Wakefield's May speaker was Charles Ferguson, aka Gerph, talking about his past and present work creating games for RISC OS.

The games were originally ported in the late 1990s and have recently been updated (you can get them on !Store and very good they are too!).

In 1997 Gerph was at University (he looks far too young), where he ported Doom to RISC OS on his A5000. Having access to a partial port of Doom, he created his own version which supported sound on his system as well as the Risc PC. Then he added networking support originally using Econet. He continued to tinker on his new Risc PC and create a window version. Game was released by R-Comp and continued to improve. After finishing Uni, he added some more features which became Doom+.

Heretic was licensed by R-Comp from Raven software and ported by Gerph while finishing Doom+ and Hexen. Some features ported into other games. Heretic was working (in a fashion) after only 6 hours! But games very slow...

2024 games have been updated and even have testing.... 5 variations of Hexen for different builds. Game was converted to 32bit (most of code is C with some Assembler which needed a little more work). Took the opportunity to clean up code and use macros. Tested under RISC OS pyromaniac. Using sprite rendering is slower but made it much easier to run in different resolutions. Latest release can support 8192 x 8192 pixels.

Fixed lighting issues in original version and added mp3 music.

There was a nice demo of Hexen on RPCEmu with Gerph pointing out lots of nice little game features.

Heretic 32bit port was much faster to implement (lots of lessons learnt from first update). 

Heretic was also demoed.

Slides and resources from the talk can be found here.

It was a really interesting talk and recommender to catch the recording if you missed it. And you can buy the games to play as well...

As usual, the talk was on Zoom with an audience from all over 'greater' Wakefield. Talk was recorded on Zoom if you missed it.

Details on all meetings (and email address to ask for a Zoom link) can be found on the WROCC website