Category: News

On December 1st, Castle Launched a new Iyonix special offer. Until 31st January 2006, you can get up to 50% off an LCD monitor when purchasing an Iyonix PC.

With December fast approaching, the RISC OS Ltd. RISC OS Roadshow becomes ever closer.

RISC OS Ltd. have gathered all the exibitor details and have been able to release the details who who's attending which venues. Although there is a slight regional variation, many exibitors are attending 2 or more of the venues.

The other day, RISCOS Ltd. announced that details of the RISC OS Christmas Roadshow have now been finalised. This is a chance for any last minute RISC OS bargains before Christmas, as well as being able to meet and talk in person with some of the various dealers, for those who've been unable to attend other shows throughout the year.

Of particular note, is that although two of the days are week days, they have been scheduled for late afternoon - early evening to allow those people who are busy during the working day to still attend in the evening.

In a surprise announcement this evening, the SIMON team, speaking through Matt Edgar of Advantage Six Ltd. have released a new product for the A9 Home Computer.

Stuart Tyrrell Developments Phone number changes...

Following a recruitment drive in December 2004, The Tematic division of Castle Technology Ltd has taken on several more full-time have now moved to larger premises.

Wakefield Show organiser, Chris Hughes has been in touch with an update on this year's Charity Stall...

News Roundup

Apologies for the lack of updates recently. Things have been pretty frantic over here at work and I've hardly had time to unpack before the next trip away :-(

As reported on TheRegister, the first PocketPC virus has been found in the wild. Reportedly capable of also infecting ARM based mobile phones running PocketPC, this virus is more of a Proof of Concept, clearly announcing its presence to the user before infecting files.

Yesterday, MicroDigital put an updated item on their Newsdesk web page about a new updated FPGA Image (the chip that allows them to implement their "Soft - Hardware").

For those who don't follow the newsgroups, you may have missed the latest update (as I did) to Pete Everett's Kino Amp video player for RISC OS.

KinoAmp is now up to Version 0.32 and is an excellent application that can show off some of the capabiities of a StrongArm Risc PC.

Just to update on the current situation with regard to legal discussions over RISCOS Ltd's licence...

Paul Middleton was apparently travelling when news broke of the Castle Technology statement, but Drobe managed to get hold of a communication from Paul Middleton in which RISCOS Ltd totally refute all allegations. See Drobe's posting of the full statement.

For those whom are not already aware, Microdigital appear to have been listening to some of the noises out there and have made a higher specification laptop available for running RISC OS 4 / Windows XP Professional.

Note: As mentioned in the comments, the Alpha and Alpha Professional run RISC OS under a host Windows XP (Home / Professional)Operating System.

Simtec have recently been updating their USB stack and this is now up to version 1.42.

One of our registered users has submitted this little item for interest.

"For those interested in what might have been, you can purchase the one and only (I think!) Nucleus case in existance on ebay."

The item can be found at:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3021430569

Note: Well the auction ended just under an hour ago. There were 23 bids, the highest being £312 and the reserve was still not met. MyRO thinks that 'astute nick', in setting a high reserve price on the Nucleus, was not so astute after all! Looks like this piece of nostalgia is set to gather dust in its original home.

As we get closer to the Wakefield show, more exhibitors are booking all the time. If you've not looked recently, check out the show website for the latest details.

The VirtualAcorn ccrew in the form of the Mercurial Aaron RISCWorld Timbrell has sent us an very interesting couple of tidbits...

First off, is that VA is happy to run anything compiled using the new 32 bit tools from Castle. Now there is no excuses for not using VA as a tool to program new apps for RISC OS.

Interesting bit of news on the GCC mailing list today. Peter Naulls, he of the numerous pay for schemes and general extremely talented programmer person, has announced over on drobe that he has made an "experimental version of GCC" which is 32 bit happy.

More details on drobe

The folks at RISCOS Ltd have announced that the second release of the Select scheme is now available for download.

This just in...

GCC is a free collection of compilers that provide the user with a powerful tool for translating C, C++ and Fortran source into fast ARM assembler that is suitable for execution on RISC OS.

GCCSDK is a portable build environment for creating ARM executables to be run natively on RISC OS. The build environment is designed to be hosted on a Unix-like system, such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD or Solaris.

This is the second release of GCC 2.95.4 and focuses mainly on useability bug fixes, compiler and C run-time library fixes.

The compilers are large programs and will require at least 6Mb of free memory to execute, so you will either require a RiscPC or a an 8Mb machine. See the GCC website for download information.

We consider this to be the best version of GCC for RISC OS and recommend that all existing users upgrade to it. The compiler toolset should be considered stable.

For full download instructions, mailing list information and bug reporting instructions, please visit the GCC website - The main distribution for GCC.

Discounts seem to be all the rage now. First John Kortnink reduced the price of his Viewfinder card, then we get these..

Clares are pleased to announce the latest price reduction on LCD panels, we can now supply the following

• AOC 15" Silver 1024x768 LCD 295(UKP) inc VAT and carriage
  
• AOC 17" Silver 1280x1024 LCD 429(UKP) inc VAT and carriage.
  

This is followed by this gem from Castle

EPSON A4 USB SCANNER (MODEL 1660 - PHOTO)

• 48-bit colour scanning
  
• True 1600 x 3200 dpi scanning
  
• Built in transparency unit
  
• High speed scanning (A4 scan at 300dpi takes about 26s)
  
• TWAIN 2 driver included
  

Cost...

SCANNER PRICE ukp199
Castle's 4/port USB podule ukp59
D Pilling's Scanning Software ukp20

For more information, have a poke around at Castle's website

And finally today

New permanently low price for RISC OS 4 upgrades

Following the securing of further OTP ROM supplies RISCOS Ltd is pleased to announce a new permanently low price for RISC OS 4 upgrades.

With immediate effect the full RISC OS 4 ROM pack is now available for ukp85 including VAT. For users who want to upgrade more than one machine a set of ROMs only is available for ukp75 including VAT.

Discounts are available for Dealers, Authorised Installers and User Groups who place orders in bulk.

Orders may be placed by Cheque or Credit Card by Post to:-

RISCOS Ltd
3 Clarendon Road
Cardiff
CF23 9JD
Tel 02920 492324
Fax 02920 492326

Mike Williams, former head honcho of Acorn Publisher, has emailed in to us with the full drop on the new baby from Castle. Hang onto your knees folks - this stuff is HOT!

Iyonix Motherboard

• All new design
  
• ARM XScale processor (80321)
  
• GeForce2 MX400 PCI video card
  
• Up to 1GB DDR (Double Data Rate) memory (200MHz)
  
• UDMA 100 Hard Drive
  
• PCI expansion (32-bit & 64-bit)
  
• Hi-speed podule bus
  
• Gigabit networking (10/100/1000 base T)
  
• Technical Reference Manual (to be published)
  

Tasty or what! - Now read on....