This is, in a way, a mature OS with an ecosystem and an aftermarket. (Which, we feel we must explicitly spell out, means that quite a few of those third-party applications and drivers will cost you money.) There are emulators that will let you run 20th century Acorn apps that you can find online, but this isn’t an emulated vintage environment like Amiga Forever. It’s not meant for running games from thirty years ago. This is a native bare-metal OS, built on 1980s roots but updated for 21st century hardware. It’s also not an experimental project with little practical use, like Redox OS or Serenity OS, interesting though those are. Liam Proven at The Register I grew up with RISC OS and still run a RISC OS machine to this day. As Liam Proven explains affectionately in this article, while as an operating system it’s missing many features we now take for granted (memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking, compositing), some of the user interface ideas it implements still manage to feel advanced compared to modern-day desktops (no need for menu bars, no clunky file dialogues, elegant mouse button assignments). The fact it’s found a home on the Raspberry Pi and continues to support an active community is testament to its enduring appeal and the amazing work of the RISC OS Open project. Some additional notes from Thom: this new release supports 7 ARM platforms, most notably the Raspberry Pi Zero, 1, 2, 3 and 4 (but not the 5), and it even supports WiFi on the 3 and 4, which is an absolutely incredible achievement. The number of fixed bugs and addressed issues is massive, and there’s even more to come later during the year, as The Register’s article notes. I was waiting on this release to spur me on to buy a new Raspberry Pi (my only other Pi is our Pi-Hole), so I’ll definitely be on the lookout for a good deal. This release deserves my full attention for OSAlert.
This is a Rom Image and hard disc image of RISC OS, built from the open ROOL sources, but compiled up in 26bit compatible mode. It mostly uses code from approx 2000-2002, compiled up with a set of contempory tools. It should be compatible with Acorn RiscPCs, A7000s, A7000+, and the emulator RPCEmu. Peter Howkins I’m not particularly well-versed in the world of RISC OS, but I think this build is targeting older machines that use 26bit ARM processors.
This talk will cover everything about the Acorn Archimedes, a British computer first released in 1987 and (slightly) famous for being the genesis of the original ARM processor. The audience will get an appreciation for the Arc’s elegant design, the mid-1980s birth of RISC processors, and the humble origins of the now-omnipresent ARM architecture. The weather’s frightful, the fire’s delightful, there’s no place to go, so here’s an hour long technical talk about the Acorn Archimedes by Matt Evans.
RISC OS Open Ltd (ROOL) are hugely proud to announce that we will be working with RISC OS Developments (ROD), following their recent acquisition of the RISC OS intellectual property through the purchase of Castle Technology Ltd (Castle), in the next phase of the mission to reinvigorate the RISC OS market.
ROD will be working alongside community maintainers ROOL to republish the source code to this popular niche operating system under the Apache 2.0 License, in a move aimed at removing existing barriers to entry for developers from the open source community and enabling free-of-charge use in commercial products for the first time in RISC OS's history.
Great news for the RISC OS community, and I hope this ensures RISC OS will remain available to play and hack with for years and years to come.
After the release of the Iyonix PC in 2002, RISC OS started moving from 26-bit architecture towards 32-bit. Nowadays all modern RISC OS machines are 32-bit, but an awful lot of older applications are still not compatible with modern 32-bit RISC OS.
Aemulor, originally a commercial application but now free to download, is a software emulator that allows RISC OS applications which were written for a 26-bit ARM systems to be used on more recent CPUs that provide only 32-bit addressing modes. RISC OS itself is unaware that there is anything unusual about the 26-bit applications that are running under Aemulor, to RISC OS they appear as normal applications - they appear on the icon bar and can communicate fully with other 26 or 32-bit applications.
I've bought a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ just for RISC OS, so hopefully, I can start posting more about this old but venerable operating system in the future. Any tips or interesting things for me to investigate are welcome.
RISC OS 5.24 has been released.
The headline features see previously neglected areas of RISC OS dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, with JPEG support, monitor EDID support, handling of larger hard drives, and the network stack being upgraded. The bounty system is delivering some really worthwhile enhancements into the software. USB and network stack improvements are a massive undertaking, and ROOL broke each into several stages to make them more manageable.
There are also some genuine improvements to user features such as clipboard improvements and new features in Paint. Lots of applications have received little tweaks such as unicode and fancy fonts in Chars, improved dialogs in Printers, tweaks to HForm, DosFS, Maestro, more secure LanmanFS which can connect to Windows 8 and 10, etc.
RISC OS 5.24 is freely available for Raspberry Pi machines.
A detailed description of the Wakefield 2018 RISC OS show.
The lead developer of a niche ARM-powered OS has
written a string of in-depth articles on the design, implementation and testing of a commercial operating system. Justin Fletcher was the architect of versions of 4 and 6 of RISC OS, the ARM processor's original operating system. Although his pieces will be best appreciated by RISC OS and Acorn users old and new, the series is a fantastic insight into operating system design: check out his
build system for compiling code into ROM images, the
abstraction of video graphics from a legacy 1980s-era kernel,
converting images on the fly,
testing and debugging, executing
applications and plenty more. Justin has
written tens of thousands of words and will be publishing new pieces daily online and in Android and iOS-friendly formats.
"RISC OS Open are very pleased to
announce the official release of RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi, 'RISC OS Pi'. This is a watershed moment for RISC OS and represents the culmination of many months of hard work from a whole community of developers, testers and other contributors. It also means the Raspberry Pi can now boast support for the quick, compact, original ARM-based operating system." This is absolutely fantastic news. I'm going to try this on my Pi later this week.
Good news for Raspberry Pi owners (
ha!): the RISC OS port is progressing along nicely. So much so, in fact, that a Raspberry Pi-based RISC OS machine is in the works. Stable beta release of RISC OS for the Pi planned for September!
Sometimes, on a rather boring and run-of-the-mill Monday, I get news in the submission queue which just puts a gigantic smile on my face. We've
talked about the
Raspberry Pi before on OSAlert, and other than reporting that everything's on track for a Christmas launch, it has also been announced that
the Raspberry Pi will be able to run... RISC OS. A British educational ARM board running RISC OS? We have come full circle. And I couldn't be happier.
Update: Theo Markettos emailed me with two corrections - Markettos isn't actually a representative of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and the quoted bits are transcribed, they're not Markettos' literal words. Thanks for clearing that up!
Since the
opening up of the RISC OS source code, developers have been experimenting with the OS on modern
ARM hardware. Recently, work has progressed on porting some vintage Acorn games to other platforms, including iOS and Windows.
Paradise Games has released an iOS port of Inferno, and
TBA Software has rendered BHP in OpenGL on Windows. TBA has also ported its TBAFS filing system to
ARMv7 hardware and is investigating its TAG games engine and the modernisation of BBC BASIC.
The Icon Bar has further details.
This year's Wakefield RISC OS computer show has given enthusiasts of the niche platform much to talk about. The show featured the release of new hardware in the form of the ARMini, a 'Beagleboard inside' computing system optimised to run RISC OS. A
full account of the show has been published on
RISCOScode, one of the RISC OS rolling news websites.
Note from Thom: Sorry for the headline.
The ARM based RISC OS has been floundering in the wilderness somewhat these past years, but it looks like it may - finally - be on the path to a real Lazarus moment with the new Beagleboard and, unusually, El Reg has taken an interest.
Submitted by Andrew Duffell
2009-11-08
RISC OS
After hearing the news that videos from the recent RISC OS London Show are now available online, leading RISC OS news website - The Icon Bar decided to
take a look at what RISCOS Ltd had to say in their presentation. They found some quite shocking results which point to RISCOS Ltd having lost their way.
Submitted by Andrew Duffell
2009-10-29
RISC OS
With all the good news around Haiku and Amiga/MorphOS, you'd almost forget that other "old" alternative operating system, with most of its following residing in the United Kingdom: RISC OS. This operating system is
fighting a predictable problem: a lack of hardware.
Drobe.co.uk, the premier RISC OS news website, today announced that it has entered archive mode and will no longer function as a news reporting source. The site was founded by Peter Price in 1999 and editorship was taken over by journalist Chris Williams in 2001.
Chris first broke the sad news on Monday morning via
usenet:
"Drobe's RISC OS news service, which launched in October 1999, will sadly cease from Monday. Running the site has been so much fun over the years and the experience has been very rewarding - from the investigative pieces and tabloid tomfoolery to the libel writ threats and meeting up with users after shows. However, all good things must come to an end - if you'll forgive the cliche - and it's time to formally move on."
Submitted by James
2009-09-01
RISC OS
"US-based company Genesi, which builds ARM Cortex-powered appliances that could be compatible with the RISC OS Open Beagleboard work, is said to be in talks with RISC OS companies over a
possible port of the OS to its products. It's hoped ROS 5 could be made to run on the lightweight EFIKA MX Open Client, which sports a 800MHz Cortex-A8 processor, 3D graphics hardware, 512M RAM, wifi networking and more. Genesi analyst Matt Sealey said: 'RISC OS is really popular in the UK and the last dedicated RISC OS box - the Iyonix - has been discontinued for six months. We are currently questioning the relevant companies in the UK, including Castle, about collaboration and marketing efforts, and the support they'd need to make it a reality.'"
We
already reported on the port of RISC OS 5 to the Beagleboard, but at that time, it couldn't yet boot the graphical shell. This has now been resolved,
and there's a screenshot to prove it. The code should already be in the ROOL CVS repository, so adventurous Beagleboard owners can start playing with it.
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