ROOL Forum: Recent posts

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 05:37:48 +0000

Is this project dead now?

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:47:11 +0000

Hey Richard,

Are you thinking about the over-IP implementation, or the classic? Or both?

Just the over-IP implementation. But still an interesting jurney I would say! XD

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:00:27 +0000

@Simon
another very interesting approach, worth testing. thanks for the link.
In one of the PDF files I was able to recover only the background without text, but I didn’t know how to use it.
To test.
@Jim
With KPDFUtils, extracting images in Jpep mode, I have no problem opening them with Compo, even opening them with a script.
I have Comp version 123a.35 and I just saw while searching with !Store that there is a problem with version 1.23c
“1.23c fails to load JPEG images on 32 bit platform.”
Both version are included in the download .
I will download your latest version and review it.

NB the Farfrontiers pages were scanned with a quality machine, the format reached almost 3000 pts, the rendering of the background was too perfect :-)

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:24:37 +0000

Sounds great, Paolo. Thanks for the updates on here. Seems like you are covering casual use by double-clicking an .exe on Windows or macOS, right up to always-on Linux servers, or even running on NAS devices (a modern-day FileStore/MDFS!).

When you said something the other week about ShareFS being the ‘original network filesystem’ for RISC OS, I was going to quibble and mention AUN/Net/Econet. :). Interesting that you are putting that on your list too. It sounds like a bit of a nightmare of versions to manage, but there are at least several implementations you can look at (on stardot & the RISC OS sources). Are you thinking about the over-IP implementation, or the classic? Or both?

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 16:18:08 +0000

@ All

I am starting to close the build for this weekend so people can run another set of tests. What I have managed to find the time to fix so far for the next build you will receive is:

• Fixed all reported issues with the sharefs.toml file being regenerated.
• Fixed all issues with transferring files from RISC OS to ShareFSServer. This should make file transfers safe in both directions now, but you will need to confirm.
• Added graceful system shutdown, so older versions of macOS on Intel should not behave oddly when pressing CTRL-C.
• Improved error reporting.
• Improved Unicode handling. This is not completed yet, so I am planning to finish it next week.
• Improved file extension handling, although this is also planned to be completed next week.
• Added a new parameter to store logs in a file, because a few of you forgot to send me logs with your reports. Sending those logs is vital.
• You can now start the server by double-clicking the executable icon.

What I am fixing tonight:

• Unicode to Latin-1 translator causing problems with RISC OS NBSP (hard space used for file names). The issue is that Unicode uses 0xC2 0xA0 for NBSP, but RISC OS uses only 0xA0. The combination of the Unicode to Latin-1 translator and the space-to-hard-space translator creates a bug that makes ShareFSServer send RISC OS a hard space as two bytes: 0xC2 and 0xA0 (and 0xC2 gets displayed as an extended “A”). This obviously does not map back to what a file with a regular space is on macOS, Linux, Windows, and BSD, so the translation table returns an unknown share.

Please let me know if there are other important fixes I forgot and need to implement.

As soon as the new builds are ready, you will receive the usual email with instructions. I have also added a README.txt file with all the instructions in the zip file.

Again, thanks everyone for helping to test this!

Roadmap:

1) After file sharing testing is completed, we will move to printer sharing testing.
2) Test Access+ features, they are not ready yet
3) After A+ and printer sharing is completed, we will move to testing the two administrative functions:
   - A web UI to administer the server from !Browse and !NetSurf ;)
   - A REST API for people who wish to write their own native RISC OS desktop application to administer ShareFSServer
4) After finishing testing of 1, 2 and 3, we will need to test the new messaging protocol I am adding to ShareFSServer. This should be exciting for users who wish to build RISC OS clusters, because the messaging protocol allows:
   - Creating a RISC OS cluster system to share processing load (the protocol allows sending and receiving processing load units, for example to create software that runs threads on remote systems. I demoed an early version at some of the RISC OS Shows in past years). So yes, RISC OS clustering is coming :)
   - Creating distributed applications on RISC OS
   - Creating ways to send update messages to running apps on separate RISC OS systems, even across VPNs
   - Creating local chats lol (some of you asked if it was for this, well yes, you can use it for this as well)
5) Finally, we will need to test all the new security features:
   - You will be able to define which IPs, subnets, and CIDRs can access each specific share
   - Set up a rate limiter
   - Check if anything can break a RISC OS client

As a separate note, I am also trying to reverse/re-implement Acorn AUN too in ShareFSServer.

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 14:26:35 +0000

WRT jpegs:

Looking into the “Resources” directory in !Compo I can see files with ‘jpeg-ish’ names that have datestamps circa 20 years ago! IIRC it is recommended to run this under an emulator of an OS of that period. So maybe either and emulator or – better! – someone updating these code snippets – would get jpegs working correctly again. Alas, beyond me.

This is Compo version 1.23c-26. And by default I’m normally using without emulation. So I guess no surprise if there are some problems.

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 14:15:00 +0000

I’m also puzzled by the failure to load jpegs. I suspect this has been ‘lost’ as a result of it’s design which I once decribed to Rob as equivalent to the old Shackleton aircraft as “10,000 rivets flying in close formation” :-) i.e. it has lots of bits of codes in various files that get called or then make calls for other helpers in this ‘formation’. In effect the old jpeg code file seems AWOL or needing update.*

However I tried using PBMs from PDFs and these seem fine. Load and get converted into ‘sprites’ internally, so can be analyses and altered as a block of sprite data. But at some point having new jpeg code ‘back in formation’ would be good.

I’ve now put up the current version of the program I’ve written here

detox: http://jcgl.orpheusweb.co.uk/temp/DeTox.zip

At present it just takes the ‘blue’ data processes that, and use it for setting output r=g=b values to get greyscale. Not yet experimented with using g as the source, etc. And also not yet experimented with adding offsets or non-linear scaling of values, etc

The prog saves info as files on RAMDisc for examination. I then use !Tau to plot the curves of the stats of the input RGB values.

Hope someone can make more sense of it than I do!

This gives my idiot ‘C’ code and the ‘call’ file to DND onto the canvas.

I’m still just hacking by specifying values for the process in the code. Mean to do plots of ‘brownness’ ( combined +ve R-G and G-B values indicate this) for example as that may help spot and fix oxidation.

• For anyone who doesn’t know the history. Compo became an ‘orphan’ program when its orginal commercial seller ceased operating. It then languished as no-one could buy a copy. (Long story. TL-DR) However an open version has now appeared and people can choose to use it or develop it. Rob has focussed on his ‘Garden’… which is a LOT more than a simple domestic garden! He’s happy for people to use it so long as he isn’t pestered about doing anything to/with/for it. He moved on to “Variations” so far as software is concerned. But I find Compo wonderfully flexible. Right down to it letting you put icons on the canvas to choose options, etc. In effect. for image work, it can be anything from presentation sofware to an intercactive way to reprocess images and use file data to generate them. Limited by the imagination and skill of the user. I just wish I was a better programmer!!

The schmijoe info looks interesting. But as yet not got into this due to ‘shopping’ as a non-maskable interrupt!

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:17:49 +0000

On RISC OS Select, and RISC OS Pyromaniac, you can use the `SET` unary operator (http://riscos.com/support/developers/riscos6/core/eval…)

For example:

*if SET "Hello" Then echo hello
*set hello hello
*if SET "Hello" Then echo hello
hello

This avoids the CLI issue where the expansion of variables becomes problematic with the command line length.

Also… this has nothing to do with ShellCLI. ShellCLI only provides the prompt that is used with F12. The user (ie you) should almost never be aware of the existence of ShellCLI because it should just be treated as ‘the CLI’ when running under the Wimp, almost indentically to GOS.

Under most circumstances, though, just use:

If "<Var$Name>" = "" Then Set Var$Name NewValue

Since you are very unlikely to hit the CLI length conditions that cause a problem.

Unless there’s some other oddity I’ve forgotten.

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:08:49 +0000

I managed to get a slightly modified version of the alias you posted working by escaping the angle brackets and replacing %*0 with %%*0. I’ve only tested it on RISC OS 5, though.

Set Alias$MySet If "<60>%%0<62>" = "" then Set %%*0

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:53:01 +0000

I came across this, that might be helpful?

https://schmijoe.github.io/2022/09/17/bg-removal/

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:10:55 +0000

I’m cleaning up some old RISC OS code and I’ve hit a bit of a ShellCLI gremlin I don’t know how to fix…!

There’s this chunk of code in the !Boot which sets up a basic operating configuration, but it’s intended that this be overridable from outside too:

Set Alias$Set If "<%%0>" = "" then %Set %*0

Set IServer$Dir        <Obey$Dir>
Set IServer$IBoardSize #200000
Set IServer$IDebugSize #200000

Unset Alias$Set

I can see what the intent is here, but it doesn’t work. The “Set” is always run, so whatever values I set outside !Boot get overridden. This is on RO 3.11.

Does anyone have a “set if not already set” ShellCli/Obey pattern that they could share?