If you're interested in puzzles (or if you stopped at my stand in Bristol on Saturday), then you might be aware of Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection: if you're not, then see

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

for details. It's a set of 40 single-player games, mainly focused around
logic with the occasional piece of maths thrown in.

I first encountered the collection through its Android port, and since then have also played it on Linux. As it is described as "portable" (and since
there are also ports for Windows, iOS, MacOS and other platforms as well) I felt that what RISC OS really needed was one of its own - which it now
(mostly) has.

Copies of the test version which I had on display at the South West Show are now available to download from my website, at

https://www.stevefryatt.org.uk/risc-os/games

It's currently a work in progress, although 39 of the 40 games appear to be playable (the 40th throws floating point exceptions on starting up, which I need to investigate). There is a list of known bugs and omissions from the
RISC OS port in the supplied documentation - the biggest being the lack of
any user guide or instructions for the games.

For now, that last omission can be overcome by reading the RISC OS-specific information that comes with the port, and finding the rest of the
documentation on Simon's website, at

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/doc/

Key presses and mouse actions are identical between the desktop ports
(mobile ones can be different), and the RISC OS port's interface should hold few surprises for our platform's regular users.

If anyone does have a play with the games, I'm interested in feedback and
bug reports -- there's a list of known issues in the RISC OS documentation. Please assume that all bugs are in the RISC OS-specific code, and report
them to me.

I must finish by saying "Thank You" to Simon and the other contributors to
the collection, both for making such an interesting set of games available completely free of charge and for making them so easily portable that it's
been possible to get a RISC OS version running in only around six weekends' worth of work and without making any changes to the upstream code.

There's still a lot of work to do, but it would be nice to think that the
RISC OS version of Puzzles could reach another milestone in time for the
next date in the platform's calendar.

--
Steve Fryatt - Leeds, England

http://www.stevefryatt.org.uk/


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