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.
Until tonight, the SIMON team have been working away quietly, amidst rumours of some kind of graphics enhancement project for RISC OS
Tonight, they announce that a new product for the new A9 Home computer is released that will allow the computer to use "Portrait Mode" screens on suitable monitors. Aimed at the LCD Monitors which allow you to physically rotate the viewable area, these Portait Modes are particularly useful for document processing which often are taller than they are wide.
HeadTurner, as the product has been named, brings technology to
RISC OS [4] 4(.40) previously only available for the Iyonix PC in the RISC OS world and also becoming popular in the
Windows PC market with cheaper LCD screens being available.
It is still unclear exactly who the SIMON team are, but it would appear that they have been working with Advantage Six on some aspects of the A9 video system, even before this announcement.
The A9 Home computer is still only in the hands of developers at the moment and as such the product is being released at a proce of GBP15, including updates as required, to cope with the maturation of the underlying platform. Hopefully this means that by the full release of the A9 Home product, end users will be able to buy this addition off the shelf without any waiting time.
One of the project team members commented, "It's been great working with RISCOS Ltd and Advantage 6 on taking RISC OS forward and seeing our work included, but releasing our own product like this is fantastic."
Matt Edgar of Advantage 6 Ltd said "Co-operation between various groups has enabled us to tackle larger projects like the
A9home [5] and we are happy that this is continuing. SIMON are playing an important role in this, and it is nice to see them being successful in their own right."
RISCOS Ltd Managing director Paul Middleton explained, "The future power of RISC OS is very dependant on harnessing the rapidly evolving capabilities of graphics hardware. Partnerships between developers in the RISC OS world to accomplish this are echoing those between ARM and graphics hardware in the wider world."
For more information, see the links below:
http://www.advantage6.com/SIMON.html [6]
http://www.advantage6.com/A9hsplash.html [7]
http://www.riscos.com [8]