!System for pre RISCOS 5 machines

Trying to use these modules on a physical RiscPC fitted with os4.02 roms completely hangs the machine on boot up.

If you want to use ROOL !Boot and PlingSystem with RISC OS 4 ROMs, there are three (not two) steps to the process:

1. Install ROOL !Boot (from HardDisc4.zip)
2. Unpack PlingSystem.zip and run the supplied !SysMerge file.
3. A handful of RISC OS 4 modules are not in the ROOL distributions, for copyright reasons. These will have to be copied from the original RISC OS 4 !Boot structure.

Sadly I don’t have a list of the missing modules, and my Google-fu isn’t up to finding the forum post that did contain the list. However I was under the impression that the absence of these modules would cause failures of the type “error when trying to perform function” not “system freezes during boot-up”.

PlingSystem itself is a “daily build” of the latest work-in-progress sources, so it is possible you have run into a bug in PlingSystem itself. Do you have any older versions of PlingSystem (preferably later than March 2024) that you can try?

Trying to use these modules on a physical RiscPC fitted with os4.02 roms completely hangs the machine on boot up.

The modules work fine on my Risc PC with RISC OS 4.02. At a wild guess, something in your boot sequence is loading the C Library a second time resulting in stiffage – the easiest way to avoid that is start from the ROOL !Boot as well (which ensures it loads C Library once and only once early on) but you could do similar with a 4.02 !Boot with some manual hacking.

You don’t say where it hangs specifically, starting with Ctrl held down will let you see some text going past and might narrow things down.

Thanks for that Sprow, I wonder if the CLib in the NIC eeprom might be causing the problem then?

Anyway that gives me something to look for.

Well that didn’t take much digging!

I reflashed the NIC with the latest image and the problem went away.

Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction.