VideoList 2
A little bit of history

The VERY FIRST incarnation of VideoList

The very first version of VideoList was planned in late 1997, and coding began around my birthday (16^th December). The program was more a 'trial of ideas' to play with the look and feel of things. I didn't want to use software that I wouldn't like using.

I carried on with this version for a while, concentrating on the file format and the user interface, but it was decided fairly quickly that a program written in BASIC was going to suffer from speed issues, among other things. Now pretty much every problem can be resolved; however I found it preferable to abandon this version and begin again, this time in C.

The version of VideoList presented for your delectation, should you be so disposed, was finally abandoned on the 16^th of August 1998. Apart from a few minor tweaks (removal of some debugging code, inserting notices to say this is a historic release and not the real thing, etc), this software is exactly as it was left some seven years ago (eeek! don't I feel old now?).

Click to download the original BASIC version (v0.01ß; 1998/08/16) [Zip archive,35K]

The software runs under RISC OS (version 3 or later).
It will not work under Windows!

For those who do not have access to RISC OS, here are some screenshots - but please note that the display is a little bit on the ugly side as I was using archie v0.9 with a vanilla version of RISC OS 3. Later patches made the desktop look far better than Windows has ever managed (and that includes XP), but I do not have these patches installed in the emulation.

Every RISC OS program should have a little program information display giving the title, purpose, author, and version. Here is the information on the original version of VideoList...

And, now, a big picture to show you what it looks like in practice. As the display says, some of it may look rather familiar!

To use this software under RISC OS on a true RISC OS machine or RedSquirrel/VirtualAcorn, you will need to extract all of the files and then simply double-click on !VideoList.

To use this software under archie's PCFS, from Windows you should extract the files from the archive into a convenient place within the PCFS structure (if you've never done this before, open the Archie directory, then Pcfs, create a directory called vlist and dump everything in there; from the RISC OS side it will be a directory called vlist within PCFS's $ (and if this is gibberish, perhaps it is best to give up while you're ahead?)).
The application directory will appear as something like !Video~1. Rename it to !VideoList.
Go into the directory (hold shift while double-clicking, else RISC OS will try to run the application). All of the files will be messed up, ~1 suffixes and no filetype information.
Fix this, thus:

	Correct filename	File type
	!Boot	Obey
	!ReadMe	&FFF
	!Run	Obey
	!RunImage	Absolute
	!Sprites	Sprite
	Configure	&FFD
	Messages	&FFF
	MyMovies	&17F
	Sprites22	Sprite
	Templates	&FEC

The RISC OS demo version

While I do not have any plans to continue development of the RISC OS version of VideoList, I thought it would complete things if I made the demonstration version available. It should be fully functional (insofar as is provided by the demo facilities), but please note that it is a pre-release demonstration so it has not had the final polishes and offsite testing I would have preferred for any proper release.

If you like VideoList for RISC OS and are interested in obtaining a copy, please send me an email...

Click to download the VideoList (for RISC OS) demo (v0.92d; 2004/09/09) [Zip archive,127K]

This version of VideoList requires the new SharedCLibrary (at least v5.43 dated 2002/09/05) as it has been compiled to be 26/32 bit neutral. This means it will work on any RISC OS machine from a 2Mb A310 to an Iyonix provided that you are using RISC OS 3.10 or later and the updated SharedCLibrary.

Finally...

I hope you enjoyed a quick peek at the history of VideoList. It is, perhaps, deeply ironic that the Windows version - VideoList 2 - is written in VisualBasic. We started off in a version of BASIC and we are now back to a different version of BASIC. I guess you can say we've almost come full circle, no? :-)

Return to main index