RISC OS 5.20

I was expecting to see a ‘stable’ RISC OS 5.20 ROM for the Iyonix and Beagleboard on the downloads page. Are we waiting for the OMAP4 and Pi versions to be stable before it’s all released together?

When a release like this occurs, is there a high level list of features/bug fixes that it includes over and above the previous one? I have been looking but can not find any list – I suppose one exists with the source control commit comments but I worry I wouldn’t see the wood for the trees trying to figure out the major differences that way.

When the Raspberry Pi download appears look for a file detailing the changes in the ROM from RC8 to RC11. You can get a good idea of the changes by looking at the changes in the OMAP3 ROM here . The changes in the HardDisc4 image from circa RISC OS 5.18 (Aug 2010) are described here and here – hope that helps. The news pages today contain a comprehensive explanation of all this.

Ah great – thanks very much that is exactly what I was after :)

(Posted in Forums > Community Support too*) Just seen Chris’s post under “RISC OS 5.20” ROM who asks the same question I have in Forums > Community Support.

*Never been sure of the difference between the two forums (Community Support and General)

Thanks.

The downloads are there now (and, now, grouped).

I had some slight difficulty getting the softload to work on my Iyonix (I couldn’t set the screen configuration). I renamed the existing !Boot to !BootOld and copied in the !Boot from the new HardDisc4 520 image. I then followed the instructions to bootmerge the softload tool and restarted.

I found that !Boot.Choices.Boot was not being populated because the !Boot.Choices.Boot.PreDesk.!!Softload tool was there. So I copied manually the contents of RO520Hook into Choices. I also copied everything in !BootOld.Choices (except Choices.Boot) into !Boot.Choices plus my monitor definition !BootOld.Resources.Configure.Monitors.CubeWide+ and then I was able to set the screen confiduration.

I think users may find the process a bit intimidating?

OS5.20 is now running on my Iyonix, I went directly for the flash option.

I preserved the 5.18 !Boot and installed the 5.20 !Boot from the HardDisc4 5.20 image. At this point a user blunder occurred when I copied all the Choices into the new !Boot, which of course contained obsolete 5.18 stuff in !Boot.Choices.Boot including the now non-existent VIDCBandwidthLimit command. That gave the game away as the screen mode configuration is lost on a reboot. I binned the old Choices.Boot and copied in the contents of RO520Hook.

It all went very well, my thanks to all concerned.

Is the IOMD version on mask ROM or FlashROM? Either way, not bad, £30 for a ROM set. I bought myself RISC OS 3.10 back in the day and I seem to recall it cost more. I would imagine RISC OS 3.70 → RISC OS 5.20 would be every bit as mind-blowing as RISC OS 2 → RISC OS 3.10.

Something I think needs to be addressed on the web page, though, is how well RISC OS 5.20 works with the Kinetic.

Are there any plans to tweak/rebuild !PC to work in a 32 bit world? [didn’t Aleph1 open source it?] I would imagine there are quite a few people with some x86 silicon kicking around inside their RiscPCs.
Are Simtec still in the RISC OS scene? I wonder if they would consider modifying (or releasing) their IDEFS sources so the IDE podule would continue working. I guess the same goes for other such devices.

Make no mistake, bringing RISC OS 5 to the RiscPC is huge. It’s a little bit nuts¹ given the age of the hardware, but now the machine – nearly twenty years old – can stand proudly beside its later bretheren, and say “I’m the last one Acorn made, nerrr!”.

RISC OS 5 on a ROM.

Wow.

¹ Only, we’re British. We don’t call it “nuts”, we call it eccentric, and it’s a way of life. ;-)

didn’t Aleph1 open source it?

IIRC yes – if so the collection of discs and stuff upstairs needs a good firtle through because I’m pretty sure there should be a downloaded copy in that mass.

Something of a squirrel. Eccentric not nuts :-)
The thought occurs: Truly barking would be to try and hack in a faster second processor card. Fast Arm emulating a post pentium class device?

edit:
http://www.drobe.co.uk/article.php?id=1415&hlt=risc+os+open
Published: 11th Aug 2005, 12:23:08

So, where in the upstairs bits is that code archive?

Rummage ye not, because it’s here:
http://www.riscos.info/index.php/PC

It’s not quite a trivial rebuild because I think it assumes quite a bit about the RISC OS 3/4 memory map (since it has to talk real physical addresses to the PC copro), but hopefully it shouldn’t be too painful. Would be interested to know if anyone succeeds in making it build (may have suffered assembler-rot).

The RISC OS 5 ROMs for the RPC are real EPROMs. None of this fancy reprogrammable stuff, needs a proper UV light to erase. (More boringly, saves having to make a carrier sled and then populate it with ROMs with the wrong timing, ahem).

Fast Arm emulating a post pentium class device?

I did wonder if the sources to the old Acorn PC emulator are around anywhere, and exactly how fast it would run on a GHz processor?
I think hacking a faster hardware processor might be an incredibly skilled job… unless the later x86 co-pros are socketed in which case a carrier board might be a proposition?

I think it assumes quite a bit about the RISC OS 3/4 memory map

Wouldn’t it be broadly similar on the same type of machine? Or has the memory mapping completely changed in RISC OS 5 on IOMD? It’s the hardware we’re talking about, right? I vaguely recall that the Aleph1 ASIC works a little bit like the Broadcom GPU with a sort of mailbox-message mechanism.

That said, I’ve not turned on my RiscPC in ages.

Rummage ye not, because it’s here:
http://www.riscos.info/index.php/PC

The wife will be disappointed that I don’t spend some free time digging through – and “tidying out”
Oh, well.

(More boringly, saves having to make a carrier sled and then populate it with ROMs with the wrong timing, ahem).

Yeah, looked at that a while back. Mostly comes down to playing with SMT or PLCC devices complicated by limited choices with the right voltage levels (unless the RPC bus is more flexible than I think.

I think hacking a faster hardware processor might be an incredibly skilled job… unless the later x86 co-pros are socketed in which case a carrier board might be a proposition?

Well, the OpenBus shouldn’t be too much of a problem, say with an FPGA, as it’s relatively simple. But the trouble is that many modern system-on-chips don’t expose a bus, they expose peripherals. So you get DDR2/3, USB, SATA, PCIe etc. So you need to find something that gives enough host access. Possibly a PCI or USB to OpenBus bridge. But you’d end up like a super-Kinetic – everything on the processor card, not much on the host. In fact, if you’re using USB why not just fit a Beagle/Panda in the OpenBus slot and have done with it?

Wouldn’t it be broadly similar on the same type of machine? Or has the memory mapping completely changed in RISC OS 5 on IOMD? It’s the hardware we’re talking about, right?

Physical memory map is the same, but virtual memory map quite different. We don’t have the 64MB limit of 26 bit addressing for starters, and so everything has moved around.

Yeah, looked at that a while back. Mostly comes down to playing with SMT or PLCC devices complicated by limited choices with the right voltage levels (unless the RPC bus is more flexible than I think.

If I were doing that I’d use a 3.3V or lower flash and some voltage converters. They’re quite small, shouldn’t be difficult to fit them on the bottom side of a sled. You may be able to find some 5V tolerant flash, but would have to stare at the RPC bus specs to see whether their 3.something V output is regarded as ‘high’ correctly in the 5V RPC.

But you’d end up like a super-Kinetic – everything on the processor card, not much on the host. In fact, if you’re using USB why not just fit a Beagle/Panda in the OpenBus slot and have done with it?

Big smiley at the thought of where that could lead.

If I were doing that I’d use a 3.3V or lower flash and some voltage converters. They’re quite small, shouldn’t be difficult to fit them on the bottom side of a sled. You may be able to find some 5V tolerant flash, but would have to stare at the RPC bus specs to see whether their 3.something V output is regarded as ‘high’ correctly in the 5V RPC.

Hmm, it was the voltage level converters plus the SMT work plus the memory access speeds/access times plus memory sizes available at a reasonable cost that caused me to drop that fanciful idea. Mostly the fact that I’ve spent so long in network management and away from any meaningful use of a soldering iron I’m not sure I’d trust myself to not hold the hot end of a normal iron never mind what I’d do with the surface mount kit.

edit: Third time lucky.
I’m with Rick M, it’s annoying when the forum blackholes your profound submissions.
First time round was understandable – running as a test of a cisco easyvpn resident on a 3G link to the internet, round in through our internet link and then back out through N3 and the NHS gateway, always likely to be flakier than something from Cadbury.

But you’d end up like a super-Kinetic – everything on the processor card, not much on the host.

Maybe we are actually talking about different things here? I was thinking of taking the CPU off of the x86 co-pro card and bolting on something meatier, like a 466MHz Celeron? [not too much point going whoo-hoo with the slow bus speeds, even a <500MHz part might spend much of its time twiddling its thumbs]

In fact, if you’re using USB why not just fit a Beagle/Panda in the OpenBus slot and have done with it?

USB? What, for the 5V? Just jack into the PSU for that.

However, having said that, imagine using some glue logic to run one of those boards as a co-processor. Forget the Beeb with a 3MHz CMOS 6502; we’re talking a 40MHz ARM710 based machine with a 1GHz co-processor. It also generates the video. ;-) There’s no way you can’t call that epic.

We’ve just gotta find a way to wong the OpenBus into the board’s GPIO and some sort of protocol to get it to work. Simples!

always likely to be flakier than something from Cadbury.

Dunno why this forum just doesn’t set a cookie like everything else. [looks] Actually it does, it sets seven cookies¹. So why does it seem so damned obsessed with tying you to an IP address. Have the authors never tried using their forum while in a car on a country road with patchy reception? <sigh>

¹ You’re setting cookies on a British hosted website. Where’s your annoying pop up “we’ve set cookies, click the ‘yeah whatever’ button” message that will insist on appearing every time a person logs in!

The latest download on the Raspberry Pi web site is RC10 (which is 17 Jun 2013 and includes RISC OS 5.19). Is RC11 (which has an updated HardDisc4 image and RISC OS 5.21) going to be uploaded? Note that the latest advertised download is RC8.

Matthew 7:7.

Is RC11 (which has an updated HardDisc4 image and RISC OS 5.21) going to be uploaded?

Yes. We’ve provided the raw RC11 image but we need to co-ordinate with RPi to get their NOOBS image updated at the same time. Should be sorted soon.

Ah! there it is.

Just downloaded the image from Raspberrypi.org site & it’s still the RC8 version dated 19th March. Am I missing something here or hasn’t it been updated yet ?

Try it again. It’s definitely RC11 (5.21) now.

Edit: Do you mean the RISC OS image, or NOOBS? NOOBS is still the old version (1.2.1).

Yes, it was. I obviously jumped the gun. Thought it may have been RPi site not updating the filename again but all ok now thanks. NOOBS will soon be up to date hopefully.

NOOBS is not yet there. Version 1_2_1 is in the wings but that is 27 Jun 2013 (and thus contains RC10).

Many thanks for this welcome surprise of a new OS upgrade, great stuff. After a couple of glitches, i’ve got everything running correctly, but I can’t get MP3s to play anymore, it doesn’t recognise what they are anymore. The icon sprite for MP3 is there, but a double click on the icon doesn’t do anything.

Can anyone help please how to get MP3s playing again, I suspect it could be related to MimeMap?

Thanks in advance

cheers
Matthew

The icon sprite for MP3 is there, but a double click on the icon doesn’t do anything.
Can anyone help please how to get MP3s playing again, I suspect it could be related to MimeMap?

Sounds like the application you previously had playing mp3 files is nolonger the defined application for playing mp3.

If you open atask window and type echo <alias$@runtype_1ad> does it display the path to the application you expect to play the file or just a blank?

Hi
Thanks for your reply. The answer is it’s blank.