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When RO4 was obtained – what happened to the new motherboard being shown at the shows as a replacement to RPc boards.
(Do you want to be a Millionaire?)

As Aemulor in works with a RPc RO5 – hindsight is a handy thing :-) pity Acorn didn’t go 32bit with the announcement of the RPc!

hindsight is a handy thing :-) pity Acorn didn’t go 32bit with the announcement of the RPc!

That would have been the time to do it, the impetus of a new far more capable machine, and an active developer community pretty much near it’s peak. When the first 32bit ARM6 came out it was obvious to everyone 26 bit chips would be dropped in a couple of years, we were extremely lucky the first StrongARM variant still had it, but that was the end. However, short term expediency won out, and many great RISC OS programs fell by the wayside when we eventually got a 32 bit OS, although I tried to rescue as many as I could.

Moving to 32 bit when the RPC came out, wouldn’t have helped us for 64 bit, as ARMv8 was long after Acorn and most of the developer community had gone. In the intervening years there were technical merits but no commercial imperative to rewrite the OS in C. But even if it was all in C right now, breaking APIs changes would have to made for 64 bit, and the fundamental re-architecturing of the entire OS to work on multiple processors would still break every non trivial existing program.

A interesting note on IconBar for Arm 64 bitters :-)

You mean “The most exciting project for me right now is bringing up Genode on a 64bit only cpu and run arm32 emulation on it”?

https://www.iconbar.com/forums/viewthread.php?threadid=13014