Meetings
Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club meets on the first Wednesday of most months: at least in February, April, June, August, October and December, and often in several of the intervening months as well. Our meetings usually consist of a talk or demonstration, with plenty of time for informal discussions before and after.
Recent meetings have included presentations from major RISC OS hardware, software and operating system developers, along with demonstrations of specific pieces of software by experienced users. In addition, we have covered a wide range of other subjects including digital photography, hardware upgrades, networking and problem solving. More information about the topics covered in recent meetings can be found further down the page, and details of future meetings can be found below.
Meetings take place online using the Zoom platform. They start at 7.45pm, and the scheduled part of the evening is generally complete by about 10pm.
Visitors are always welcome to attend our meetings (with the exception of the AGM and EGMs) – contact us for details, or see the Join Us page for information about membership.
Forthcoming meetings
The following meetings are planned for the near future (note that presentations may be re-scheduled due to events outside of our control).
Martin Eastwood will be talking about the following:
A15 Emulator for RISC OS
The A15 Emulator is aimed at running RISC OS on (or emulating) systems based around the Cortex-A15 processor.
The A15 generation of ARM cores offered a substantial step up in performance over earlier designs that RISC OS originally targeted. This project explores bringing the operating system and its software to that class of hardware, whether through native support or emulation, while trying to preserve the classic RISC OS experience as far as possible.
It’s part of the wider effort to give RISC OS a path onto more capable modern ARM platforms.
Sprite and Draw Viewers for Mac and Windows
Alongside the emulator work are two practical utility applications: a Sprite viewer and a Draw viewer, available for both macOS and Windows.
RISC OS has its own long-standing native formats — Sprites for bitmaps and Draw files for vector graphics. These are still commonly used in the RISC OS community, but they aren’t natively supported on other platforms.
The viewers were created to bridge that gap. They let you open, inspect and work with these files on modern Mac and Windows machines without needing a full RISC OS environment running. They’re deliberately focussed tools rather than full editors – simple, useful utilities for anyone who still deals with RISC OS graphics assets.
Kinetic Box — Risc PC Native Emulator with 64MB Graphics Card
Kinetic Box (also known as Virtual Kinetic Box) is a ready-to-run emulator of an Acorn Risc PC fitted with a Kinetic processor card.
Built on the excellent RPCEmu foundation, it presents a fully configured Kinetic RiscPC running a modern RISC OS distribution. Key features include:
- Substantial memory configurations (up to 384 MB, combining motherboard and on-card Kinetic SDRAM)
- A dedicated 64 MB graphics card (KineticGraphics) that lifts the old VIDC20 limitations
- High-resolution desktops — including ultrawide and 4K modes in millions of colours
- Hardware-accelerated 2D operations (scrolling, fills, window movement)
- Fast JPEG rendering
- Native networking and ShareFS/Access support
- Versions for Apple Silicon Macs (with Metal acceleration and a native AArch64 JIT) and Windows
The result is a fast, modern way to run a Kinetic-class RiscPC with capabilities that go well beyond what the original hardware could manage – especially in the graphics department.
Andrew Rawnsley will be covering 64 bit developments and various plans that are on-going and how things can be done.
Recent meetings
WROCC’s meetings cover a wide range of topics relating to RISC OS and computing more generally. Here are some of the events from recent months; for a longer list including videos and links to more detailed reports, see our past meetings page.
Steve Revill, of RISC OS Open Ltd, updates us on the Moonshot project and discusses his work on LanManFS as well as rewriting the BASIC programming language in C.
You can find links to the meeting on YouTube via its page.
This was a follow-up to our previous two sessions regarding broadband changes and the ongoing transition to digital phone lines, in which Chris Hughes took a closer look at these two distinct sets of changes.
You can find links to the meeting on YouTube via its page.
Martin Eastwood will be talking about Frosted & Obsidian, a look at bringing a modern visual style to the RISC OS desktop whilst keeping the speed, simplicity, and personality we all love - plus how he got into RISC OS and wanting to do this.
You can find links to the meeting on YouTube via its page.
In this talk, Chris Hall shared how RiscOSM had become his essential tool for documenting and illustrating railway history. Moving beyond the ‘trial and error’ of old mapping methods, Chris demonstrated how he uses the software to bridge the gap between historical research and digital cartography.
You can find links to the meeting on YouTube via its page.
At our November 2025 meeting, Martin Avison demonstrated the setup of Anti-Spam and Pluto software for email access, etc.
As a follow-up, Chris Hughes presented the alternative option of configuring Messenger Pro and NetFetch/Hermes to send/receive email, access newsgroups (Usenet), and utilize the available spam filtering facilities.
You can find links to the meeting on YouTube via its page.
