WAKEFIELD RISC OS COMPUTER CLUB

Martin Eastwood
-----------------------

Meeting on Wednesday 12th August starting at 7.45pm

A15 Emulator for RISC OS

The A15 Emulator is aimed at running RISC OS on (or emulating) systems
based around the Cortex-A15 processor.
The A15 generation of ARM cores offered a substantial step up in
performance over earlier designs that RISC OS originally targeted. This
project explores bringing the operating system and its software to that
class of hardware, whether through native support or emulation, while
trying to preserve the classic RISC OS experience as far as possible.
It's part of the wider effort to give RISC OS a path onto more capable
modern ARM platforms. ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sprite and Draw Viewers for Mac and Windows

Alongside the emulator work are two practical utility applications: a
Sprite viewer and a Draw viewer, available for both macOS and Windows.
RISC OS has its own long-standing native formats - Sprites for bitmaps
and Draw files for vector graphics. These are still commonly used in the
RISC OS community, but they aren't natively supported on other platforms.
The viewers were created to bridge that gap. They let you open, inspect
and work with these files on modern Mac and Windows machines without
needing a full RISC OS environment running. They're deliberately focused
tools rather than full editors - simple, useful utilities for anyone who
still deals with RISC OS graphics assets. ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Kinetic Box - Risc PC Native Emulator with 64MB Graphics Card

Kinetic Box (also known as Virtual Kinetic Box) is a ready-to-run
emulator of an Acorn Risc PC fitted with a Kinetic processor card.
Built on the excellent RPCEmu foundation, it presents a fully configured Kinetic Risc PC running a modern RISC OS distribution. Key features
include:

* Substantial memory configurations (up to 384 MB, combining
motherboard and on-card Kinetic SDRAM)
* A dedicated *64 MB graphics card* (KineticGraphics) that lifts the
old VIDC20 limitations
* High-resolution desktops - including ultrawide and 4K modes in
millions of colours
* Hardware-accelerated 2D operations (scrolling, fills, window movement)
* Fast JPEG rendering
* Native networking and ShareFS/Access support
* Versions for Apple Silicon Macs (with Metal acceleration and a
native AArch64 JIT) and Windows

The result is a fast, modern way to run a Kinetic-class Risc PC with capabilities that go well beyond what the original hardware could manage
- especially in the graphics department


This 'virtual' meeting is open to all, and will take place using the Zoom conferencing service using our regular meeting credentials. Zoom
invitations will be sent out ahead of the meeting, but only to those who
email info2026@wrocc.org.uk to request one. If you would like to be part
of the meeting (and don't already have the link from a previous meeting or receive an invite in the next 24 hours as a member of WROCC), please RSVP
-- at the latest by the end of Tuesday 11th August (GMT). We email the
links out on the morning of the meeting.

If you haven't used Zoom before, we suggest that before Wednesday you try
to join the Zoom test meeting at https://zoom.us/test on the device that
you intend to use, in order to check that your system works OK. You will
not require a Zoom account to take part.

Past Meetings
-------------

Videos of previous meetings can be found in our links to past meetings at https://www.wrocc.org.uk/meetings or see our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@wrocc-riscos

WROCC Membership
----------------

Annual membership of WROCC is available for those living near and far at 10.00ukp per year.

Members receive:

* A PDF newsletter with all the latest news and articles.

* Entry to meetings.

* Access to the WROCC Internet Discussion List.

For further information, please email info2026@wrocc.org.uk or visit the
Club's website at https://www.wrocc.org.uk/

--
Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club - https://www.wrocc.org.uk

"A friendly face for all things RISC OS in Yorkshire,
the surrounding regions and beyond."


_______________________________________________________________ a.m.conroy@argonet.co.uk, Moderator of comp.sys.acorn.announce.
Submissions to csaa@owlart.net
Related mail to csaa-request@owlart.net

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)