Out to Lunch

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Please note that this software was written to work with Risc OS 3.7. It may work with later (and earlier) 26-bit versions of OS but is unlikely to work with the 32-bit versions on the Iyonix.

There is nothing I can do about this. My Risc PC died early in 2005 and nothing I have tried will bring it back to life. All the source code is on its hard drive. I probably do have copies on floppies but without access to the machine I cannot read them.


Version 0.34
22nd December 1992

I originally wrote this desktop screen saver because I got cheesed off with such things taking up a minimum of 32k of memory when I was using an A440/1 machine. Out to Lunch only uses what it needs, normally around 5k because it’s module based (though there is one display which uses considerably more than this).

The program has configurable displays, mostly pretty simple things which just stick a pretty pattern on the screen, along with configurable sleep and no sleep corners and the option to monitor the internal serial port (so that it doesn’t start up while transferring large files). Other desktop programs continue to run while Out to Lunch’s display is running.

You can write your own display provided you can program in assembler, though you don’t need any knowledge of programming the desktop. If you want to try this please mail me and ask for the documentation. Info on writing displays also appeared (around April 1997) as part of Matthew Bloch’s assembler series in Archimedes World.

I’ve recently (Feb 1997) written a new small display called Tracks which is included in this release. Jesus! Is that recently? How time flies.

Please note

The software on this site only runs under Risc OS. It will not run under Windows, DOS or any other PC thingy.

Of course it won’t run under Mac OS, Unix or any other operating system either but then if you use one of these you’ve probably sussed that out already. It seems to be only PC users who have trouble in this respect :-)