|-------------------------- Acorn News Service --------------------------|
| http://www.acornusers.org/ans/
|
|------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| The Acorn News Service is an independent service. |
| It is in no way connected with, or supported by the Acorn Group PLC. |
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| ISSUE 28 7th March 1999 |
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| To send in your news items or comments, use the ANS website, |
| or e-mail them to ans@ans.acornusers.org.
|
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| Random site this issue: http://www.riscos.com/
|
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Contents
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1) Editorial
2) General News
3) Commercial News
4) PD/Shareware News
5) Club News
6) ANS information
Editorial
---------
Welcome once again to another issue of ANS. Membership is, as normal,
creeping up, so welcome to all those new readers!
Please be sure to pass ANS on to other Acorn users you may know that are
not currently subscribed to ANS. Subscription details can be found at the
end of the newsletter.
Things seem quiet, but not for long! ANS are soon to release a few brand
new features on the site. Watch out for more information.
As always, don't forget to use the great classified ads section on the web
site (http://www.acornusers.org/ans/),
and... remember to send
in those
news items!
General News
------------
1) RISCOS Ltd acquires license to develop and release RISC OS 4
05 Mar 1999 - http://www.riscos.com/news/pr990305_1.htm
Following extended negotiations with Acorn Computers Ltd, recently
rebranded as Element 14 Ltd, RISCOS Ltd is pleased to announce that it has
now secured an exclusive license to complete the development of RISC OS 4.
It will bring it to market as an upgrade for current RiscPC and A7000(+)
users and for new machines dedicated to the desktop market, within the
next few months.
Now that RISCOS Ltd has access to the full sources to RISC OS it should be
possible to work to remove the dependency of RISC OS on the current
peripheral chips such as IOMD and VIDC. Once this is done it will be
possible for many more manufacturers to produce RISC OS compatible
products. It is hoped for example that an upgrade will be available for
existing RiscPC users in order to keep their existing RiscPC case and
replace the motherboard with a new improved version this year.
Chief Executive of Element 14, Stan Boland said "I am proud to announce,
that after having originally developed RISC OS, Element 14 now feels that
the time is right to offer the other companies who have supported Acorn
for the past 20 years the chance to continue to develop the RISC OS
market."
Senior Vice President of Marketing, Andy Mee went on to say, "By licensing
RISC OS 4 to RISCOS Ltd, there will be more chances for both new and
existing users to protect their current investment in Acorn computers and
also benefit from the advances that the dedicated RISC OS developer
community is able to offer in the future."
Managing Director of RISCOS Ltd, Paul Middleton commented, "The
announcement by Acorn that they were closing the Workstations Division
last year had sent shockwaves through the Acorn community. I see the
signing of this agreement as a very positive sign for current Acorn
users."
He went on to say that "Whilst Phoebe RiscPC 2 was cancelled by Acorn for
very good reasons due to the current economic and commercial climate,
users should not be dissuaded from buying RISC OS based computers."
Software developers who were worried about the continued availability of
Acorn computers will now be able to confidently plan to release products
that can take advantage of the new features of RISC OS 4 that were
originally developed for use with Phoebe on a choice of new hardware as
well as the existing RiscPC and A7000's.
2) Acorn Comic Relief auction update
Many more items have been donated to the Acorn auction for Comic Relief,
including products from ProAction / Superior Software, Cumana / Cannon
Computing, CJE Micros, Solloway software, Clares, RISCOS Ltd., and
Uniqueway. So far over GBP3500 has been raised for Comic Relief.
Items on offer include: WimpBasic 2, RiscPC internal modem, SparkFS, Acorn
User and Archive subscriptions, the talking joystick, Studio24Pro, OHP,
ArtWorks, Impression Pub+, ImageFS, RiscPC 486 cards, RiscCafe, BBC Master
128s, as well as many other utilities, games, numerous CDs, the first
copy of RISC OS 4, and life membership of the new RISCOS Foundation!
See http://www.acornusers.org/comicrelief/
for a list of all
the software
and other items which are available, and for instructions on how to bid
for lots.
But hurry, bids must be in by 10pm on Monday 7th March (tomorrow)!
(http://www.acornusers.org/comicrelief/)
3) ANS Awards 99' - RESULTS!
ANS are pleased to announce that we now have the results of the highly
successful ANS Awards '99, which were active for the past four weeks on
the ANS web site. Many Acorn users participated, which resulted in
interesting and accurate results.
Category (Nominated) First (% votes) Second
-------------------- --------------- ------
Companies (20) RCI (17) Icon Technology (10)
DTP (6) Ovation Pro (68) Impression Pub+ (19)
Word Processor (11) TechWriter (23) Easiwriter Pro (13)
Integrated (4) Fireworkz (50) Pipedream (15)
Graphics (10) Photodesk 3 (30) Draw/Paint (17)
Internet (14) ANT (23) Browse (20)
Utility (26) Zap (9) TaskFilters (6)
Game (13) Heroes M&M (23) Doom+ (13)
PD (24) Zap (28) StrongED (6)
Hardware (13) StrongARM (33) Cumana SCSI2 (8)
Commercial WWW (11) Cybervillage (46) Cerilica (14)
Non-Com. WWW (13) Acorn Arcade (43) ANS (9)
Thank you to all those who participated!
4) Acorn Southeast Show
The 'Acorn Southeast Show' will be taking place on Saturday 3rd July 1999
at The Alban Arena, St. Albans, Herts.
The show is aimed at supporting RISC OS users in South East England.
Events include Bring & Buy, theatre and games arcade. For more
information:
* Phone: (01707) 390410
* E-mail: acornshow@argonet.co.uk
* http://www.argonet.co.uk/acornshow/
5) Acorn Gaming
Over four years ago 32-bit Acorn Gaming became one of the first Acorn
websites to launch. Now, many hundreds of thousands of readers later, it
has dropped the '32-bit' prefix and relaunched as 'Acorn Gaming' with a
smart, completely new layout and format.
Pop along to http://www.acorn-gaming.org.uk/
to read the longest-running
regularly-updated Acorn web magazine in existence.
Features include:
* The latest news.
* Acorn emulation section.
* Download section of games, emulators and more.
* Reviews and previews of commercial and free games.
* Listing & compatibility of all commercial Acorn games.
* Plus absolutely loads more!
http://www.acorn-gaming.org.uk/
6) Acorn South West 1999 - Photos and Notes
A short review of the 1999 Acorn South West show, and collection of
photographs, are available from
http://www.escarpment.demon.co.uk/Acorn/SWest99.html
The 'full' review will appear in The ARM Club's Eureka magazine.
For more details about the largest independent Acorn user group,
visit (http://www.armclub.org.uk/).
Only GBP15 a year (no VAT)!
7) Roguelike game competitions
George Quail is currently running a series of roguelike game competitions.
To enter all you need to do is download the Angband savefile from his
homepage (http://www.coturnix.demon.co.uk/compo.htm)
and get hold of a
copy of Angband from (http://www.argonet.co.uk/users/musus/angband/.
Commercial News
---------------
1) Teletext+ with Teletext Card
Teletext cards with Teletext+ software are now available at the new low
price of GBP139 from Octopus Systems. These are Computer Concepts teletext
cards (no longer available from CC), supplied with Octopus Systems'
advanced Teletext+ software.
Teletext+ displays teletext pages on the computer screen but works much
faster than a television, as pages and sub-pages are cached for fast
access. Teletext+ can also automatically search hundreds of pages every
day for keywords of interest, presenting you with a personal summary of
the news and TV listings.
Other features include FastText; page selection by clicking; save as
sprite or text; automatic data logging; share prices saved for Apricote's
Shares software etc.
More details and screen shots are available at
http://www.octosys.co.uk/
2) Spacetech Canon PhotoReal Printer driver
To complement their existing range of PhotoReal Drivers, Spacetech have
perfected a 7 ink algorithm to drive the Canon BJC7000 and BJC7100
Photorealistic printers with the Canon Photo Ink Cartridge (BC62 photo).
Support is also provided for standard 4 colour printing with the BC61
cartridge.
A colour calibration application, PhotoReal, is supplied for experienced
users who may want to vary the fixed printer calibration settings. Also a
further application, Control, allows the user to take advantage of the two
way communication facility to clean the print head, run test prints, etc.
Both printers are available at from Spacetech, with the PhotoReal driver
bundled. The Canon BJC7000 is GBP245.00 and the BJC7100 is GBP299.00. The
driver on its own is available for GBP69.00. Prices include UK VAT. Please
contact Spacetech if you would like to receive a sample printout. See
http://www.spacetech.co.uk/
for details.
3) HolyBible 1.89; upgrade available
HolyBible version 1.89 has just been released. A free upgrade is available
from the ExpLAN website (http://www.explan.demon.co.uk/).
HolyBible is the only generic Biblical Software published in the UK for
desktop computers. It is available solely on the RISC OS platform and
supports multilingual operation.
PD/Shareware News
-----------------
1) lpd (Line Printer Daemon)
lpd is now available for RISC OS. It allows RISC OS machines to act as
print servers for machines running Unix (and anything else with an lpr
client, including RISC OS).
lpd is a cut-down version of Justin Fletcher's LPRd. It is designed to be
small (32KB WimpSlot) and lightweight (1 poll per second).
It does *not* support any filetypes apart from raw data (so the client
must convert the file for the required printer), nor email notification of
job completion, nor banner pages. If you want any of these, you should be
looking at LPRd.
lpd is available from
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rrt1001/program.html
2) LongFiles 2.50 released
LongFiles 2.50 is now available from
http://www.tribbeck.com/longfiles/
The main additions are:
* Now appears to work correctly with Simtec IDEFS;
* Preliminary support for RISC OS 4.
LongFiles allows you to use file names longer than the FileCore limit of
10 characters. X-Files and raFS perform similar functions, but all three
programs approach the problem from a different angle, and you should find
which best suits your requirements.
3) Encrypt version 0.995 released
Version 0.995 of freeware encryption program Encrypt is available now from
http://www.argonet.co.uk/users/hsloan/Stephens/
Encrypt it is an encryption program which encrypts files or directories to
protect sensitive or confidential data. Features include:
* Uses Blowfish or PGP strong encryption.
* Nuke to wipe all traces of unprotected originals from the disc.
* Directories can be both encrypted and compressed, preventing filenames
and filetypes of items in the directory being read.
4) Last StrongHelp ever is now in beta
Guttorm Vik (guttorm.vik@eunet.no)
has recently uploaded
the first beta of
StrongHelp 2.70 to his web page (http://home.eunet.no/~guttorvi/).
There is only one change in this version; pages can be exported to Draw.
Using this one can finally print StrongHelp pages.
The completed StrongHelp v2.70 it will also be the *last* version; Guttorm
Vik is leaving the Acorn scene in a few months. StrongHelp is a fairly
mature product, but the source will be included with the release version,
so anyone who wants to continue development is free to do so.
5) Visit a new homepage
Carlos Michael Santillan has uploaded a new RISC OS site at
http://www.arcsite.de/hp/cms/
You will found there some software like Counter (calculate the tape
counter of a cassette recorder), Summertime (sets the daylight saving time
automatically) and HeiseReg (search the German magazines c't and iX).
There are also some German texts like "How to write RISC OS multitasking
programmes", as well as a collection of Monitor Definition Files.
6) Count, matches, MPEG, template freeware utils released
Andy Boura has added a few utils to his web site (http://i.am/andyb/).
CountOnIt is a program to count the total file size of a directory
structure that can cope with large drives. It also gives sub-totals for
the different file types found.
Matches checks whether there are duplicates of a file in a directory
structure, presents the results in a user friendly way and allows the
files that are suspected to be identical to be executed, deleted etc.
MP3z is a sequencer for MPEG layer 3 audio files. It allows the use of
playlists, adding directories to the play list recursively and more. It is
a front end for !PlayAMPEG so some of its functionality is restricted.
TmpltVrfy checks whether a template file has sensible values and
terminators for indirected text, font names, numbers etc.
Also the following programs (published originally on the Risc User cover
disk) have been added for download: Mandelbrot (Risc User 10:9), ChsWtrWhl
(Risc User 11:2) configurable simulation of a chaos water wheel.
7) VNCViewer 0.09 Released
VNCViewer version 0.09 is now available for download from
http://www.brighteyes.u-net.com/
The main improvements in this version are single tasking mode, changes to
the code to improve the overall speed and a couple of small bug fixes.
VNC is a way of controlling a machine remotely across a network. It shows
the screen display of the remote machine in a window and passes all
keypresses and mouse movements to the remote machine for processing. For
more details, and to download servers and clients for numerous platforms,
go to http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/
Club News
---------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Brought to you with The Association of Acorn User Groups*
The AAUG website provides details of all the user groups worldwide, and
how you can benefit from becoming a member. For more information, visit:
http://www.argonet.co.uk/scs/AAUG/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) March meeting dates
The following user group meetings are planned for March. Always check the
AAUG website (http://www.argonet.co.uk/scs/AAUG/
to confirm details.
March 1999
==========
3rd - SARC meeting - Visit by Spacetech
8th - DARC meeting - Barry Thompson: Genealogy & The Internet
11th - NKACC meeting - DTP at Work
24th - Bristol meeting - AGM
26th - Blackpool meeting
2) Southampton Acorn Users Group
The next Southampton Acorn Users Group meeting is on Monday March 8th
1999, 1900 to 2100h. Venue: Itchen College (1st Floor), Middle Road,
Sholing, Southampton.
For further information, please contact either:
* Dave Higton, e-mail davehigton@arcade.demon.co.uk,
on Arcade BBS
as David Higton, or 'phone 01703 222312 (evenings/weekends), or
* Ted Lacey, e-mail tedell@argonet.co.uk, 01703
325560.
ANS Information
---------------
1) Contact ANS
Editor - Eytan Abrahams - eytan@ans.acornusers.org
Sub-Editor - James Sears - james@ans.acornusers.org
Webmaster - Stephen Courtney - stephen@ans.acornusers.org
Life-Webmaster - Richard Hesketh - richard@ans.acornusers.org
ADL Moderator - Paul Johnson - paul@ans.acornusers.org
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