Posted on in Computers

!Spconv for RISC OS

spconv Port of a ZX Spectrum snapshot converter for RISC OS.

Yes… RISC OS.

RISC ‘what’ you say? 😉

Well, once upon a time in a geeky bedroom I dabbled with programming on an Acorn A5000 and released my one and only bit of public software on the machine. Totally unoriginal, it was a port of the then sort of popular (to some sad people) SPCONV application by Henk De Groot which carried out the amazingly interesting task of converting ZX Spectrum snapshot files (as used by ZX Spectrum emulators) to other formats. Thus it enabled people to play just about any ZX Spectrum snapshot on their favourite emulator. I said it was interesting 😉

My involvement in this was to take the already available command line application and wrap it up in a Wimp application for RISC OS. Did I have a clue what I was doing? Probably not. Copy and Paste gets you a long way though :D.

Anyway, this was done whilst at Portsmouth Uni back in 1994 when Acorn still existed as a computer manufacturer and their Risc based machines powered by ARM processors (their creation, though somewhat more successful than Acorn ever were ;)) were still a match for Intel based PCs. I left Uni, realised the world was marching on and Acorn wasn’t and defected to Windows, gaining profitable employment at the same time ;). I thus abandoned my little App and the Acorn world seemingly forever!

With Acorn gone I presumed this app was gone too, but on digging around I discovered it still exists out there in public domain circles, and RISC OS still lives on in a way. Having discovered the delights of VirtualRPC, I can now take a look back and my old Acorn days and even fire up the little App again (the A5000 has long since gone).

So now I provide a home for it as it didn’t really have one in the early days of the web. I present here the app in all it’s glory along with source for any who are interested (I seriously doubt anyone would be ;)).

!Spconv v1.10 (based on spconv 1.08)
spconv.arc – !Spconv application (I’m never too convinced about what’s needed to unzip these. !ArcFS or maybe !SparkPlug. There’s a zip version here too)
spcnvsrc.arc Source

Next up… those programs I wrote for the ZX81 when I was just a little kid and got published Sinclair Programs (they truly are awful though :D). Still have the magazine somewhere. The last issue ever published (an omen… good or bad? ;)). Earnt me something like £10 at the time!