ROOL Forum: Recent posts

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:08:09 +0000

Only issue with some apps is fixed buttons with sprites are going to be light when the rest of the interface is dark, which kind of looks weird. is there anyway to change this and allow the wimp to switch to a dark set of sprites in the app, if the app has added them?

I don’t think there’s a practical way for the Wimp to automate that, since although we’re throwing the term “dark mode desktop” around a lot here, you should really be thinking more as “not a light grey marble desktop”. The new *WimpVisualFlags could equally well be used to make a pink and yellow desktop. In that case apps with fixed buttons with sprites will jar just as much. For that, we have Wimp$IconTheme to allow apps to select private sprites for the current theme.

If there isn’t already, it’d be handy if there was a system variable set to indicate the preference for dark mode colourings. This is because graphics are often loaded in Obey files via IconSprites [snip]. Having to interrogate SWIs to do this would be something of a pain in the proverbial, where a system variable can just issue a *If command to switch between light or dark iconsprites.

Application sprites which end up in the global sprite pool (via *IconSprites) can simply continue to use Wimp$IconTheme. For private sprites, you already need code to load that (ie. can’t be done via an Obey file) so calling one extra SWI doesn’t seem a big effort. Anyone loading private sprites into the global pool should be ready to have rotten cabbages thrown at them.

A couple of random thoughts here:
will the Toolbox be updated to support themes?
how do we handle Themes and internationalisation?

The Toolbox already handles themes (since Toolbox 1.52 in 17-Jan-2003).

I can’t think of much overlap between Themes and internationalisation, if there are sprites with English drawn on them as pixels then yes, there will need to be another set with those pixels changed. But that’s not a function of being dark per se, it’s just another theme, like Sovereign has “Util” on sprite file_ffc and Ursula does too.

I’ve uploaded version 2.91a of StrongHelp with support for DarkMode here

Downloaded and running – am able to see the text again on the pages.

There’s a freshly baked TestDarkLight Pi ROM to try out featuring

• An updated ThemeSetup plug-in and Filer, rebased to the latest sources from ROOL
• Minor tweak to the start banner so the word ‘RISC OS’ isn’t black
• Revised Wimp which highlights sprite-only menus correctly now (for example Draw’s Style → Line pattern, or Maestro’s Clef selection)

I’d like to put up FocusTextColour for consideration

Idea noted.

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 11:43:50 +0000

I’ve opened the filer window for the dir where I hace !KPDFutil.

This directory also had !ImageMagick7. Indeed, I’ve run that so the icon is on the icon bar.

This gets me ‘something’. But it is series of reports of each page being proessed… with a stored result of zero percent. When I look in TMP the jpegs look like unaltered originals. i.e. still oxidised.

This did work on a previous test some days ago, but I have no idea what I’m failing to do, or doing wrong! :-<

The file on question is the ebook of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for May 1950 (EQMM_1950_05" from the Net Archive site. But I doubt the specific choice matters much.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 18:02:15 +0000

I’ve written up my experiences so far with the Dwarf Mini smartscope, at:

Dwarf Mini Notes and Observations

Not much RISC OS related in this post, but if you’re thinking of getting one — there has been some interest expressed! — it has a few tips.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 17:51:46 +0000

Hiya,

Quick note that there’ll be no live coding this week … it’s been very hot this week, and a little time to recover would be good – plus my server’s redundant power supply failed which was annoying. Annoying because it wasn’t redundant any more as the primary died a month or two back and didn’t get replaced. So, I’m without server at the moment. Doesn’t affect things too much, but I think I’ll have another week’s break.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 16:40:10 +0000

Jim,

Yes, it would help if instead of saying “it doesn’t work”, you could let us know of any error messages you get.

Also if you could report what particular file was the problem. Most of the scanned PDFs available — on Luminist at any rate — are just collections of JPEG files, but those on Archive.org seem to be different. They certainly seem to include a text layer generated by an OCR program and have multiple images for each page. This may cause problems with generating the page images.

As well as ImageMagick7 (for the image processing) and !InfoZip (to produce the .cbz file) !DeBrown2 also uses PDFUtils — specifically pdfimages — to generate the image files from the PDF in the first place.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 14:44:55 +0000

Jim,
Audio

Yes, I recall the work on the sig-gen+analyser. :-)

I created a page for this work, it’s Desktop versions of your applications. I always use !ModulMeter(PPM) before recording with my devices.

Andrew,
I use Compo with my CM4 (Hydra), there are some problems depending on the version, I’m trying to sort them out.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 13:29:09 +0000

Fantastic – what a superbly speedy response!

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 11:20:31 +0000

Just release 1.1.7 with fancy new icons and…. a Windows build!

Have a look for rpcemu_quickstart_1.1.7_windows_amd64.zip in the 1.1.7 release assets, this will let you decompress and run – no extra setup required on the RO side of things (networking is configured for DHCP, Access is on, latest HD image is included).

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:36:07 +0000

Hi Jim – I believe you did get it to work after updating your iMX6 computer to latest OS. You sent me some examples of DeBrown vs Compo method.

If something doesn’t work, please let us know the error message (if any), as it may help point to a solution.

IIRC Debrown just needs ImageMagick7 installed (which needs to be seen by the filer, I think?) and !InfoZip for zip handling.

Increasing your “Next” slot and/or RAM disc may also help – both done via the Task Manager (click on the “i” icon in the bottom right of your screen).

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:07:13 +0000

haha, that’s one way of getting it to work. ;-)

It is in fact how I run various RPCEmu instances for testing :-)

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:05:59 +0000

haha, that’s one way of getting it to work. ;-)

I do plan on getting Windows builds back; it’ll need a bit of work and a heap of testing though. :-/