Geminus for Raspberry Pi

Hello all,

Geminus graphics acceleration is now available for the Raspberry Pi devices and, addressing earlier remarks, the store is now more accessible without the need to login or to register. See Sendiri Store

Geminus Any Pi

To keep things simple, there is a single version of Geminus that runs across the entire current range of Raspberry Pi devices from the lowliest Raspberry Pi 1, through 2, 2 (V1.2) and 3 up to the super fast Raspberry Pi 4. Since Geminus is licensed to the Individual rather than the machine, and Individual licensing permits a single person to install and use the software simultaneously on up to four devices, most users will find that a single licence covers all of their Raspberry Pi needs.

On the Raspberry Pi 4, Geminus is able to leverage the faster DMA4 hardware present in the latest SoC and thus provide rectangle copying that is 3.5 times faster than the on-screen copying supported in RISC OS. Of course this capability is also exploited to redraw window contents even faster, and if there is one thing that RISC OS on the Raspberry Pi 4 is not short of, it’s a lot of RAM to create a nice big cache to support even the largest of desktop screens.

Background: Geminus provides a much faster, smoother desktop experience by using spare RAM to remember the contents of windows, by offering faster scrolling and dragging of windows on the desktop, and by making greater use of acceleration hardware. It also provides an accelerated JPEG decoder and renderer, which can benefit any application that asks RISC OS/SpriteExtend to perform on-the-fly JPEG rendering.

Next: Aemulor 2.55 updates for all targets, and Geminus 1.42 updates for the i.MX6, ARMbook and RPCEmu builds. These shall, of course, be free to existing licence holders, but please allow me a little time to complete the necessary website work first.

Best regards,

Adrian

As a matter of interest has anyone tried RO 5 on a real RPc and tried Aemulor?

I can’t say that it’s something I’ve tried personally but I suspect that you may get no other response, so here’s my tuppenceworth; RISC OS 5 works on the RiscPC/A7000 series machines as far as I know, and ROOL does testing before releases.

Aemulor certainly did run on the RiscPC (it was developed there, on RISC OS 4.02) and runs fine on RPCEmu. It does require a StrongARM CPU, though, since the builds are CPU-locked to prevent obscure faults occurring if the machine and build are incompatible. That said, the RiscPC/RPCEmu build of Aemulor is only used on RPCEmu as far as I know, so if anyone has tried it on the physical hardware, I would be interested in feedback.

As a matter of interest has anyone tried RO 5 on a real RPc and tried Amulator?

I did try it here on a Soft-loaded 5.29 – Aemulator didn’t like it. ‘Not for this processor’

Yes, I’ve tried Aemulor on a real Risc-PC, using soft loaded 5.28. It quite quite happily runs !WorraCAD, which is definitely 26 bit only.

Risc-PC is StrongARM rev s, overclocked with 40mb ram, 1mb vram, Etherlan 600 nic.

I took a screenshot but no idea how to post it

I did try it here on a Soft-loaded 5.29 – Aemulator didn’t like it. ‘Not for this processor’

That would happen if you’re using a non-StrongARM processor, and I guess that it’s possible that some revisions of StrongARM may yield that error message too.

Yes, I’ve tried Aemulor on a real Risc-PC, using soft loaded 5.28. It quite quite happily runs !WorraCAD, which is definitely 26 bit only.

That’s nice to hear :)

My StrongARM RiscPC has served as only a monitor stand for a long time already.