Musus Umbra's Musmus Configuration Utility

Page last updated 27th January 1999

This application is aimed primarily at users of RiscPCs or the new window manager (installed in the 'new' !Boot, for example on the Acorn User CD4). It requires the new !Boot sequence on pre-RiscPC machines.

Many have installed the new boot sequence and therefore the new window manager. Many of these intrepid souls are using pre-RiscPC machines.

Around the time that the new Wimp first became available there was some discussion on the argonet.acorn.voyager newsgroup concering the fact that older machines running it are now capable of displaying the desktop using outline fonts and textured windows (just as the RiscPC does). In particular, discussion has centered on how to configure such a machine to use fonts and textures.

As part of the above discussions, I offered to write a configuration utility that would allow users of pre-RiscPC machines to easily set these options rather than having to do icky stuff inside the !Boot application by hand.

Not being one to do things by halves, the 'simple' utility I had planned soon gained several more useful features and indeed is now useful to RiscPC users also. Perhaps this happened because I mainly use a RiscPC. Who can say for sure :-)

As is usual with my stuff, full source code is available.

Features

Musmus allows you to easily alter the following configuration options:

Desktop font and size, including turning outline fonts off
Textured windows, including a special texture just for Musmus users :-)
Icon drags (ie. use of DragASprite)
More dithering of desktop colours
Behaviour when a window's toggle size icon is clicked/shift-clicked
'2D/3D look' flag in the CMOS RAM
2D/3D window tools
Solid/Transparent drags with DragASprite

None of those options is available in the RISC OS 3.1 !Configure application, and only half of them are available in even the RiscPC's newer !Configure... In particular the ability to set the desktop font's size is missing from the RiscPC's !Configure.

Version 1.24 (26 Oct 1998) is now compatible with the AUCD4 version of the new !Boot sequence. The previous version would refuse to start since it expected the RiscPC window texture to be present.

Downloading

There are two archives available to download:

Musmus version 1.24 (26 Oct 1998) (36K zipfile)
This is just the !Musmus application and therefore all most people will want.
Source code for the above (25K zipfile)
To recompile you'll need Desklib and ASM (or the patience to convert some assembler source for use with your favourite assembler :-)

Any Comments, etc. to Musus Umbra

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