Previous Risc PC builds (at Pace)

Hi, I have in my possesion two Risc PC/A7000 builds of RISC OS made inside Pace in 2000-2001.

RISC OS 4.00 (Pace 20000808 aUUP00-00) RISC OS 4.00 (Pace 20010402 Ursula0020)

I have some questions about rebuilding them from the publicly available ROOL sources.

1) Which CVS branch were they built from, and if possible which CVS tag. 2) Is the CVS repository likely intact enough on those CVS branches to reconstruct these ROM images. 3) What build environment is required for that CVS branch, is it similar to the build environment recommended for the current sources. 4) If it is theoretically reconstructible from the ROOL sources, I believe the Castle license would permit me to release the binaries without necessarily compiling the source. As long as I state where the source is available, is this your understanding of the license too?

Either of these ROM images would be an ideal free companion for emulators until a suitable RiscPC rom image is made available from more current CVS sources.

Peter

I’ve had a brief play with the various Risc PC tags in CVS.

Most of a sensible tree comes if you check out the Ursula_RiscPC branch, which is merged into the main tree in August 1999. However some bits are missing… to get any further in building I also needed to check out tag BASICTrans-2_04 (from 2001) and merge it. I think there may be some other parts that hadn’t made it to CVS by then.

I ran cvs2cl on the CVS repository to try to get some idea of all these branches: you can find the ChangeLog output here: http://www.markettos.org.uk/riscos/rool/ROOL-ChangeLog-to20081211.gz (840KB, expanding to 10MB)

Have a look at the log around the dates of your versions, and see if it matches the modules in your ROMs.

An interesting tag, which may be worth trying to build: UrsulaBuild_FinalSoftload (Aug 98, presumably the RO3.8 image shipped to developers)

I’ve had a look at the Building RISC OS for RiscPC page. it appears the builds I have were off the HEAD (though why Ursula0020 is mentioned in the *FX0 string isn’t clear).

I’ve had a check of your Changelog text. Amongst other things sbrodie was converting modules from aasm format to objasm and a familar sounding srevill was fixing bugs in BASIC, in the time just leading up to that build.

Helpful comments include “Requires BuildSys 3.06 or later.” “Requires Library 0.71 or later.” “Requires Env 0.65 or later.” “Updated build structure to use the shared AAsmModule makefile.”

From which I might be able to figure out more.

In another thread, you wrote:

Can you check in the build product for the 26-bit HEAD RiscPC/A7000 build please?

You may have noticed that RISCOS Ltd is currently in dispute with Castle Technology Ltd about the licensing of RISC OS for legacy IOMD-based platforms. In light of this, RISC OS Open has no current plans to publish binaries or build scripts for 26-bit versions of RISC OS.

If you are interested in acquiring a free-to-distribute ROM image for Risc PC emulators, I would encourage you to investigate the 32-bit IOMD HAL ROM. This theoretically should work on an emulator, although we have not tested it in that environment. If any developers or testers can spare time to work on it, it could do with some polishing off (it’s certainly not yet ready for use by general users).

I ought to say that I doubt the legality of using the shared source licence as a precedent for ditributing the Ursula0020 ROM. That included various bits of third-party code such as the CDFS driver modules that have not been sublicenced under the Castle licence. Some libraries (notably OSLib and Desk) have been substituted with the public releases, and some modules needed editing to be compatible with them. Some source files and build scripts had to be rewritten by ROOL to remove dependence on third-party code or tools that could not be easily be redistributed. And even then it would be questionable whether you could apply the shared source licence to a copy of RISC OS that you acquired via a different route.

Having said that, it should now be possible to build something close to the Ursula0020 ROM using the shared source sources. But I can’t warrant that you won’t be receiving a letter from RISCOS Ltd if you attempt to distribute it further.