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Email: Private ICQ: AOL: Yahoo:	Username: caliston2 Realname: Theo Markettos About me: Homepage: http://www.markettos.org.uk/ Face/Logo: Comments posted: 81 (show all) Articles written: 3 (show all)

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On RISCWorld mag back-issues reprinted online for free:

Some good stuff there... eg the full text of the Archimedes Game Makers Manual, BASIC V: A Dabhand Guide, First Steps with RISC OS 4, ArtWorks Made Easy, Budget DTP, Graphics on the ARM and ARM Assembly Language Programming. And quite a few interesting articles. Thanks, Aaron, for putting it online. caliston2 on 19/8/09 3:17PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On NetSurf on RISC OS faces axe:

For better or worse, I imagine many home-grown RISC OS programmers followed something like the following sequence: 1. Learnt BASIC 2. Learnt WIMP programming in BASIC 3. Learnt portable-ish C 4. Programmed C in a BASIC-like way with a library like OSLib, DeskLib or (back in the day) RISC_OSLib 5. Programmed C with a higher-level toolkit like the Toolbox (or DeskLib to some extent) (and if you go down the lower-level route, assembler and writing modules will fit in somewhere, but aren't of concern for someone doing WIMP stuff) Now of course you can do these differently, or in a different order. But I think the biggest step is 2. Once you have some idea of how to program, learning how to interact with the WIMP is the main thing. Having done that, switching language (especially if you've even seen other computer languages) isn't so hard... just takes a little while to get your head around new features like structures, a while until you stop making stupid typos, a while to iron out your silly bugs, and a while to develop a good coding style (peer review helps a lot with all this). You can, of course, short-circuit this by going straight to the Toolbox. But sooner or later you'll need to interact with the WIMP directly. So it's worth knowing how the WIMP works even if you rely on something else to do the legwork most of the time. This is more the case than, say, Unix where there's not so much of a need to learn Xlib because libraries like GTK cover it more. But by all means start with the Toolbox and then fill in the detailed WIMP stuff later. I think I would actually suggest BASIC is a better environment to learn WIMP programming than C as it's more dense. Especially with a library so you don't have to do all the q%!(q%?3) stuff. Then you can switch to C which will have a similar library, and better structure support for manipulating WIMP data. caliston2 on 15/8/09 8:05PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On Your 60-second Wakefield 2009 preview:

Also there's a whisper there'll be RISC OS running on the Cortex A8-powered BeagleBoard: https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/5/topics/166?page=4 caliston2 on 25/4/09 12:43AM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On RISCOS Ltd's head licence with E14 leaked:

But to post to wikileaks you first have to port Tor to RISC OS caliston2 on 20/12/08 10:25PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On Using ROL's 4.02 ROM image in Linux RPCEmu:

I would come to help out, only I'm nowhere near London Xandros on the eee is a slightly odd system. Not having used one, the main issues I anticipate might arise are: Installing a compiler and tools Installing the Allegro library (both the runtime library itself and the -dev package that allows you to compile things with it) I can't seem to find a list of packages available in the eee Xandros, so first I'd try using the default install to grab the packages named in the RPCEmu guide. Here's the procedure: [link] If that fails, you'll probably have to add some repositories. Try this: [link] That suggests that using vanilla Debian repositories isn't a good idea, but there are others listed. Good luck! Theo (who might be persuadable to be around on IRC at the time if someone points me at a channel) caliston2 on 15/12/08 2:55PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

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