Report: RISC OS London Show 2011
The RISC OS London Show 2011 took place Saturday and it lived up to expectations.To finish off the RISC OS Blog’s coverage of the show (Preview – Commentary), here’s our report from the show, thanks must go to David Gregory who kept us informed throughout the day.
Upon entering the main hall, you would have come across ROUGOL’s stand, the usergroup for RISC OS users and enthusiasts living in and around London. The stand was manned by a number of friendly and informative gentlemen who’d quite obviously gone to a lot of effort in organising the show.
The next stand along from ROUGOLwas that of the Raspberry Pi, the new RISC OS computer on the scene (and the cheapest computer ever made!). Rumours had been flying for weeks before the event as to whether a RISC OS port would be running on the Pi, which will go on sale before Christmas this year. The answer was of course, yes. The Pi was in fact displaying a full RISC OS 5 desktop, but due to a lack of USB drivers, the keyboard and mouse wasn’t operational. A temporary fix involving a Windows laptop was thrown together to get people playing around with the nifty little device. The next few weeks will probably see a number of USB Linux drivers poached and ported over to RISC OS in order to get the Pi fully operational.
RISC OS Open, busier than ever.
RISCOS Open Ltd.’s stand saw them selling their usual range of merchandise and had their helpful volunteers politely informing the public as to their operations, and what they have done recently. The biggest change came in the form of a USB stick, two different types were being sold, the first containing a RISC OS emulator and a RISC OS 5 ROM image, and the second containing everything you need to get RISC OS running on a BeagleBoard.
R-Comp were as well prepared as usual, with their new ARMini computer taking centre stage. As well as selling their range of different computers, R-Comp were quite eager to point out the availability of a new (and ARMv7 friendly!) version of Fireworkz Pro, the popular spreadsheet and word processing package. Along with that, Andrew and his team of friendly staff had a range of 24 and 27-inch RISC OS friendly monitors on sale, as well as a brand new version of their back up software, SafeStore, and some new NAS drivers to accompany it.
A little along from R-Comp, Peter Nowosad was present with the Charm Programming Language stall. Charm is a simple to learn yet powerful high level language, with a compiler that generates efficient code with a small memory footprint.
Nigel Willmott was keen to flaunt a brand new version of his wonderful personal information manager software, Organizer 2.14. The new version contains a lot of exciting new features, as well as bringing back multi-language support, kudos Nigel!
Steve Fryatt was present as usual, discussing his CashBook and PrintPDF software as well as going into some details regarding his work with popular web browser NetSurf.Trevor Johnson was quite eager to recreuit new contributors to WikiProject RISC OS at the show. The projects main aim is to increase RISC OS’ presence on the extremely popular encyclopedia website, Wikipedia.
Jim Nagel had brought out a fresh new copy of Archive magazine at the show, which was a good a read as always.RPCEmu shared a stand with WikiProject RISC OS on the day, RPC Emu being the cross platform RiscPC and A7000 emulator of course. It was being displayed running RISC OS on a number of different machines, including a Nintendo Wii running RISC OS under Linux!Keith Dunlop was on the floor with his new Usable Range project, a brand new audio project involving a BeagleBoard, RISC OS and some “banging tunes”. UPDATE! For those of you craving for a little more information on the new ‘Usable Range’, it is a project lead by Keith Dunlop to improve the BeagleBoard’s (and in theory, other ARMv7 machines) audio processing under RISC OS.
The biggest monitor ever to be present at a RISC OS show courtesy of Keith Dunlops Usable Range.
Next, Retro Clinic were at hand with hardware upgrades such as USB and IDE for your 8-bit computer. Then CJE Micro’s were in attendance with their usual range of stock, be it hardware, software, books and some funky toys too.
Away from the main hall, there were three smaller rooms. Michael Emerton was in one, demonstrating RiscDJ, a digital music library supporting up to 100,000 MP3 and OGG songs with added search and filter facilities. Then we had RISC Control/Beeb Control, where Neil Fazakerley was demonstrating his range of large, RISC OS and Beeb controlled robotic arms, there were a number of RiscPCs and Beebs present, as well as funky little BeagleBoard XM board running RISC OS 5.
Chris Whytehead was in attendance displaying his large Acorn and RISC OS computer collection, some of the most interesting pieces were his Acorn System 3, Acorn System 4, and Acorn System 5 computers, fascinating beasts.
Orpheus Internet were as keen and eager as ever, the RISC OS friendly ISP were very informative and heplful as usual, selling their range of RISC OS friendly Internet packages.
The day’s theatre talks were a constant attraction for the surprisingly large crowd that were present at this year’s show, R-Comp started things of at 11:45am, discussing their ARMini, RISCube and RISCBook computers as well their latest software developments, Fireworkz Pro and SafeStore 2. Martin Wuerthner was next up after Andrew Rawnsley’s informative chat, Martin primarily discussed the TechWriter/EasiWriter 9.0, which was released at the show, but he also focused on RISC OS’ premier graphics package, ArtWorks 2 too. At 13:15, Peter Nowosad then took to the stage discussing the Charm Programming Language, a light and easy to learn multi-platform programming language. The next few talks were taken by WikiProject RISC OS and Orpheus Internet, but the one that really drew a lot of people was the Raspberry Pi presentation, as you’d expect.
RISCOS Ltd. and APDL were the biggest misses from this year’s lively and high-profile show, with the former being unable to make it due to a commitment clash.I hope you all enjoyed the RISC OS Blog’s coverage of the show, and make sure to check out the RISCOSCode and RISCOSitory’s coverage of the event.
The RISC OS Emulation USB stick from RISC OS Open!
Now before I bid you all good night, it’s time for a shameless plug, if you’ve got a spare five minutes, spend it over on the RISC OS Blog forum, which has enjoyed a nice revamp recently and is now located on the riscosblog.co.uk site rather than on an external one.
UPDATE! Photos from last weekend’s show have now replaced the placeholder images from last year’s version in this very article. Thanks must go to Martin Hansen of the RISCOSCode, which is where these images were pinched from.
Thanks so much for these reports. I was really keen on coming, but as it was half term, family comes first! Glad the show was a success, and that Raspberry Pi on RISC OS is a definite. Well done everyone, on what appears to have been a very successful show.