming new and existing members to our meetings.

The MUG Events team.

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 06:10:45 +0000

You don’t need the API to read the extra fields. You can read in the ZIP file as a data file, and read each byte manually. Find the extra field, using the details in the APPNOTE, and extract the RISC OS fields, and then use the ZipArchive class to decompress the actual files.

Take a look at how I did it in Lazarus.
https://github.com/geraldholdsworth/Decompressor/blob/…

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 00:40:10 +0000

No.

Version 0.41 uploaded. BBC Basic on VRPC is only version 1.29 but reading VDU variables (using a=VDU 7) was only introduced in version 1.34 so have reverted to using the OS call.

The new approach of rendering offline to a sprite then plotting that in one step to the shadow screen bank (after a ‘WAIT’) seems to have sorted out the flicker. Tested on VRPC, CM4 and Titanium. Degrades gracefully if there is limited memory to direct rendering and/or operation with no shadow screen bank. On a mode change reviews whether there is still enough memory for a whole page sprite in the new screen mode and degrades if not. (Only tries to get sufficient memory for screen mode it starts up in, if 10Mbytes is not enough.)

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 22:59:39 +0000

static char string [ 256 ]; reserves 256 bytes of space in read-write memory at a fixed location.

Yup; and written like that, most compilers will use the .bss segment to store it, while if you initialize it with whatever value when declaring it then, most compilers, will use the .data segment. If no initializer is given at declaration time, IIRC, the standard (or at least it’s common behavior) that the variable is initialized to NULL.

It’s also useful to know that static variables live for the entire runtime of a program. Fun fact: while they are local to the function, they can be returned as a pointer by the function, so it can be another useful bit of information I think.

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 22:37:56 +0000

Buried on PKWare’s site, I found APPNOTE.TXT which documents the Zip file format. If I’m reading it correctly, the “External Attributes” is a 4-byte value which stores Unix or MS-DOS file permissions (none of the docs I can find describe what, if anything, is stored for RISC OS files).

I think what you need to read instead is the “Extra Field”.

I’m basing this in part on the libzip documentation (which is a C library but quite helpful to understand Zip file handling). The library has a zip_file_get_external_attributes function which returns an int (like the PHP method you’re using). There is also a zip_file_extra_field_get function, which returns a pointer to some data.

But that doesn’t really help you, because you’re using PHP and the ZipArchive class apparently doesn’t provide a way to access the extra field(s).