Riscos ?


Lozrus said:
RiscOS is an ARM specific OS. In fact the original ARM processors were developed by Acorn specifically to run RiscOS.
That's a joke isn't it? :) ARM processors predate RISC OS by a few years. In fact ARM processors were probably designed to efficiently run Acorn BASIC ;)
 
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Laurent said:
That's a joke isn't it? :) ARM processors predate RISC OS by a few years. In fact ARM processors were probably designed to efficiently run Acorn BASIC ;)
Well it was a big over simplification, but honestly I did think that they cooked up RiscOS at the same time as the first ARM processors. Either way, my point is that it's an ARM specific OS. :P
 
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Certainly is. While the ARM might not have been made to run RISC OS, it was made to power the Acorn Archimedes, and RISC OS was written because they needed something to drive that machine, and noone had written an OS for ARM by then*. At least that's true if you consider Arthur (the original Archimedes OS) to be version 1 of RISC OS (the first version of RISC OS was v2.00).

* If you ignore the TubeOS(?) which allowed you to use the ARM1 development co-pro on a BBC Micro (which is what they used to design the ARM2 which RISC OS originally ran on).
 
Acorn Computers invented the ARM chip (Acorn Risc Machine) and made the Archimedes (I bought the A300 and then the A3000 models) as a follow-up to the BBC Micro/Master. The original operating system was called Arthur, which was crap and then it was developed into the much better RISCOS
There was a great game called Zarch so hopefully can get that running on Pandora.

There should be a port of RISCOS in tribute to the humble beginnings of the ARM chip that turns up in everything now
 
Oh boy, Zarch on Pandora would rock! As would ArcElite too. But the best way to acheive that would be to build RpcEmu for the Pandora and run RISC OS 4 on that - although I'm not sure Zarch was even updated to work with that ten-year-old OS. ArcElite is fine, since there's someone still maintaining that, but Zarch predated RISC OS 2 and was never made freely available unlike ArcElite. Mind you, it's possible that someone's put out a patch for the Zarch binary to make it work with RISC OS 4, provided it runs on RISC OS 3.5.

But even if you can get Zarch to run, controlling it with an emulated mouse might be a bit much. It'd be a much easier game to control if the nub controlled the ship's attitude directly - though to do that I suspect you'd need to port Zarch to Pandora, and good luck doing that with 20+ year-old hand-written machine code that bypasses the OS for pretty much everything. It might be easier to work from the PC version of the game (called Virus) or even the four year old Windows remake (called Z-Virus, according to wikipedia).
 
Laurent said:
Zarch was redone as Virus, which should run on any ST/Amiga emulator, no need for a PC emulator :)
Virus on the Amiga was great, and inspired later games like Zeewolf which was also excellent, they will probably all run well on Pandora UAE.

Since we have some Archimedes/RiscOS users here, dflemstr's original question (which never really got answered positively) is interesting again. What might make RiscOS interesting to the current crop of Pandora fans?
From what I understand RiscOS provides a nice and highly efficient desktop and was popular enough in its time to probably have a good variety of applications available. So maybe those who have ordered a Pandora with the intention of using it for productivity might find that RiscOS, booted from SD, provides a more efficient environment? Linux has this covered, but I'm betting a RiscOS system on a Cortex A8 with 256MB RAM would absolutely fly?

I remember my Uncle using an A3000 for music score notation, it also had a very decent version of Lemmings :D
 
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The 26bit to 32bit transition was just one of the many compatibility breaks RISC OS software has had to deal with over the years. Other issues have been various memory map changes due to hardware changes, the introduction of a cache with the ARM3, the introduction of a harvard cache with the StrongARM, and the pipeline length change between the StrongARM and other ARM chips. Various bits of software have made assumptions about all of these things over the years.

The 32-bit PC change is a pretty easy problem to fix though - software exists to trap instructions that attempt to modify the flag bits in PC and simulate them. Unfortunately, that's still a valuable commodity to RISC OS users, so it's paid for software.

But if all you want to do is play old Archimedes games, you're better off emulating an older ARM chip and running an old version of the OS.
 
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