Softloading on RISC OS 3.7 / Filer_Action

Yes, I know I’m asking for trouble, but I managed to load a considerable amount of the RISC OS 5 modules onto a RiscPC 610 (32M + 1M VRAM and the original ARM 610 CPU module).

• MsgTrans
• UK
• FontManager
• RedrawMgr
• Wimp
• WimpUtils2
• Filer
• FilerSWIs
• Pinboard
• Switcher
• Internet
• DHCP

• Desktop
• Wimp Free slot is -1, Next slot is 0 (doesn’t affect normal operation (!) )

I must say I was incredibly surprised that it worked at all! (and nice to have some of the RO4+ features on such an old machine – and I think the Filer’s actually more stable as my ROM appears to be buggy)

One thing I haven’t been able to find is Filer_Action as a prebuilt module. It seems to be in the source tree, is it possible for someone to add this? At some point I may try building the tree myself but it’ll probably (literally) take all day on this machine.

Michael

I don’t think FilerAction has a module target as it stands – basically, the pre-built stuff was a quick multi-component build that I set up. Anything which failed that I couldn’t easily get to the bottom of (there were lots of things that failed and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life on it ;) was dropped from the list of things I uploaded onto our site.

So I think you might have to live with FilerAction not being available to softload – or have a look at its sources yourself and see whether it can easily be changed so that you can softload it. It’s unlikely we’ll be looking at stuff like that because our main priority is doing ROM builds right now.

Oooh very interesting!

Does that mean I can finally get my A7000 online with cable/dsl without having to resort to RO 4.39?

In principle, yes. If you get the Internet and DHCP modules, install them into !System.310.Modules.Network and get the InetSetup app (part of the boot resources section) and install that into !Boot.Resources.Configure (merging the !Boot folder from the archive to your existing one should do the trick), then the “DHCP” option will activate in InetSetup and it should work. All at your own risk, take a backup etc etc – works for me, anyway (admittedly, a goodly part of OS 5 is in there already, which may help). Also, make sure you have the new CLib – the Castle-supplied 32-bit should be fine. The CLib from this site appears to be bugged on older OSes, so I wouldn’t install it.

As regards FilerAction, it looks like I’d need the Norcroft compilers, which I don’t have and can’t justify spending money on, to build the OS. I guess I could make it all build with GCC, but I suspect that would end in tears. A full ROM softload would be interesting, I guess that probably won’t happen.

This is getting me all happy! I always kept my A7K for games that didn’t work on 4.+ . Being able to get it online properly would be awesome! It is still at my parents house and currently I only have a screen with ADC (Apple’s own modified DVI standard from a couple of years ago). SO it will take a while before I can test this.