RiscPC to RPi migration

Hi All,
Just dug my RiscPC out of the loft (no keyboard, mouse, monitor) where it’s been sat gathering dust while I’ve been putting my wife off chucking it in the bin while I considered what on earth to do with it. And thought I’d at least try and access the HD on my PC to get a few files off. So I undid the RiscPC case lifted off the top section and extracted the HD.

Pulled my ageing shuttle PC’s case off and unclipped my IDE CD drive. Flipped the jumper on the RiscPC HD to ‘slave’ and plugged the IDE cable and power in. Then booted Ubunto. Noting at this point the absolute racket that the RiscPC HD was giving off. Click and wirrr-orama. To be fair it probably hasn’t been powered up for like 10 years.

Followed these instructions:
http://www.filecore.net/riscos/public/filetransferlinux.html

And I could access the files via Ubunto!!

Although I then read the faq – file types not maintained. You need to !Zip up the contents before hand. :( Not much good to me.

Decided to back up the hard disc using dd. Despite the instructions saying it was tricky, it worked easily. Now my 1.2Gig HD was backed up to an image file. Wehay. Saved until I worked out what to do with it, I thought.

Then thought, hmmmm, my RaspberryPI doesn’t have an IDE drive, but it does have a USB port, and 1.2Gig is not much.

Fished out a USB pen drive.
Used dd again from the if=image file to the op=pendrive.
Used the above instructions to mount the pen drive on Ubunto as though it was my RiscPC HD. That worked, again I could access the files on Ubunto.

Right, thought I. This will never work.

Booted RPi with RiscOS, unplugged my keyboard (kept the mouse), and shoved in the USB stick.
Waited.
Waited.
Poink! The USB icon showed. I clicked. Ping!!!!! A filer window showing the contents of my RiscPC Harddisc.

I swore. I really honestly never expected that to happen. I called my wife. She shrugged, and went back to her book.

I copied the 1.2 Gig of precious historical files over to the SD card….
And (although it took a while for me to get round to it) my RiscPC Hard disc had been saved from becoming inaccessibly. Now to start delving into what I had done, that I hadn’t looked at for 10 years. 26bit vs 32 bit is going to be an issue to fix. Lots of sound modules I have are old style. :(

Ah well. Maybe I can dredge something up for the community!

Owain
Visions of the Impossible

It’s great when something works like that :)

26bit vs 32 bit is going to be an issue to fix.

Just in case you haven’t found all the useful docs yet: There’s Castle’s definitive 32bit guide here, and then a further guide here for all the issues you’ll run into once you move past the warm and cosy ARMv5 compatible world.

And as a games programmer you have the added hurdle that the video hardware in post-RiscPC machines isn’t as VIDC compatible as we’d like. Doing the same thing on different machine types may yield different results, and we haven’t yet come up with new APIs that programs can use to get around this.

I got !MICE running after an hour or so of hacking. (Without the sound). My wife enjoyed killing the little creatures ;) I’ll try and get SunBurst running on the RPi too. !EatMyDust didn’t get enough initial development I don’t believe to push to live. !SuperFE has a cease and desist notice on it now :(

I swore. I really honestly never expected that to happen. I called my wife. She shrugged, and went back to her book.

My mother is a lot like that.

Funny… When she needs “tech support”, she expects me to drop everything and then we tend to have an argument as she asks a really complicated question but expects a really simple answer…

yet… when I compile a two million line source that passes the compiler flawlessly to turn my Beagle into a self-aware data-sucker bent on recognising that humanity is evil and must be destroyed……she asks if I plan to put the kettle on soon!

Pffffft!!!!!

[the only reason the Day Of Reckoning has not yet happened is because I have an itty-bitty sort-of-two-megabit connection; which is usually swamped by animé, cute kittens, and ripping stuff off YouTube… so it’ll be a while before my self-aware code makes any decisions (^_^) ]

I got !MICE running after an hour or so of hacking.

Owain, could you please drop me an eMail with regard to the Archimedes Software Preservation Project – I’ll explain more in the reply: jon at jaspp dot org dot uk