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Email: Private ICQ: AOL: Yahoo:	Username: Stoppers Realname: Simon Willcocks About me: Homepage: Face/Logo: Comments posted: 118 (show all)

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On Dual-head DVI ViewFinder graphics card announced:

Unless I've misunderstood, they're talking about the "general speed of rectangular drawing operations", rather than the transfer rate from the board to the screen, which is what you calculation is of (I think). So, the boards can shift around several screens' worth of pixels around the screen per frame. Stoppers on 10/9/09 8:55PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On BBC to record film on Acorn versus Sinclair in the 1980s:

String him up! Stoppers on 22/6/09 7:26AM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On Five tips for ROL over the next five years:

Even so, there'd be an almost infinite number of possible combinations, if each module could come from more than once source. Stoppers on 4/6/09 2:04PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On First screenshot: Beagleboard runs RISC OS 5 desktop:

"How do you plan to do this, without introducing a new Poll call?" I plan to add a new poll call. But only for new applications; old RO apps get to see the same behaviour as before. Actually on umpteenth thought, even that may not be necessary. How about a Poll response code (for modern applications, and only when requested) that indicates that the application's request has been queued, but the Wimp is busy. The application may then do some non-Wimp work (decoding video or audio, for example) before trying again. As long as it doesn't wait too long between tries and doesn't hog the processor in the mean time, it should provide a good, RO-like, user experience. Stoppers on 26/5/09 11:22AM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On First screenshot: Beagleboard runs RISC OS 5 desktop:

"There really aren't any shortcuts here, either you do things properly (which is now beyond our resources), or you'll just make the user experience worse." It doesn't have to be that bad. Keep some things cooperative (opening/moving windows, RO-style inter-process messaging, user input), but allow multiple processes to draw their windows simultaneously and use other IPC mechanisms for things like sound. In that way, you can have your video playing uninterrupted on one window while another task is rendering a draw image. When you move a window, window updates pause temporarily, but you're concentrating on moving the window (and the sound from the movie should continue uninterrupted). Stoppers on 25/5/09 10:32PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

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Today's featured article

Star Fighter 3000: The Next Generation review
Star Fighter 3000: The Next Generation was born from the 3D0 version of the original SF3K that was ported back to RISC OS and this year freed from programmers' hard discs for the platform to enjoy, writes Andrew Weston. In this review Andrew weighs up much-improved graphics and sound against playability and stability.
 19 comments, latest by AW on 9/12/08 8:45PM. Published: 17 Nov 2008

Random article

The leaked ROL licence is the dullest thing you will ever read
Having had the authenticity of an anonymously leaked partial copy of RISCOS Ltd's licence to develop and distribute RISC OS confirmed and having read through its contents, we wondered why we bothered.
 4 comments, latest by bucksboy on 22/12/08 1:58PM. Published: 21 Dec 2008

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