RISC OS Developments announce acquisition of Castle Technology Ltd and RISC OS IPR (don't panic!)

has changed much in the meantime.

I’d imagine sales of VirtualWhatever have probably dried up – it is logical that by now everybody who is going to cling to the old and emulate probably has done so. And it’s also clear that the Select/Adjust branch has died, no development since when? And that things are moving with ROOL’s version, that had persisted as open source despite “evidence” to the contrary. The licence may not have changed but maybe the argument has just run out of steam?
Plus I believe VRPC to be quite a capable emulator. If it is modified as necessary to run 5 (of it cannot already?), that might make it an attractive commercial alternative to RPCEmu?

Times change…

Hey guys, why not wait and see what is said at the upcoming shows before speculating on possible outcomes and pitfalls?

Sorry, I forgot – this is the internet…

Plus I believe VRPC to be quite a capable emulator. If it is modified as necessary to run 5 (of it cannot already?), that might make it an attractive commercial alternative to RPCEmu?

It could be a highly attractive alternative if the few weaknesses (that persist since…whenever it was first released) would be tackled. I would certainly pay money (again! VA5000, V-RPC, V-RPC Adjust, V-RPC-DL, VA5000-DL) for it, because the only alternative would be to invest much of my time to add “a few” features to RPCEmu, which is unlikely to happen partly because of my love-hate (or probably more hate-hate) relationship with C.

V-RPC needs to be “neutral” when it comes to the RISC OS version used – the reasons why exactly one RISC OS version needs to be bundled have long vanished, if they were ever valid. V-RPC needs a working MouseSync. V-RPC needs to respect today’s Windows way of application data/user rights working (erm, basically the way since Vista…), that it needs Admin rights to work properly if installed in the standard way is really a joke. V-RPC needs to be bugfixed wrt DirectX so that it works properly via RDP. And the non-DL versions need the “copy protection” based on the first MAC address it happens to find during installation removed, because if it was ever needed because of licencing details, these details have long since changed. A few bugfixes for HostFS would be great, too (like proper handling of retyping files if the new filename already exists in the host’s FS, or fixing the completely broken timestamp handling).

A Linux version would be also great, but Linux is notoriously difficult to handle for non-open source software.

Hey guys, why not wait and see what is said at the upcoming shows before speculating on possible outcomes and pitfalls?

Where is the fun in that!

And where would we be if RODL announced next that they had purchased the rights from 3QD as that would then totally stop this “ah but” stuff.

Still only a couple of weeks to we know more in the meantime I’ll leave it to others to speculate whilst I plan to go and hear first hand what the plans are and support all those who are putting in the time to try and make the London show a success.

…I believe VRPC to be quite a capable emulator.

It could be a highly attractive alternative if the few weaknesses (that persist since…whenever it was first released) would be tackled.

The Mac VRPC was much less of a pain than the Windows version. It did a lot of good work here. But it is 32bit app and so a dead duck next year with the next version of macOS.

I would certainly pay money (again! …

So would I.

I do not panic :)

and with it the RISC OS Operating System

I hope to see some news around this point. IMHO, RISC OS 5 is the best asset we have today. And it would be even better if RISC OS 3/4 (or even BBC Micro) ROM were free to use under RISC OS 5 emulators (Arcem, ArchiEmu, RPCEmu). That would give us more software and so attract more users.

RISC OS 3 source code – or at least some work around it – would be cool too. For example, it would be fantastic to be able to modify RISC OS 3.1 to support bigger modes under emulation.

Great to see people still supporting RISC OS 20 years after Acorn pulled the plug. After all the trials the platform has been through where still here, trying to push it forward. Things have started to look up in recent years and hopefully this will be a catalyst to a brighter future.
Looking forward to the show.

Well done to all involved, this is fantastic news!

Other than on Twitter, I’m a bit late to the party. This – and the more recent news to go open source – are fantastic shots in the arm for the platform. I’m seriously having to think about attending the London show now!

Definitely come to the show if you can. There’s a lot more detail that’s being saved for then.

Yeah, what Steve said!