KiSS originated in Japan, and its name comes from the phrase kisekae ningyou, which loosely translates to "clothes changing game". It was originally developed in 1991 for a NEC computer, but since then the specification has been formalised (and broadened, to allow for more capable hardware).
Lua evolved from a data-entry language devised for PETROBRAS, the Brazilian oil company, by Tecgraf, the Computer Graphics Technology group of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio, in the early 1990s. Its keynote has been simplicity.
Wari is a game played with rows of dishes, containing counters (seeds, shells, stones). It has been played for 3,500 years, longer than any other game known to civilised man. This is an extended RISC OS version of the game for 2 to 4 players with optional rules, choice of skins, speed of play and level of play against the robot(s), and save, reload and review of the game.
Tiles is a visually attractive and entertaining crossword game that provides a basis for learning spelling, vocabulary, strategy and computer literacy. To cater for all levels of ability a number of boards are supplied in 5 languages: English, French, German, Spanish and Italian.
This program was originally written for RISC OS version 2 to run in a WIMP window and be mouse driven and has since been de-loused. It recreates the original 'board' game, where the balls must be cleared one at a time, by being hopped over as in draughts. The aim is to be left with only one ball, which must be in the centre hole.
The Brandy BASIC V interpreter for RISC OS, Unix and other OSes. This page is from the Internet Archive and version 1.16 is available from archive.org.
Gradint is a program by Silas S. Brown that can be used to make your own self-study audio tapes for learning foreign-language vocabulary. You can use it to help with a course, to prepare for speaking assignments, or just to keep track of the vocabulary you come across. A RISC OS port exists.
CVS stands for "Concurrent Versions System" and is a version control system. Using it, you can record the history of your source files (e.g. source code of your programs, contents of your web site).
OSLib is a highly optimized interface library for the Application Programmers' Interface (API) for the Acorn series of 32 bit RISC OS computers. It is a useful tool for application program writers for this platform. OSLib provides a set of functions and C headers For its target platform, to provide complete coverage of the RISC OS API (the so-called SWIs) as a set of C/C++ and ARM Assembler headers, together with a thin veneer library.
Weave is a language for describing tagged text and, in particular, webpages. Why not use HTML? Because it has no provision for variables or functions. It has no abstraction facilities. By contrast Weave can be used as simply as HTML, but gives you a lot more descriptive power. You can create a whole website with a single Weave script.
DiscKnight is a disc checker and fixer for FileCore E and E+ format hard discs which incorporates fixes for a large number of problems. DiscKnight is the first tool to include support for the new E+ format introduced with RISC OS 4 to provide support for long filenames and large directories.
This is a RISC OS desktop version of the old card game. The idea of the game is to reach a total of 21, without exceeding it, by counting the pips of the cards that are dealt to you. The suits do not play a part in the game. This is a game for one player.
Whether or not you consider yourself a programmer, the very fact that you use Risc OS suggests that you are probably an active user of your computer, and hence that you are likely to find Awk a useful tool. The original version of Awk was created in 1977 at AT&T Bell Laboratories, as a tool for extracting information from text. It was intended for relatively simple tasks that could be described in a couple of lines. Its simplicity made it so popular that people tried to use it for more ambitious tasks, and this led to a major revision in 1985, extending its capabilities to that of a fully-fledged programming language without sacrifice of its simplicity. It is now a standard part of every Unix distribution.
The RISC OS Toolkit (RTK) is a class library for developing RISC OS application programs in C++. It differs from other such libraries currently available for RISC OS in its support for automatic layout. This is achieved by specifying the relationship between different visual components (for example, the fact that they are arranged in a grid or a column). The precise coordinates are calculated by the RTK. This eliminates the need for a template editor, and allows the layout to change at run-time to accommodate varying content.
Zap is a programmer's editor for RISC OS on Acorn and compatible computers. It has a large number of features designed to facilitate programming (particularly source code), as well as full text editing facilities. It is also highly configurable and extensible.
Freeze is a machine state snapper and restorer for RISC OS. Freeze can save the state of a machine and reload it at any time. Using Freeze, an overloaded boot sequence can take less than 5 seconds.
A personal website featuring images and illustrations created using ArtWorks 2 by Richard Ashbery. The website also includes photography and pictures created using Photodesk.
![[RISC OS cog in 3D]](cog.png)
