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News in brief

By Chris Williams. Published: 16th Jan 2005, 08:36:35 | Permalink | Printable

New software, updates and games

It's been a while since the last update, so let's quickly round up recent news and other interesting bits and pieces.

Michael Drake has spotted that Nicholas Marriott has released the source code to his simple spreadsheet application, Isis. The software includes all the usual features and anyone looking for a project to polish up should probably take a look.

AcornArcade are appealing for designers of games level to submit their work for a new online gallery of sorts. The website plans to open in February.

Alligata Software have issued a free bug fix update to their Desktop Repton Plus game pack. Players with a DRP CD issue earlier than 4.1 should apply the patch available from Alligata's website.

News in brief motif

Richard Wilson has released FlowerBox, a sleek 3D RISC OS 4 screensaver. Fred Williams has ported his Pushy II game to the ARM7500 powered Gameboy Advance, while the RISC OS ports of dungeon crawling adventures (in ASCII™) Angband and cousins have enjoyed various updates.

Kris Adock has released an alpha version of Yassa, an interesting slide show application. Picture gallery utility WebGen2 has enjoyed a few javascript related bug fixes. Family tree app GedText (zip file link) now allows you to select which fields are reported in its output listings. Card game SPatience now supports many more game variants. StripStyle removes style definitions from Impression files and has been recently bugfixed.

And finally, a very rose tinted look back at Acorn in the early days, with a focus on the Electron. Control-Break.. blerr-beep.

Links

News? Comments?

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Discussion

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I hope someone makes Isis 32Bit ...

MoAco on 16/1/05 1:13PM
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Yeah, I always thought Isis looked like a promising application. It would be nice if someone were to revive it.

flypig on 16/1/05 11:23PM
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Isis is apparently written in pure assembler, which will prove difficult to maintain, it seems.

Chris.

diomus on 17/1/05 9:40AM
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It would be nice if you could get to the website! All I got was a message stating that the websites transfer quota is exhausted and a popup asking in French whether I was tired of all yhr annoying popups!

Martin

mrtd on 17/1/05 9:47AM
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No problems here getting to the Isis website. After downloading the source code and having a quick look through it, it looks like it wouldn't be /too/ tricky to update it to 32-bit, but I think it would be an absolute nightmare for someone to come along and try to add new features/update it as (as Chris mentioned earlier) it's written in pure assembler without many comments.

not_ginger_matt on 17/1/05 12:33PM
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From that Electron remisicense: "Also in terms of power it matched the BBC B blow for blow (until a revamp of the BBC in 1984)" Hmm. Same RAM, half clock rate (effectively at least), no teletext chip. Like you say, very rose-tinted.

Shame about Isis. Was that the one where you were meant to be able to add extra features as modules (can't find a mention of that on the website), or am I thinking of something else?

ninja on 17/1/05 3:23PM
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Less rose-tinted, more plain *wrong*.

moss on 17/1/05 3:27PM
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ISIS was a great start to a new Spreadsheet that had potential. Ah well.

harmsy on 17/1/05 5:40PM
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Is Alligata the same brand that released games in the 80's. The logo looks very similar.

AW on 17/1/05 7:25PM
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More "Rose Tints" at [link],39024645,39127208,00.htm

Projjer on 21/1/05 6:56AM
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"Acorn tried to combat falling sales by launching the high-powered Archimedes in 1987 but this also floundered because of lack of software."

I'm getting pretty sick of the way a lot of people just dismiss 10 years of Acorn history like this. Even ignoring everything else, it dominated education - that's hardly a faliure. It just comes across as a lack of research.

moss on 21/1/05 3:24PM
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