The annual Wakefield Show takes place on Saturday, 26th April, 2014 – five days from now – and I will, as usual, be in attendance, representing both Soft Rock Software and RISCOSitory.
The show takes place at the Cedar Court Hotel, Calder Grove, Wakefield, WF4 3QZ, which is right next to junction 39 of the M1, and is open to the public from 10:30am until 4:00pm, with an entry fee of £5 (free for children aged 12 or under).
The status of Soft Rock Software’s products remains largely as it did for the South West Show, with no changes to WebChange, and the WebChange manual remaining incomplete.
There is a new version of WaitUntil, although that isn’t something I normally demonstrate at shows because, while it’s the sort of program where if someone has a use for it they’ll probably use it frequently (possibly even every time they use their RISC OS machine), it’s the kind of tool you install, set up, and then just… forget.
The new version – which isn’t yet available, except as a test version (email me if you’d like a copy) – does exactly what the old version did, with some added features (and general improvements).
Look out for an announcement about it when it’s ready for general release.
In the meantime, and not least because 2014 marks Soft Rock Software’s 25th birthday, what you will find on the stand at this year’s Wakefield Show are (almost all of) the old budget games released through Soft Rock Software in the early to mid 1990s:
- Escape from Exeria
- Guardians of the Labyrinth
- Drop Rock
- Switch!
- Floopy
- [Escape from] The [Sacred] Pyramid [of Doom]
- The Purple Crystal of the Heavens
The last two on that list are text adventures, not released in their own right, but instead supplied as example games with Trellis; The Adventure Interpreter (now referred to internally as TrellisAI) – and the first of those has been known by various names, depending on version, hence the strangely bracketed name above!
The missing games are two BBC versions of the two adventures, which were supplied in that form (for use with the BBC emulation app that came with early RISC OS computers) on the same disc as the first release version of Escape from Exeria – and which are largely irrelevant now – and another free game that was also supplied with Escape from Exeria, called Return to Exeria.
As well as the old games listed above, there is also the more recent Quicksand – and, aside from Floopy, which doesn’t run on modern hardware – the games will be available to play on a Raspberry Pi. Depending on space, a laptop may be set up – on which Floopy does run, in VirtualRiscPC.