Foundation RISCWorld Archive

Welcome to the 2026 release of the Foundation RISCWorld Archive.

This website contains a complete archive of volumes one to nine of RISCWorld magazine. That's over 1100 articles of interest to RISC OS users and all of them are free.

Editor's notes for 2026 release
It's almost 25 years since I edited my first issue of RISCWorld. The original editor, David Matthewman, had to step down after issue 2 and I volunteered to put the next couple of issues together while David Holden found a new editor. Dave never found another editor so I carried on assembling the magazine for nearly a decade. Dave Holden and I continued to work together until he died suddenly in 2014 leaving behind a massive resource of RISC OS products, both hardware and software.

Since 2014, with the agreement of Dave Holden's family, I've been working on preserving all the APDL software, including RISCWorld. There have been several false starts, multiple rejected layouts for a 'new' APDL and the problem of the domain being "appropriated" by the hosting company. Finally it looks like the project is coming together but everything needed to be checked and updated before release, this included RISCWorld.

Some of the articles included here are over 25 years old, even the newest articles are 16 years old which means that contact details shouldn't be relied upon for accuracy. I've tried to remove as many bad links as possible and have also updated links for organisations that are still around. For the sake of readability I've left the text of the links in the articles and removed the hyperlink part. So if you see a website address in an article and it's not clickable that's because the link is long dead. You could try copying and pasting the link into the Wayback Machine to see if a copy of the linked content has been preserved, you might get lucky.

Here is the list of changes made to RISCWorld 2026:

• Removed dead links for organisations and products that are no longer available (plain text left in place).
• Updated links, addresses and phone numbers for organisations that are still in existance.
• Fixed broken searches from article index pages.
• Corrected any spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.
• Corrected faulty graphics on the volumes.articles page.
• Updated volume 1 issue indexes to the same template as the other volumes.
• Fixed broken internal links on the issue picker.
• Fixed multiple HTML and page errors. (e.g. missing </html>, !DOCTYPE undefined etc)

In total I've made over 2000 edits to RISCWorld. These changes are the last update the RISCWorld content will receive (unless anyone reports any faults I've missed), everyone involved hopes you enjoy it and find it useful.

Aaron - RISCWorld Editor (07/04/2026)

What was RISCWorld?

RISCWorld was a bi-monthly CD based magazine for all users of RISC OS either on Acorn or other RISC OS computers. It was published between 2000 and 2009 by APDL a company with over 20 years experience in the RISC OS market. RISCWorld, and latterly Foundation RISCWorld, was produced by a team of writers, lead by Aaron Timbrell, who in total had over 100 man years experience of Acorn computers and RISC OS.

You can get more information about the history of the magazine by clicking on the About link on the left of this page.

Using this website

Everyone is welcome to browse through this site and to read and enjoy the articles. The Issues Index button on the left will take you to an index page that lists each issue of each volume. Simply click on an issue number to open it. Each volume of RISCWorld will open in a separate window. This allows you to keep different articles from different volumes on screen at the same time. The Article Index button will open a list of each article from each issue in volumes 1 to 8. The Free Apps button will take you to a page that has download links for a number of applications which can be freely downloaded.

Please note that all the articles reproduced on this site are copyright and may not be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the copyright holder. You may link to an individual article from your own site on the condition that any such link opens in a new window.

About RISC OS

RISC OS is the British operating system originally developed by Acorn Computers Ltd for their range of 32bit desktop computers. In 1999 development of RISC OS was taken over by RISCOS.com. Over the past decade there have been a number of "Acorn compatible" machines launched from a range of different suppliers. These include the Iyonix from Castle Technology and the A9 from Advantage Six. In addition it's now possible to run RISC OS on both Windows and Mac OS X using the VirtualAcorn range of products.

What's on this site

On this website you can find a complete index of the contents of all nine volumes of RISCWorld.

To navigate round the site please use the links located on the left hand side of each page.