The March 2023 was a Zoom only meeting featuring Nemo (who has been using RISC OS for 35 years so far) to talk about his projects. It was a well-attended meeting with 40 people joining.
Nemo still uses RISC OS as he finds it really adaptable. He has been doing lots of things with Spites and written several utilities to improve Sprites and ImageFilerRender (which started life on RISC OS 4 / Select). He has reimplemented this from scratch so it can run on RISC OS generally. Along with ImageFileConvert this allows RISC OS programs which use it to support a wise range of image formats.
The new implementation does not need all modules loaded. It loads formats on demand as needed. When it is released, it will be a really exciting addition to RISC OS!
1994, Acorn introduced the Compressed Sprite format. In the new implementation, anything can be stored inside a compressed sprite. This also allows him to have metadata in a Sprite.
One of the reasons for Nemo's changes is so that he can correctly handle Gamma settings (which was not something anyone at Acorn ever understood). Having metadata in the sprite provides an elegant solution to this problem.
Any kind of data can now be treated as data and treated like an image - interesting demo with a saved Spectrum game and also embedding text files.
Nemo has found a new file format called Qoi recently which he is big fan of. So adding some support to RISC OS. It is similar size to png but MUCH faster to open and save. It also has colour management built in.
The ability to have all these separate modules working together is why he still uses RISC OS.
As always plenty of time for questions at the end.
It is very hard to do justice to the all the things shown in a write-up so you should definitely visit Nemo's site and watch the video recording!
The April meeting will with a pub only meeting in April. As usual, details on the Rougol website.