On 1st March, 2014 – this coming Saturday – I will be attending the next major UK event in the RISC OS Calendar: The RISC OS South West Show, 2014.
This is my “local” event, being held at the Webbington Hotel and Spa, Loxton, Somerset, BS26 2HU, just an hour’s drive, or thereabouts, depending on the actual route taken, and it is almost a tradition that I will either arrive late, or with barely enough time to set up before the doors open to the public – but this year should see a break with that tradition, because I will be staying on site the night before.
So, what do I have to present to visitors to my stand this time?
Development-wise, sadly, nothing has changed. When I’ve had the time, I’ve been working on the WebChange manual, and not the software itself, and a small amount of work has been done on that since the 2013 London Show, but not much – certainly not as much as I would have liked. However, this year is something special for Soft Rock Software – which I’ll expand on in another post, at a later date – and, as such, it is the perfect year to get certain things finished, with the WebChange manual being chief amongst them, allowing the software to finally be officially released as version 3.00.
What has changed, though, is what I will have available to play on the Soft Rock Software stand.
Games!
A couple of years ago, I made it a small quest – thinking specifically ahead to this year – to try to find copies of all the budget games released by Soft Rock Software in the early-mid 1990s. My goal was primarily to tidy up any oddities, ensure they can be made to run on new hardware, such as the BeagleBoard and Raspberry Pi, and possibly even update them to give them newer, better graphics on these devices, and make them available to download.
My initial searches turned up some demo versions, and Martin Bazley helpfully provided me with full copies of some that he’d found on a couple of Acorn User CDs – but one of these had graphics issues and, even ignoring that, the collection was still incomplete.
More recently, though, I’ve turned up even more, and I now have an almost complete selection, with only one game missing – Return to Exeria, which was supplied as an extra on the same disc as Escape from Exeria – so this coming Saturday it will be possible to play almost all of those old budget games.
I will post again soon to talk more about those games, what I have, what works and what doesn’t, as well as what I intend to do with them, etc., but in the meantime, I look forward to seeing as many people as possible at the South West Show this Saturday, hopefully with plenty of people playing those games!