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Letters Page

It's cheap and cheerful, but you give us an earfull...

Dear Aaron,
Thanks for including both my Text->Draw and Q->BBC Basic Converters on your last subscription disc. Talking about spelling checking in DTP applications before converting to Draw, attached is a zipped Impression TextStory to Text Converter (!Story-Txt). The text you can save from Impression is full of control information in curly brackets, which this application strips out. The QBasic to BBC Basic Converter has now gone on a bit to Version 2.00 and is available from the Melotech site at www.melotech.co.uk, as will shortly a GW-BASIC to BBC Basic Converter. Regards,
Martin Carradus.

It's always a pleasure to publish original software, so I have included a copy of !Story-Txt in the software directory of this issue.

Aaron,
Nice issue, even though there's no education news. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it. We're about to buy 50 sets of those speakers Dave recommended, however! Thanks for the tip...
It always makes me grimace when I see digital images of shows that people have taken. OK, so flashes don't tend to reach very far (pants of course - the light gets there and reflects back: just too weakly for the camera's pathetic lens) but we're COMPUTER USERS people! This means we can apply a simple gamma correction in !ChangeFSI or even !Photodesk.
Sounds like something for my education column...
Andrew

Education column...education column...you know I think we used to have one of those in RISCWorld, I wonder when it will be coming back? (Ohh look it's re-appeared in this issue) Anyway I hope you like the speakers, Dave Bradforth seems to like his set. Now back at the digital photos. Firstly the camera I was using doesn't have a flash, it's meant for digital video, not stills. And although it's hard to believe the images were after some correction had been applied, of course if someone would like to write me a nice article on how to gamma correct properly perhaps I won't make the same mistake again...(hint hint).

Aaron,
i'm trying to open the DOSbox archive, but it has an icon which has a green question mark on it and the filetype is &B23. How do i open it? All the other archives are openable except this one.
Matt

It's an X-File archive, which should work on an Iyonix (see my comments about X-Files in the last issues letters page) because we have 32 bitted X-Files for this very reason. I was a bit confused about this and then I got a follow up...

Aaron,
Ignore my email about the dos-box archive, it just suddenly opened and got all the files out, so all ok now.
Matt

Which is even weirder and has me slightly concerned, did anyone else have the same problem, if so did it just fix it itself? If so any ideas how, or indeed why?

And now it's time for our regular start o fa volume I-not-going-to-re-subscribe letter.

Aaron,

Just to let you know I am thinking about not re-subscribing to RISCWorld as I am not getting much out of it anymore:-( I am not going to buy a replacement for my Risc PC as the cost is to high and no support in Australia as well the specification is just not good enough. I may get an upgrade to run the Risc PC on a Windows computer some time in the future, unfortunately my copy of VA5000 will not run on my Toshiba laptop and I cannot justify purchasing a new PC either:-( Peter Prewett, Coromandel Valley, South Australia

This letter has me a bit stumped, as what you seem to be saying is that you simply aren't going to buy a new computer of any sort, which is odd. If the RiscPC is working fine then it doesn't need to be replaced, so why not carry on using it. It's already paid for, it works, OK it may not be state of the art but does that matter? As for the laptop if it won't run VA5000 then it must be quite old, and due for replacement itself, or there is some software problem that is in the way. Why not e-mail me and let's see if we can get VA5000 going. If you don't want to subscribe to RISCWorld that's OK, but it sounds to me as though you are just giving up on everything, which doesn't ever help anyone, especially yourself.

If you have any comments on this issue, or the RISC OS world in general, then write in, we do want to hear from you. /P>

Aaron Timbrell