Thanks for the reply
The original request was for a block of randomly chosen items to display, I now have this working beautifully in Simple Portal block, it only requires one small edit in addition to a minor change to to the block code, as follows:
In Sources/Downloads2.php add the section circled in green to the snippet of code shown located in the Downloads_MainPageBlock() function:
After that make this minor change to the portal block code, shown in its entirety here:
global $boardurl, $modSettings;
$modSettings['down_url'] = $boardurl . '/downloads/';
global $sourcedir;
require_once($sourcedir . '/Downloads2.php');
Downloads_MainPageBlock(null, 'random');
Enjoy... I also have some custom modifications to the SMF Statistics Page that relates to various modules and SMF features, visit my site and have a look at the ones for this module, although my version of Downloads Pro is out of date, everything I've customized works great!!