The Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club provides a friendly face for all things RISC OS in Yorkshire, the surrounding regions and beyond. Originally formed as the Wakefield BBC Micro User Group in 1983, it is one of the longest established RISC OS user groups and now has members all over the UK.
The group meets most months to look at subjects relating to RISC OS, publishes a monthly newsletter, The WROCC, and provides an online discussion group to keep its members informed. We used to organise the annual Wakefield RISC OS Computer Show.
For more information about the group, contact us or visit one of our meetings. You can find out more about RISC OS in our brief introduction to the operating system or discover new hints, tips and tricks in our RISC OS HowTo.
(Vol 43, No 3)
In the July 2026 issue, Chris Hall continues with his work involving the use of RiscOSM and Finding A Signal Box. A roundup of Software news and a list of Useful Websites from the talk at the June club meeting relating to the end of the PSTN phone service and ongoing broadband changes.
Older issues, and free samples for non-members, are available from the newsletter area
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.
Details of past and future meetings can be found in the meetings area
Information given on this website forms no part of any contract. Details of memberships, meetings and events are given in good faith and believed correct at time of publication. Circumstances beyond the control of WROCC may force the alteration of details at any time. No responsibility can be accepted for inaccuracies, errors or omissions.
