New RiscPC owner - tips?

Hi people,

I am now the proud owner of a RiscPC 700! :D
The machine has only had one owner and as such it has no school marks too! Top banana!

Having done a quick bit of research beforehand I’ve opened up the machine to have a look at the state of the CMOS battery.

Which was bad; furry. :( Though thanks to come quick thinking I’ve removed it now and intend to replace it as soon as possible with a new battery of the AAA rechargeable variety. (APDL seems an option but making one up myself with a AAA battery, an enclosure (greased to prevent any corrosion) and some trailing wire)

Specs wise; it has RO3.7 on ROM, its got a nifty sound card in it – an AudioDynamics DMI PowerWAVE 50 which has MIDI on a ‘gameport’ like serial interface.
It also has a TV Card (which is kind of useless now that the digital switchover is complete in my area) a SA-110K and lastly it has a 486 DX 100 card in it.

Any tips or pointers on where to get the machine closer to the present (USB, Ethernet, max the RAM, replace HDD with CF and the like)? I’ve seen mention of the UniPod but no idea where to start.

Regards,

(a very jolly) Craig :D

P.S – will the machine still start without a battery installed (for the sake of finding out exactly how much RAM is installed)? Not so fussed about maintaining CMOS setting at the moment.

with a new battery of the AAA rechargeable variety

Is this okay if it is trickle-charged constantly?

Specs wise; it has RO3.7 on ROM,

That’s the last Acorn version. Same as I have on my RiscPC.

its got a nifty sound card in it that had MIDI available though over the traditional serial port like interface (forgive my inaccuracy; tad excited :D ).

Sounds interesting… MIDI is a sort of serial port, it is just clocked at an odd speed.

It also has a TV Card (which is kind of useless now that the digital switchover is complete in my area)

You can still plug stuff into it if it accepts composite video or s-video. Games consoles, 8 bit computers, a RaspberryPi, VCRs, satellite receivers…

a SA-110K and lastly it has a 486 DX 100 card in it.

Seems reasonably well specified.

Any tips or pointers on where to get the machine closer to the present

USB – There was a Simtec podule for USB. It is completely different to the USB system on RISC OS 5. I don’t know if you’ll be able to find such a podule, and if so how well supported it’d be.

Ethernet – you can either fit an Ethernet podule, or a little module thing that plugs into the network socket on the motherboard. 100Mbit networking hardware exists, but much of it is of the 10Mbit variety. You won’t get 100Mbit out of an I/O system clocked at 8MHz – but it ought to be a bit faster…

RAM – beware it is an old sort of RAM. You’ll probably need to get 72 pin EDO SIMMs, and watch the local PC World pimple-face turn pale as this stuff probably predates him. RISC OS is light on memory use and in a 26 bit world (complicated to explain, just know that RISC OS 3.70 is a little different to RISC OS 5) you can only have up to 28Mb WimpSlot per task. In a nutshell, go to a boot sale, rummage, splash out a quid per SIMM, try ‘em. Two 32Mb will be quite nice. I think the machine can run up to 256Mb (IIRC!) but there’s no point really.

The SIMM in mine is a 32Mb SIMM. It was fitted in a PC where the CPU cooling fan failed. Being an early Pentium, it didn’t do fancy stuff like clock throttling. No, it carried on running. Until it got so hot that the memory (mounted just above it) started to fail and eventually the Windows swap file was written to all sorts of random locations on the harddisc – including from the first few hundred sectors – obliterating any hope of recovering the disc structure to get at the files. The person who owned the computer didn’t turn it off, and still didn’t when the thing was obviously crashing terribly. They phoned me. I heard the crack as the processor exploded. The computer was still not turned off (person ran away screaming like a girl, which would not have been noteworthy if they were a girl, but alas…).

Long story short, the motherboard was toast. The harddisc was recoverable but the data on it wasn’t. The SIMM failed selftests in a 66MHz PC. So I thought “what the hell” and put it in my RiscPC instead of the 8Mb I had in there. The RiscPCs much more sedate clocking (~12MHz IIRC) agreed with the SIMM. I threw as many tests at it as I could write. Faultless.

So, you might pick up a bargain in a boot sale. ;-)

HDD→CF – some work, some fail horribly. I think it depends upon the type of CF interface and the type of CF card. You can get these things cheaply off eBay. I have a CF interface and a 4Gb CF, but since entering into the world of Beagles and Pies, I haven’t really had the impetus to try doing stuff with the RiscPC.

The machine will start without a battery, but it might start very weirdly. If it does, hold down R while you switch on to force-reset the battery-backed memory. This should also kick the machine to its default settings.

I’ve seen mention of the UniPod but no idea where to start.

CJEMicro’s probably has one in stock… <clicky-clicky> Price depends upon the number of functions you want to use (gee, sounds like a Microsoft concept). Does USB, an additional IDE port, and Ethernet for £155. http://cjemicros.co.uk/micros/individual/newprodpages/prodinfo.php?prodcode=STD-UNIPOD3
Many people purchased add-on IDE cards (I have the Simtec one) because the motherboard IDE is…lacklustre.

[3.70 is] the last Acorn version.

It may be the last version shipped in machines, but there were later ones that leaked out. Pretty sure I have 3.98 somewhere.

There was a Simtec podule for USB. It is completely different to the USB system on RISC OS 5. I don’t know if you’ll be able to find such a podule, and if so how well supported it’d be.

I have a prototype Simtec USB board. Unless something radical happened recently (and I’m sure it didn’t) it’s now useless.

you can either fit an Ethernet podule, or a little module thing that plugs into the network socket on the motherboard.

Early ones had a BNC socket, which is a pain in the arse to deal with these days. Some had both a BNC and an RJ45. Later ones had RJ45 and are more likely to be 100MB compatible. here’s a combined one on ebay.

Any tips or pointers on where to get the machine closer to the present

You could do what I did a few years ago – retire the ancient hardware and go virtual. For day-to-day use I think an emulated RISC OS machine makes far more sense than machines that are older than the age of consent. And I say that as the owner of ten RiscPCs, an A7000, A5000, A3010 and two A310s.

Did I mention the Beeb and the Master? They’re completely different of course. Got to keep that hardware running. ;-)

It also has a TV Card (which is kind of useless now that the digital switchover is complete in my area)

Not for certain.

http://www.sprow.co.uk/pics/risctv.htm

The machine can softload RISC OS 5, which would make having a lot of memory more useful (upsides include DHCP, big wimpslots, unicode. Downsides it will only run 32 bit clean software and peripherals need 32 bit clean drivers)

Hopefully RO 5 will get partition support before too long, which would make it very viable to dual boot an old 3.7 RPC.

Any tips or pointers on where to get the machine closer to the present

To be honest the simplest (and possibly cheapest) approach would probably be to gut the case and buy a beagleboard or a Pi and install that. There a decent power supply in there that could be pressed into service, plenty of room and nice skid plastic walls to mount extension sockets on.

For a Pi you could get simple plug-in extension sockets for the USB, Ethernet, HDMI & audio. There’s space for a USB hub too. And a hard-disk of course. And some sandwiches. Hmph. I might have to find an old RPC case to hack.

Pretty sure I have 3.98 somewhere.

I have (had?) 3.8x or something. Apparently supports bigger harddiscs, but I never tried that. Still, softloading a development build is hardly “official”!

I have a prototype Simtec USB board. Unless something radical happened recently (and I’m sure it didn’t) it’s now useless.

The Unipod has USB. Co-designed (or built?) by Simtec so it may well use Simtec’s way of handling USB. Dave’s USB-for-toys (the missile launcher etc) supports both types of USB. AFAIK he’s pretty much the only one to support both.

Whether or not the hardware is “useless” perhaps depends on whether or not anybody ever gets to writing firmware for it. There’s no reason why the Simtec driver(s) couldn’t be thrown away and something else used, at the base level it’ll be a bunch of registers in a memory location someplace.
But, you know, don’t hold your breath…

Early ones had a BNC socket, which is a pain in the arse to deal with these days. Some had both a BNC and an RJ45. Later ones had RJ45 and are more likely to be 100MB compatible. here’s a combined one on ebay.

Mine is… <grabs torch> Oooh, combo. Forgot about the 10base2 as I’ve not used that since the ‘90s. As soon as I got myself a discarded 10mbit hub (not a router, this thing was braindead) I went to 10baseT. If nothing else, the thing was smart enough to detect faulty hardware and block it so a duff network card (not uncommon for those old ISA clones) wouldn’t bring down the network. You could also see blinking lights for a network card that was spewing garbage and clogging the network. Yeah, I know, I shouldn’t buy bits from boot sales and computer repair shop reject bins – but on the flip side I got all the PCs in the house networked for about thirty quid. Quite a lot less than the cost of an Acorn NIC (but I have a NIC in the A5000 and one in the RiscPC).

You could do what I did a few years ago – retire the ancient hardware and go virtual.

Certainly. I run RISC OS 3.70 and RISC OS 5 under emulation. Much of my work with RISC OS is actually done on my PC (but in my defence, the two most recent RISC OS devices don’t speak VGA!). It is extremely useful to switch to RISC OS as if it was just another application. So I can run it, a web browser, PDF reader, and swap around as necessary. The only difficult part is remembering which keystroke to use when.

…that said, I use the Beagle/Pi through a USB video capture thingy on the eeePC so the display output appears on the netbook’s display. There have been more than a few instances when I’ve typed something and thought “has my program crashed the machine?”… the first tip-off is having typed an ‘R’, the AverMedia software begins recording and crashes ’cos it is really crappy. Then I think “oh, okay, not this keyboard!”. ;-)

My RiscPC’s NIC is made by i-cubed and is only 10mbit.

than machines that are older than the age of consent.

The age possibly depends upon region. It’s 13 in Japan […beat… wait, that means cute schoolgirls are legal?!??! well, maybe legal but pretty damn immoral at my age…]; America is all over the place but sort of 18-21ish (and different depending on gender). Looks like it is 13 in Spain too. And Wiki says, quote: “Sharia gives no restrictions on age at marriage, and defines 9 as the minimum age for consummation, in accordance with the Qur’an and the example set by Muhammad.”. [source]

<cough> moving swiftly on…

The older machines are not bad per se, just increasingly showing their limitations (although they hold up pretty damned well – what can you do with a 386 motherboard these days?).
For the increase in speed, reduction in power consumption, and overall price, it would make sense – if you are enough of a geek to be okay with setting up the OS yourself – to transition to one of the SoC-based devices; unless there is a specific reason not to (usually a piece of software that isn’t RISC OS 5 friendly). The big caveat is if you aren’t happy with building your own system from scratch, the prebuilt solutions are somewhat expensive and might convince you to hang on to the older hardware a little bit longer…

Simtec USB supports keyboards and mice reasonably OK, hubs mostly OK, and it’s pot luck with mass storage devices. You have to put configuration information in a file for each one (indexed by vendor/product ids) before it will work. If something doesn’t work it can freeze the USB stack. Things like floppy drives don’t work, CDs/DVDs don’t by default, wifi and networking don’t, serial ports don’t… you get the idea. Mass storage is also limited to 2GB FAT devices (a braindead design decision), unless you can borrow the driver from the A9home which will do larger and FileCore formatted (where they had to go back and do it properly).

The one useful thing for the Simtec USB would be someone to write a driver for the RISC OS 5 stack.

The IDE and 100Mbit Ethernet on the Unipod are generally more stable, though I’ve never used them myself.

Makes me wonder… maybe someone could make a parallel port to RPi GPIO adaptor, and use a Pi as a USB/ethernet/SD reader for an older RISC OS machine. Won’t be quick, but would be a lot cheaper than a podule. Alternatively make a simple Pi-GPIO to podulebus adaptor – the Pi can do up to 22MHz on the GPIO which is faster than the podule bus.

How about just sharing the Pi’s ports/attached media over the network? I might do that with my A4000 for fun! I mean every self respecting computer should have working a network card, right?*

*May not apply to Livebox owners

How about just sharing the Pi’s ports/attached media over the network? I might do that with my A4000 for fun! I mean every self respecting computer should have working a network card, right?

Sounds like a good move. You could network the facilities on both ends of a Pi – A4000/RPC combination with the PI providing USB etc to the RPC and the A4000/RPC providing harddisc, serial, parallel, power and case space.
Might take a while on the messaging elements. I seem to recall a discussion last year regarding inter-machine messaging and clustering.
Ah, yes:
https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/11/topics/1470

I had planned to release Gateway which would shuffle ActiveApps: http://www.jaffasoft.co.uk/wwv2/activeapps/ messages (a lightweight IPC protocol built on top of WIMP messages) across the network.

How about just sharing the Pi’s ports/attached media over the network? I might do that with my A4000 for fun! I mean every self respecting computer should have working a network card, right?

Sounds like a good move. You could network the facilities on both ends of a Pi – A4000/RPC combination with the PI providing USB etc to the RPC and the A4000/RPC providing harddisc, serial, parallel, power and case space.
Might take a while on the messaging elements.

I’m confused!
Do you realise that you can use ShareFS/Access to do this with no extra software needed?

Should work for any USB mass storage (pens, SD cards etc) or printer. but not a scanner.

Well, that escalated quickly! :D

I ended up upgrading the RAM to 256MB (I found some EDOs lurking in the garage with other PC RAM of all ages) and getting a UniPod a couple of days ago. The machine actually reports 258MB, so I assume that means I have 2MB VRAM installed?

I had just about managed to setup the system as I liked it when…
KLAK, KLAK, KLAK!
Reboot … hopes … KLAK, KLAK, KLAK!

My harddisk crashed. :(

I was glad I had thought ahead and dd-ed its contents when I first got the machine. I even managed to restore the image to a new disk but now I am without the UniPod setup programs, UniPod and IDETool and the like. It is really quite a neat idea rather than providing a floppy disk to provide the setup on the podule ROM.

Would anybody lurking here happen to have these or know of a way to restore it out of the podule ROM (assuming that switching the jumper as per the instructions in the box and writing out the ROM with the UniPod tool was not as destructive as it seems now)?

Craig

P.S That riscTV link is intriguing, the podule seems to have a large chrome box on it branded Philips… something to perhaps try out

Would anybody lurking here happen to have these or know of a way to restore it out of the podule ROM (assuming that switching the jumper as per the instructions in the box and writing out the ROM with the UniPod tool was not as destructive as it seems now)?

My RPC is stored but I’ve managed to extract from a backup via my Mac’s DVD drive. Where to send?

Hopefully snafu 1.83 is the latest.

@Frederick – thankyou :)
c underscore lynch 8 7 At outlook STOP com

Hi again people,

I have had lots of fun resurrecting this machine. Got the CMOS battery replaced and managed to procure a copy of RO4.39 on ROM along with a copy of RISC OS 6 which I’ve never played around with before.

Still stuck with the PowerWave. The copy of MidiSupp I have is well out of date and lots of MIDI applications won’t start. This seems to be no longer avilable anywhere on the net – liquid silicon just seem to be selling off old Psion bits now.

The Unipod: USB mouse seems to ‘just work’ which is cool. Can’t find a copy of MassFS anywhere to try other devices with it.
IDEFS – is apparently unable to mount any disks – at all. I have formatted some hard disks before and have formatted a couple from the pi. Nothing mounts.

Networking: Notworking xD
The Unipod establishes a link with my router, the router shows me one MAC address…
*ShowStat shows me an utterly different MAC address for the Unipod.
I tried following the instructions for network setup on riscos.org/support/networking.html but I’m not able to set a network device (I’m not sure if that is the system being clever as there is only one network device installed).

I’m able to ping the RiscPC from my Pi but I can’t ping the Pi from the RiscPC. I ping the router and ping replies with ‘host is down’ but the router has it logged as a port scan which is even more weird. Nothing seems to make it outbound, Webster complains every time I enter a URL with ‘.!HTTP’ address not recognised.
I have entered the appropriate gateway address for my ISP-

All of this silliness happens in both 4.39 and 6.. I have contemplated putting RO5 on here but not quite sure how to go about it?

On a lighter note, this machine also had a pile of AcornUser CDROMs and a few Clan floppies with it, have had a bit of fun explorng and particularly looking at starinfo – lots of little programming curios in there. :)

The networking could be a component clash.

I had something similar happen when I tried replacing the hard drive on my A7000 with compact flash and an adapter.

Booting off the CF worked fine, but any attempt to access the network card (which claims to be a Design IT E600) with the CF in the system as master or slave failed with either a time out or host down.

Once the CF was removed everything went back to normal, with the PC, RiscPC and internet all visible

So you could try stripping out everything bar the unipod, and see if that cures the network and hard drive issues.