I don't have a full explanation of the content of this talk but I understand Tony is going to explain his methods for converting files between programs like Pipedream, ovation, word etc.
This will be our first full use of the overhead projector so it should be easy for everyone to see.
This was a splendid evening with Stuart making his first visit to Iceni. He came equipped with all sorts of gadgetry to support the A9Home computer.
Stuart began with a historical introduction on Stuart Tyrell Developments (STD) and Advantage6.
He had always been associated with Acorn/RISC OS products from the BBC B in 1982 through the range from A310, A3000, A5000, RPC up to the present day. His personal expertise is in hardware interfacing. He produced gaming interfaces Joysticks and joypads, switches mouse interfaces and serial/parallel convertors. Currently these the ultimate Unipod boards; more on these later. In 2003 he was doing a lot of Business to Business work and set up Advantage6 as a company to service the OEM market with STD as a trading name.In size he and Matt Edgar are permanent staff with 4 or 5 contractors working on particular projects. With Advantage6 it would have been possible to move away from retail but decided to support older machines as he needs the RISCOS market to continue. By supporting these he is giving people options on new technology. Electronic switches were not available for non-PC, users so he produced suitable switches. One step was to allow people to replace the Acorn mouse with a PS2 mouse on RISCOS machines by inventing the mouse mini This housed a 2 Mips processor in a matchbox sized package as an interface which would make the RPC think it had an Acorn mouse attached and the PS2 mouse to think was attached to a PC. (Ed. can mice think?)
They also approached Simtec to produce the NET100 cards for networking since network cards for RISCOS were very expensive. Stuart explained that we would always have confidence in his ideas and designs but would need to start at 100 units minimum for initial production. He has sold 1000s cards of cards since and 6000+ mouse minis. He can afford to drop his prices after the first batches are sold. The Unipod was a very successful product combining NET100, USB host, IDE disk interface, printer port on one board. The functionality was sold in stages to customers with unlock codes for each part to retro configure the cards. That way people could budget for future requirements and they only needed to buy and fit one card.
In 2003 Stuart with Advantage6 had produced the A75 machine and decided to make use the A7500 in a ruggedised aluminium case. It consists of a 400MHz ARM9 processor running RISCOS Adjust 32 the latest soft load version. 128MB SDRAM 40GB disk and 8MB VRAM with graphics co-processor. The front has 2 USB ports, microphone in, headphone out, power/reset button and Status LEDs. The rear has 2 USB, 2 PS/2, and 10/100Mb network port, serial port, Video out and Power in. It measures 168 x 103 x 53mm and weighs 550g depending on options. Power supply 20W.
CJE are marketing it and there are various options for wireless keyboard, CD/DVD combo drive. It consumes 2-3W of power.
As an experiment Stuart even tried running it from a phone battery pack as a demo! But unfortunately this pack was not capable of supplying the 1A needed for the drive bootup. The running current he reckoned would be about 300-400mA. A good try!
The A9Home in its dye cast box, rubber keyboard, mouse and a power supply and mini VGA monitor (about 8"x6") could all be packed into a flight case if required. Very neat and, as Stuart said, easy to take on holiday. With no fan the computer is silent.
Th A9Home implements the EDID system for automatically detecting the properties of a connected monitor and defines its own Monitor definition file.
It will not as delivered run older 26 bit software, but Aemulor can be installed if that is a requirement. There is no floppy disk facility as integrating this is quite difficult now for Acorn format disks. You can't open the box. Stuart said that there was no way to open the box without inside knowledge and they had deliberately adopted this policy in order to avoid having to give any hardware support. Some concern was expressed by members at this since they thought that they might need to replace the hard drive at some time. Stuart said it could be sent back to Advantage6 if this were the case.
There had been moves to increase the stability of RISCOS and to this end there was checking to see if software would run correctly e.g. is it 32 bit. The hard drive fitted was quite fast 5400rpm and had a read speed of 11MB/s and write of 7MB/s.
KinoAMP was installed for running Video. Photodesk ran very fast. Rotation of an image is 4x the speed of a RPC. (6MB image took 29secs.)
He showed a flight simulator from David Daniels which ran quite fast. In comparison to the Iyonix for some applications it ran faster as it has very fast cache memory e.g. those requiring heavy data processing but for other applications it was slower.
There are several other versions available or planned.
Stuart demonstrated the Bluetooth version which has a different board inside and ran with a virtual keyboard. This projects an image of a keyboard onto any flat horizontal surface (e.g. tabletop) which then be typed on in the usual way. The unit detects where your fingers touch down with a separate low level beam system. There is also one with GPS capability and GSM mobile phone connectivity.
He is always looking for a niche in the market and to do something in a new way with new technology. He wants to encourage developers to write software for new applications.
Altogether a very interesting talk delivered with good humour and as I said on the night in my vote of thanks - Panache!
We are very grateful to Stuart for making the journey from Oldham to show us this first native RISCOS machine.
Retail price with various options is £603·96 inc VAT+delivery from CJE, see their website http://www.cjemicros.co.uk. Technical details http://www.advantagesix.com
I have some spare copies of his brochure if anyone who was not present would like one.(Ed.)
Here are some of the photos I took during the meeting.
Stuart in full flow
The A9Home is the small box between the speakers!
Not a lot of news this month save the sad demise of the Living With Technology magazine from Paul Beverley's Archive publications. I still haven't had any suggestions for our August Social evening.
| July 5th 2006 | File Transfers between platforms | Tony |
| August | Social meeting - venue to be arranged | |
| September 6th | Quercus Magazine | John Cartmell |
| October 4th | PDF creation using Ghostscript | Frank |
| November 1st | JPEG slideshow | All |
| December 6th | Gadgets evening and Party | All |
Talks with Visiting speakers are shown in Red. We will give more details as soon as they are confirmed.
Our meetings are held at the Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road, Ipswich IP2 8RE , for a map and other details please see the website. http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com
The first visit is free and subsequent visits for non - members is £2. The membership fee is £18 due from the AGM date in April, but may be reduced for those joining late in the year.
None this month.
Continuing our publicity for EAUG events - please see their Website for details of their next meeting. Currently these are:-
11th July "Firewalls"
Note there is no meeting in August.
12th September "Conversion of Taped Slideshows"
Meetings are at the Great Baddow Village Hall, on the second Tuesday of the month
opening at 7:30 p.m. for a start at 7:45 - 8:00 p.m.
For directions see below (note the new web addresses)
http://www.eaug.org.uk or 'phone one of the contacts on http://www.eaug.org.uk/ppl.htm
"ICENI does not have any Insurance cover for computers or other equipment so please be advised that you bring machines to the club at your own risk."
P.S. My insurance company have added my computer cover away from home with no extra premium required, yours might do the same.(Ed.)
Following on from a brief discussion at the last club meeting it has been agreed that I should remove a lot of the old newsletters from the website and archive them to CD/DVD. I'll probably not do this before the end of February. If anyone would like a copy of the CD I'm sure this could be arranged.
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the new website. Our website URL is
http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com as a virtual domain,
it can also be reached using http://www.btinternet.com/~icenicomputerclub
Email to: iceni@woolridge.org.uk