Steven’s programs

Unix programs

Utilities

Topish

An alternative to the widely available top program written in standard Bourne Shell script and that does not require special permissions to run or for installation. Solaris only.

Programs for Acorn RISCOS machines

These programs will not run on Windows so don’t even bother to download them if all you have is a PC or Mac.

Applications

These are self contained, documented applications. Licensing restrictions for each of these programs are described in the !Help files in the archives. Note that the contact details may be out of date as to change them I have to rebuild the archive - something I do rarely. Please use the contact details on my personal page in preference.

Bloxed

Acclaimed as one of the best two Tetris games for the Archimedes. It features single and multi-player games, power blocks and many other features. It will run on all machines from RiscOS 2 to RiscPCs. It’s described more fully on its own page.

3dMaze

A very simple 3d maze game. You get placed randomly in maze and have to find your way out. It should run on all machines from RiscOS 2 to RiscPCs. You can download it here (Spark archive, 4k), or you can read the !Help file.

Dali Clock

A port of the Unix program xdaliclock. This program displays an animated digitial clock in the icon bar where the figures melt from one value to the next. Requires RiscOS 3. You can download it here (Spark archive, 21k), or you can read the !Help file.

Defender

This is my variant of the classic arcade game Defender. It’s not complete nor is it ever likely to be. So instead of it gathering dust on my hard drive, I’ve tidied it up for release. It’s not an acurate port of the Defender arcade game, it just has vaguely reminiscent behaviour. It’s written in 100% pure hand-crafted ARM code so is smooth and fast. It does, however, provide its own overscan screen mode (with a non-standard resolution) and although it works fine on my monitor you may have difficulty. Complaints are likely to be ignored as I am not actively maintaining this program. If anyone would like to volunteer to take it over, then contact me in the usual ways. This latest version of the code has only been tested on RiscOS 3.5 on a RiscPC, but I believe it should work on RiscOS 3 (as it was originally developed there). You can download the program here (Spark archive, 20k) or you can read the !Help file.

Utilities

These are small programs provided with minimum documentation. They are all command line programs and have a poor user interface. All are copyright 1996 Steven Singer, freely distributable provided they are not changed, and are provided “AS IS” with no guarantee of suitability for any purpose. No warranty is given.

ModFind

Modfind scans all directories from the current directory downwards printing a list of all modules it finds. It records the modules’ names, locations and versions. Once the scan has finished it checks through its list. For each module name it sees if there is more than one version present, if there is it reports all of the older versions and gives the location of one of the latest versions. This allows you to get rid of any out of date modules on your disk. Warning: Make sure you know what you’re doing before updating modules. Just because two modules have the same name it, unfortunately, doesn’t mean they do the same job. In this case, replacing one with the other is likely to cause programs to crash and may result in damage. You have been warned and I accept no responsibility for any damage caused. It can be downloaded here (BASIC file, 3k)

BigFind

This program got written after I kept seeing my hard disk space disappear. Usually the cause was that I’d downloaded some large file then forgotten to delete it (or even forgotten that I’d downloaded it). This program scans directories from the current directory downwards for all files over a specified size that have been created with in a specified number of days. It prints the names of the files and their sizes. I find a size of 100000 and a time 3 days make good parameters. It can be downloaded here (BASIC file, 1k)

BBoxCalc

This program takes a Postscript file and a drawfile written out by !Draw and alters the Postscript file so that the bounding box matches the drawfile. There’s a bug in some versions of RiscOS (not sure if it’s an OS bug or a !Draw bug) that the bounding box written into the Postscript file is the full page not the size of the diagram. The program also strips out the big white box that gets placed under the diagram (the size of the whole page), it removes saves and restores from the file and removes the ^D from the end of the file. Generally, this makes the files EPS compliant enough to work with TeX’s \psfig command. This program expects the files it needs to be in the current directory, it expects the drawfile to be called “DrawFile”, the !Draw postscript output to be called “Postscript” and it outputs a file called “eps”. The Postscript file must have been written out of !Draw whilst the paper limits are set to portrait and are large enough to enclose the entire drawing. It can be downloaded here (BASIC file, 2k)

Misc

Other programs.

Liss

A quite cute effect based on Lissajou figures. A good example of how short, simple code can produce pretty effects. I wouldn’t call this a demo as it doesn’t really stretch the machine’s performance. The code contains the license restrictions and several tweakable options near the start. It can be downloaded here (BASIC file, 2k)

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