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Article archives

Amcog Games 3D Turbo boost reviewed

Posted by Mark Stephens on 06:12, 25/4/2023 | ,
 
One of the (many) reasons to attend the RISC OS shows is to get to play the games on the Amcog stand and see them demoed by their author (who will usually give you some useful tips). Amcog have been creating quite a library of Computer games for RISC OS machines and the latest is a racing game.
 
Continue reading "Amcog Games 3D Turbo boost reviewed" | 2 comments in the forums

Free Tap Plane game released for RISC OS

Posted by Mark Stephens on 06:52, 14/3/2023 |
 
We have had a lot of fun playing Jeron's previous games, so really excited to report that he has been busy!
 
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Mamie Fletcher’s House released

Posted by Mark Stephens on 08:20, 7/12/2021 |
 
There seems to be quite be quite a renaissance of games on RISC OS at the moment. Although Rick Murray did not have a stand, his new game was being demonstrated on several stands.
 
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Free Substitute Soccer game available on !Store

Posted by Mark Stephens on 17:25, 29/11/2021 |
 
Jeroen Vermeulen has been busy continuing with his project to convert Python games in Python from the book "Code the Classics" by the Raspberry Pi organisation. His fifth game (Substitute Soccer) is now available as a free download from !Store
 
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Software Preservation at the ROUGOL Show

Posted by Andrew Poole on 15:30, 28/10/2021 | , , ,
 
Disc image of Pandora's BoxWe've mentioned before the work of the Acorn Preservation Team to archive and preserve BBC Micro and Acorn software before it's lost to time and bit rot. As part of this effort, there will be a Software Preservation stand at this weekend's ROUGOL show which will offer a software preservation service. This is possible thanks to a generous offer of time and expertise from Paul Emerton (who you may remember from his excellent demonstration on BBC TV graphics and Acorn machines at the Centre for Computing History).
 
The idea is that you can bring along your BBC Micro or Archimedes floppy discs and if it's not already in the Acorn Preservation Team's archive, Paul will take an image of the disc while you wait and give the original back to you. If you take along a USB stick or SD card, a copy of the resulting disc image will be provided back to you (although be aware that the images of a single floppy disc can be up to around 85MB).
 
Imaging the discs will be made possible thanks to Paul bringing along his Greaseweazle - a small device that reads and stores the raw magnetic flux readings from the floppy disc (hence the large size of the resulting images). The advantage of imaging the discs this way is that it preserves the content exactly, including any special copy protection tracks from the original disc.
 
Even if you can't bring your own discs along, Paul will be available at the stand to chat and give advice on how best to store and avoid damage to both discs and drives to help preserve the life of both.
 
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Arculator updated to add A4 emulation and more podule support

Posted by Andrew Poole on 10:33, 10/9/2021 | , , , , , ,
 
Archimedes emulator Arculator has been updated to version 2.1 with some very nice new features. The emulator can now emulate an A4 laptop or the A500 prototype and can also emulate more podules, including the Aleph One 386 and 486 podule, meaning you can now run DOS and Windows in the emulator.
 
Other podules now supported include Acorn ROM podules, MIDI podules, Oak SCSI interfaces and Computer Concepts' ColourCard. Support for disc images in the .hfe format is also now included.
 
Arculator running Windows  Arculator being an A4

 
Head over to the Arculator website to download the new version.
 
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How data can be recovered from damaged discs using an oscilloscope

Posted by Andrew Poole on 07:30, 18/5/2021 | , ,
 
Reading data from a floppy disc - the hard wayA couple of months ago, we told you about the Acorn Preservation Team, who are working to preserve the data from old discs before the data's gone forever.
 
Chris Evans and Phil Pemberton have written an in-depth look at how they were able to recover the data from some damaged discs that were otherwise unreadable using more traditional methods.
 
The post is an interesting look at how even when it appears the disc may be unrecoverable, with the right tools there can still be hope of recovering the data using more analogue methods at the magnetic flux level (and sometimes drawing peaks on a waveform manually!).
 
Also, as we noted in the previous article, the Acorn Preservation Team are still looking to help preserve any unique, rare, interesting and potentially historic discs anyone may have tucked away in the back of their cupboards before it's too late. They're not only working on BBC Micro discs, but discs for other formats and systems, too.
 
Links:
Recovering "lost" treasure-filled floppy discs with an oscilloscope - Chris Evans' blog
 
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Acorn Preservation Team want to help archive your old data before it's too late

Posted by Andrew Poole on 10:00, 8/3/2021 | , , , ,
 
Matthew Atkinson's Source DiscsThe need to preserve data from the BBC Micro days is becoming more and more urgent as time goes by since many of the discs are now well over 35 years old and many will be starting to degrade - if they haven't already. During this weekend's all-day ABug event, the Acorn Preservation Team gave an update on their recent project to recover the data from the original source code discs for several of Matthew Atkinson's games for the BBC Micro including Repton 3, UIM, Tempest and The Living Daylights.
 
The Acorn Preservation Team are also encouraging anyone who may have some old discs containing anything that is in need of recovery/preservation/archival to get in touch and loan the discs to them to help make sure the data isn't permanently lost. In particular, the team are interested in development discs containing sources, binaries, unreleased/missing/early versions of games and applications for both the BBC and RISC OS platforms.
 
In the case of Matthew Atkinson's discs, they were passed over to the Acorn Preservation Team a few weeks ago when they turned up here at TIB Towers after having been presumed lost by the author. It turned out that he'd in fact sent them to TIB back in the early 2000s where they were stored for the last fifteen years before turning up during a recent house move.
 
Once we'd sent the discs over to them, the Acorn Preservation Team set to work recovering the data contained within. This task wasn't entirely straightforward as some discs were showing the effect of their advancing age. One disc had damage that looked like it had seen an impact at some point in its life and sported a dent covering around 11 tracks of data. Despite this, the team were able to recover almost all of the data from the 22 disc set using a variety of methods including flux-level readings and analysing low level analogue signals from the discs. At the time of writing, only a handful of tracks from the dented disc remain to be recovered and are still being actively worked on. The data recovered so far has been provided back to Matthew Atkinson to have a look through and decide what he'd like to do with the soruces next.
 
A State of Flux talk
Phil Pemberton and Chris Evans talk about the process of recovering data from Matthew Atkinson's source discs at this weekend's ABug event

 
The ABug talk from the Acorn Preservation Team will be made available through both the ABug website and their new YouTube channel in the near future along with a talk by Matthew Atkinson himself on the history of his BBC Micro and Archimedes development days.
 
If you have any old discs in need of preservation, whether BBC Micro era or Archimedes/RISC OS, the Acorn Preservation Team urge you to get in touch via the Stardot forums or the Software Preservation channel in the Stardot Discord Server before it's too late and the data's gone forever.
 
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Book: Acorn - A World in Pixels

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Cloverleaf drops promise of including retro games with Kickstarter rewards (Updated)

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Amcog's latest game Star Mine reviewed

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Amcog Games Escape from the Arcade reviewed

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RISC OS interview with Tim H-Smith

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Treasure trove of RISC OS games at JASPP site

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