Hello all

The BASIC file and the sprite file are currently in the same Dir. I thought it would look in the current directory if not given a full path, but it doesn’t seem to be doing so.

The current working directory may not be the directory you have those files in…

Click the middle mouse button (menu) over a directory window – note the “set directory” option?
Or in command line just hit . to list the current directory, DIR data would change the current directory to the data sub-directory of the current directory.

In an application directory¹ the !Run file will, normally, set a variable which will contain the directory path so you can use it within the program to point at the required files without mucking about with the current working directory settings.

¹ Have a peek at the Run files of a few applications by holding down shift when double-clicking on the !Application

Thank you Steve, that was it. Seems like a Risc OS thing, not sure if I would have found that answer online anywhere. Every search pulled up an answer about Linux or Unix. That answers the previous question I gave up on as well. Brilliant.

Seems like a Risc OS thing, not sure if I would have found that answer online anywhere. Every search pulled up an answer about Linux or Unix

Ah, now in Linux (or unixes) you can have a file file fail to if you don’t refer to it as ./file even when you are in the same directory as the file. Quirks.

Having your !Run file set up a variable “MyAppDir” with

“Set MyAppDir <Obey$Dir>”

< MyAppDir >.!Sprites 

< MyAppDir >.!RunImage 

IIRC the Pi image has, I think, among the many many software files something that helps you build shell applications.

This may help.

Edit noticed, after a meal break, that bits of the stuff above got eaten by Beast.

I don’t have a !Run file yet, that’s actually far in advance of what I’m doing. I just have a plain BASIC file calling a Sprites file. It’s loading it up in Mode 27 so not even using Risc OS. Reading through your link though cause eventually I wanna do stuff with the desktop.

You might find it easier to create a directory called !MyAppDir and drop your BASIC and !Sprites file into that.
Add a !Run file with the lines I suggested. File type the !Run as “obey”.
Then you can play with the BASIC file to your hearts content by double clicking on the run file, or on the !MyAppDir directory.

Otherwise various items like current directory, system variables etc are more difficult to deal with.

e.g. You want a pretty icon for your app? add a sprite to your !Sprites file with the same name as the application directory. You can do a specific Iconsprites line in a !Boot file, but you don’t need to.

Hi Phil

If you want to go onto WIMP stuff I highly recommend DrWimp

http://www.rayfavre.me.uk/drwimp.html

Thanks Kevin, I’ll check it out. Been busy with school last few weeks but I’ll be back into it soon.

Hello, everyone.

I am a new member on RISC OS Open. I am very keen to get RISC OS onto every desktop, laptop, STB and mobile device in existence. (Also, not used to forums, so let me know of any transgressions in etiquette – I mean no harm :)

I had a BBC A, BBC B, Master 128, A3000 and I used my A3010, which had gotten updated to an A3020, until 2001 where I moved onto a Windows 98 PC (Eurgh.) I have also tried umpteen Linux distros, but found them a tad shabby, to be honest, apart from Ubuntu, which is now overly bloated. I used to write RISC OS software in my youth, even touched on ARM assembler.

I believe that we can get RISC OS back on top without having to resort to such foolish ideas as mandatory pagefile, complex, power-sapping pre-emptive multitasking (which ignores the user’s priorities in place of it’s own.)

Suffice to say it’s been a while for me – I have a PI with the new RISC OS, a SA-RPC 600 with a 486 running RO3.6, and an A7000 running RO3.7 with a 40GB HDD (yes, it’s problematic) lol – but I would LOVE to get involved with bringing RISC OS up to date and get it back in front again, influencing lesser platforms again. ;)

I have about 15 years of questions which have been left unasked. Please forgive my rabid curiosity…

1. Is there a digest/road-map/matrix I can check out to see where you guys are up to and what you’re looking at next, or should I read all the forum posts? :S

2. Do we still have John Kortink (Kortnik? spelling?) (Tranlatr/Creator author) in RISC OS? He was doing some work with AGP accelerators last I knew, thought it could be good for updating graphics and acceleration?

3. As I said, I haven’t read every post in the forum, but is there a discussion regarding Wi-Fi functionality?

4. My penneth with regards to multi-threading/multi-core functionality: I would hate to be stuck in pre-emptive mode when I need a time-critical, real-time execution. I always felt that the co-operative model suited the active power user better, as it focussed on what the user was currently doing, NOT what was happening in the background or what the user was doing 2 minutes ago.

5. Memory – I can’t believe I can now run RISC OS with over 24MB of RAM – It’s nuts running it in 512MB – There’s soooooooooo much free memory and no slow hard disk (read ‘record player’) slowing things down by paging stuff in and out while I’m working.

6. IS RISC OS now 64-bit, or still 32-bit? I don’t think that we’ll need to talk to 4GB+ of RAM just yet (unless Microsoft starts writing RISC OS software at least lol) but it would be cool to not have the limit for future.

7. …Anyway, so many questions still to ask.

If I can help you guys with anything… I will. I may not be the world’s best coder, but I will try… I remember why RISC OS was the best OS around – at least for me – it didn’t get in the way, or try to be something it wasn’t. It was modest and ‘English’, which is so refreshing compared to Windows 7’s sensational 4GB+ footprint and 200+ multi-threaded behemoth of a desktop environment (without adding apps.)

I am very keen to get RISC OS onto every desktop, laptop, STB and mobile device in existence.

Somehow I think you might need to tame your aspirations. ;-)

(Also, not used to forums, so let me know of any transgressions in etiquette – I mean no harm :)

Ever been on Arcade or Digital Databank for the messaging? Ever been on Fidenet? It’s the same sort of deal here. Be polite and don’t make an ass of yourself (…..that’s my job ;-) ).

a Windows 98 PC (Eurgh.)

Funny, I quite liked 98SE. It was Win95 that was a steaming pile of poo, and ME that sucked. But 98 wasn’t so bad given that it was Windows of the old school.

I used to write RISC OS software in my youth, even touched on ARM assembler.

Do you still have any of this? Perhaps you could bring some stuff up to date?

but I would LOVE to get involved with bringing RISC OS up to date and get it back in front again, influencing lesser platforms again. ;)

To be honest, I think this is futile. It isn’t that RISC OS is bad or the others are good, I think we are rapidly reaching a point with connected applications and HTML5 websites where the operating system will cease to be of relevance. You can sort of see this with products such as Google Docs. I have the app on Android, the app on iOS, and from time to time use the website version on Firefox on a PC. The web version is more feature rich (you can customise styles, set paper margins, various things the apps can’t do), but otherwise the experience is more or less the same regardless of my platform.
This is why I said yesterday (?) that it isn’t worth our while even attempting to get into that world. I rather suspect that the choice of tablet and OS is defined more by status and budget than any specific attributes. There will be a time when it ceases to matter at all.

2. Do we still have John Kortink (Kortnik? spelling?) (Tranlatr/Creator author) in RISC OS? He was doing some work with AGP accelerators last I knew, thought it could be good for updating graphics and acceleration?

I don’t think he is active any more. He is still making co-processors for the Beeb, and impressive things they are. The problem with graphics as I understand it is that the GPU internals are “proprietory trade secrets” which mean that outside of binary blobs available for Linux (etc), you’re kinda stuck.

3. As I said, I haven’t read every post in the forum, but is there a discussion regarding Wi-Fi functionality?

Probably. Result? Not supported.
I use a Vonets Ethernet to WiFi adaptor.

I would hate to be stuck in pre-emptive mode when I need a time-critical, real-time execution.

;-)

I always felt that the co-operative model suited the active power user better, as it focussed on what the user was currently doing, NOT what was happening in the background or what the user was doing 2 minutes ago.

As a person who used to run a server, the flip side is a stalled task freezes the system. How galling it is to leave the system running to demo to a friend, it fails, and upon returning home the screen would say “Please insert disc BlahBlah…”. Grrrr!

It’s nuts running it in 512MB – There’s soooooooooo much free memory

Yeah. My Pi is the older model B with 256MiB on board. What did it show on my video, about 190MiB free? There may be some demanding users that need a lot of memory – if Archive (etc) is still produced on RISC OS then it is likely to need a fair wodge for the pictures and such. For the usual users? For an eternity we made the best of 4MiB. With the RiscPC this increased to 16-32MiB. Sure, some power users had more (Kinetic, anybody?) but RISC OS never really demanded crazy amounts of memory. So…there’s a lot sitting there doing nothing. It kind of makes me want to load a dozen copies of OvationPro just to fill it up (sadly, tried that, got bored with around 40 copies running and oooodles of memory still unused).

slowing things down by paging stuff in and out while I’m working.

Paging is a double edged sword. It is, as you mention, crappy and slow. On the other hand, it tries to provide useable memory when you don’t have any. I run XP on a netbook. No swap file as the harddisc is an SSD. I used to have 1GiB fitted, but Firefox was rather crashy as nothing copes gracefully with Windows aborting tasks because memory has run out. Things are better with 2GiB installed. On a typical desktop PC, the user wouldn’t notice such things as if some extra memory was needed and it didn’t exist, something would be thrown on to harddisc and as if by magic, extra memory appears.
How a system feels in use depends upon how aggressively memory is managed. I believe that a system using virtual memory should not until physical memory is used up. That my XP PC is (mostly) useable with 2GiB and no VM shows that it can be done without all the constant swapping that Windows is famous for.

6. IS RISC OS now 64-bit, or still 32-bit?

Still 32 bit? Most ARMs in production are still 32 bit. The 64 bit stuff has some specific purposes but typical ARM cores will be 32 bit for a long while yet.

it would be cool to not have the limit for future.

The problem is, will the ARMs of the future behave in the same way as the ARMs of today? It is no good rewriting RISC OS to be ARMv8 64 bit compatible (which I would doubt would be an easy task) just to find that ARMv9 is the way forward and it’s completely different.
The history of the ARM is already littered with Jack Harness moments (“This is when everything changes”). ;-)

I remember why RISC OS was the best OS around

Well, back on the day it was Atari TOS vs AmigaOS/Workbench vs DOS. It wouldn’t have taken much to be awesome. ;-)

Unfortunately, Acorn set a good start with RISC OS 3 which was loads better than RISC OS 2; but then they totally dropped the ball. That the RiscPC versions were 3.5-3.7 ought to indicate that what really changed was that which was necessary for the new hardware, plus some random improvements such as moving task swapping to the kernel as the Wimp doing it via SWI calls was fine on an ARM2 with a task using half a megabyte, but it sucked hard on a RiscPC with a 28MiB slot…
RISC OS 4 was a sideways update. Some cosmetic stuff was added and a few services tacked on, but I think the main improvements were to make the OS design a little more bomb proof. RISC OS 5 brought RISC OS 3.7-and-a-bit to the 32 bit world. I still think the last really dramatic update was 2→3 which was…uh…how long ago?
So, yeah, the others. They’ve kinda overtaken us. Oh well.

It was modest and ‘English’,

It’s like tea vs latté, right? ;-)
[Tetley for me every time, and I mean real Tetley, not the crap they sell in the French supermarkets]

Oh, yeah, and … Welcome Back!

I am very keen to get RISC OS onto every desktop, laptop, STB and mobile device in existence.

Somehow I think you might need to tame your aspirations. ;-)

What’s that saying? aim for the stars, hit the moon

(Also, not used to forums, so let me know of any transgressions in etiquette – I mean no harm :)

Ever been on Arcade or Digital Databank for the messaging? Ever been on Fidenet? It’s the same sort of deal here. Be polite and don’t make an ass of yourself (…..that’s my job ;-) ).

Huh! does age count for nothing round here? :)

a Windows 98 PC (Eurgh.)

Funny, I quite liked 98SE. It was Win95 that was a steaming pile of poo, and ME that sucked. But 98 wasn’t so bad given that it was Windows of the old school.

Strange I thought of Win95 as what Win3.11 should have been and Win2000 as what Win98 should have been.
I think we can agree WinME was less attractive than the stuff my cat leaves in the litter tray.

Oh, and as you say “Welcome back” James

There may be some demanding users that need a lot of memory

Or apps. My little ‘to be published’ spreadsheet can use more than 512 MB of RAM. OK, with 4 millions cells.
All in BBC Basic, and quite fast :)

I am a new member on RISC OS Open. I am very keen to get RISC OS onto every desktop, laptop, STB and mobile device in existence. (Also, not used to forums, so let me know of any transgressions in etiquette – I mean no harm :)

Suffice to say it’s been a while for me – I have a PI with the new RISC OS, a SA-RPC 600 with a 486 running RO3.6, and an A7000 running RO3.7 with a 40GB HDD (yes, it’s problematic) lol – but I would LOVE to get involved with bringing RISC OS up to date and get it back in front again, influencing lesser platforms again. ;)

1. Is there a digest/road-map/matrix I can check out to see where you guys are up to and what you’re looking at next, or should I read all the forum posts? :S

Most of the above are linked from here

Though I think there is very little there to ease your way in. I’m hoping that simpler requests (as often listed in the wish list forum selection) will be able to be organised more effectively in the future by ROOL. The problem is those people running ROOL (Like almost all those active here) are doing it unpaid in their spare time and they are struggling to keep up with things. I have suggested to ROOL one way to ‘create time’ which they are considering. In the meantime I suggest looking at the wish list forum posts and finding something that piques your interest to ease your way in with.

6. IS RISC OS now 64-bit, or still 32-bit? I don’t think that we’ll need to talk to 4GB+ of RAM just yet (unless Microsoft starts writing RISC OS software at least lol) but it would be cool to not have the limit for future.

There is a 4GB RAM RISC OS system on the way. Though for the foreseeable future RISC OS will only be able to access 2GB of it:-(

If I can help you guys with anything… I will. I may not be the world’s best coder, but I will try… I remember why RISC OS was the best OS around – at least for me – it didn’t get in the way, or try to be something it wasn’t. It was modest and ‘English’, which is so refreshing compared to Windows 7’s sensational 4GB+ footprint and 200+ multi-threaded behemoth of a desktop environment (without adding apps.)

Go for it, if at first you don’t succeed try try again. Oh and welcome:-)

Oh, yeah, and … Welcome Back!

Thank you all! Honestly, it’s REALLY good to be back :) I can say I have missed the scene. – I still have my Acorn Clan membership card – Does it hold sway in here? lol

Or apps. My little ‘to be published’ spreadsheet can use more than 512 MB of RAM. OK, with 4 millions cells.
All in BBC Basic, and quite fast :)

Hi, David. :) The footprint of BBC BASIC applications (indeed RISC OS Software,) IMHO, seems to make it a viable development language, along with the RISC OS SWIs – Fast and open. That BASIC spreadsheet is an impressive feat, BTW :)

I remember starting a game engine and an alternative desktop environment written in BASIC lol

What’s that saying? aim for the stars, hit the moon

Exactly – Whilst keeping your feet rooted on the ground ;-)

“This is when everything changes”

What are the alternatives?
- Apple: Looks nice, but BAD company.
- Windoze: Just nope… Also bad company.
- Linux: Well… It’s free and at least it’s not Windows. And the binary blobs :((
- Solaris: Isn’t that Linux? O_o lol. Tried it and it was a bit slow, ZFS looks niiiice.
- Android: Small and looks nice… Needs a proper desktop and option to disable the OSK… And it’s slow.
- SPARC: Are they still in use? Honestly, I have no idea.

RISC OS may have ruined me for other OSes. I think that after all attempts have been made, so long as we tried, I could go on to use Unix/Linux, but I cannot go back to Windoze and Apple lol I may even call it a day – I am 33 now.

I had a very long, RISC-y tech chat with a programmer I met at a party the other month. She writes real-time systems – We were both in agreement that RISC OS rules (still) and RISC is the future (Though, another of my friends reckons that as we approach a unified die of 19nm, there will be no difference in performance, but he’s a Linux CISC-head :S)

Wow! Much memories… Many reminisce.

I think we can agree WinME was less attractive than the stuff my cat leaves in the litter tray.

Oh, yes.

a system using virtual memory should not until physical memory is used up

Completely agree. RAM is faster and it shouldn’t slow things down by paging unnecessarily.

I think that with RISC OS, we have a unique way to solve problems, as was mentioned before, the OS is the framework – That gives us leverage, it just needs building, developing, rotating slightly, possibly reseating after a clean-up of the contacts (went too far with that analogy lol). I do think we shouldn’t necessarily go down comfortable paths oft walked by modern coders, but rather see what this platform can do.

I also got worried about porting FF and other incumbent mainstream softwares to RISC OS because of the poor quality of programming I fear it would bring with it and that I feel the software does too much – I like the idea of small programs running together to create a whole, unlike Microsoft and their ‘this huuuuge lump of code does it all’ approach.

When I moved from RISC OS to M$-Windows, I saw nicer graphics, heard nicer sounds, saw a decrease in desktop responsiveness and loads of features that I wouldn’t ever use. As if they were justifying the cost by adding more buttons and flashy graphics to my desktop. I see computers as tools – How many tools do you see with overly decorative pictures or features on? Not many, because they don’t actually do anything for the tool, that is all purely for the tool’s user and only a designer justifying their job could or would argue otherwise, surely. Dismounts extremely tall horse

32 bit for a long while yet.

Fair enough – 3GB RAM in RISC OS, though… WOW… The heap shuffling would echo lol

tried that, got bored with around 40 copies running

My housemate was suitably shocked by that statistic. LOL. Couldn’t do that with Word on my Win7 laptop.

I rather suspect that the choice of tablet and OS is defined more by status and budget than any specific attributes. There will be a time when it ceases to matter at all.

Exactly the place for RISC OS – Slim, tight, fast, unintrusive – Like change the desktop module to a full screen browser module??

Most of the above are linked from here

Sheepishly reads the page I completely missed

Thank you! :)

• Acorn thought ahead and included GBytes in the units for Free – RISC OS actually displays ‘40GBytes’ (with 38GBytes free LOL) for the 40GB HDD in my RPC…

Solaris: Isn’t that Linux?

Oracle OS these days (bought Sun)

Decent OS, heavy GUI makes anything graphical akin to a wade in treacle only partially rescued by processor speed.

SPARC: Are they still in use?

Sparc T5 Oracle 2013

My work colleague is the AIX, Solaris, HPUX man.

Oracle OS these days (bought Sun)

Haven’t played with it for several years. Oh, dear.

My work colleague is the AIX, Solaris, HPUX man.

Cool – Always good to know diverse peoples :)

Steve:

What’s that saying? aim for the stars, hit the moon

Exactly.

Huh! does age count for nothing round here? :)

It was a rhetorical question. A coder back in the days of the hardware originally mentioned would probably either have had to have been part of a local (school?) club, or in the comms scene in some way. It’s kind of boring writing software when there’s nobody to share it with… ;-)

I think we can agree WinME was less attractive than the stuff my cat leaves in the litter tray.

The computer I used to have that ran Win98SE originally had WinME installed. I think that says all I need to say. ;-)

My little ‘to be published’ spreadsheet can use more than 512 MB of RAM. OK, with 4 millions cells.

What are you recording with that sort of data set? SETI project data?

James:

What about porting Lynx/Links and incorporating that minimal webkit renderer on it?

Err – isn’t Lynx the text mode browser?

Chris:

In the meantime I suggest looking at the wish list forum posts and finding something that piques your interest to ease your way in with.

Alternatively, if messing with the OS itself sounds like fun [crash course in building it on a Pi at http://www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=20131105 ; some random tweaks to see what you can break at http://www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=20141101 ], then take a look also at the bug tracker, I’m sure we’d all appreciate some of the quirks and problems being fixed. ;-)

There is a 4GB RAM RISC OS system on the way. Though for the foreseeable future RISC OS will only be able to access 2GB of it:-(

David – that enough for you? :-P

Is the processor on the board 64 bit capable? I’m just wondering how you’d deal with hardware and I/O mapping on a machine with 4GiB RAM and a 4GiB address space. Or do you just accept that you’ll lose a few megabytes?

Why is RISC OS limited to 2GiB? I know there is a shortage due to how memory is mapped, but wasn’t the “logical memory followed by physical memory with everything mapped into address space together” a quirk of how the MEMC was designed? Or does RISC OS depend upon this behaviour to the point where it needs to be duplicated today?

James (again):

I still have my Acorn Clan membership card – Does it hold sway in here?

I have an ART pin badge. Err… Somewhere. And a RiscPC sweatshirt. Say… does ROOL have any plans to make apparel? Like, CafePress style stuff?

and an alternative desktop environment written in BASIC lol

Err… Didn’t we call that one Arthur? :-)

- Apple: Looks nice, but BAD company.

Looks nice, works okay, just don’t expect to get iOS updates if you actually use your iThingy for something. ;-)

As for the grown up Apple, looks very nice. My doctor has an Apple setup with a monitor that could double for a home cinema (I guess the Sécu pays for stuff like that?). Oddly enough, the medical software he uses looks like it is a website (Améli?) so did really it need shiny tech?

- Windoze: Just nope… Also bad company.

XP is nice. It’s been progressively losing the plot since…

- Linux: Well… It’s free and at least it’s not Windows. And the binary blobs :((

Free and not Windows? That’s like a politician promoting himself by saying “I’m not the other guy”.

How about this. Let me tell you about Unity… [snip several thousand words of rant]

- Android: Small and looks nice… Needs a proper desktop and option to disable the OSK… And it’s slow.

Proper desktop? It’s designed for phones and tablets. That’s there isn’t a traditional style window in sight and most things take over the screen.

You forgot Symbian and… uh… some others. Not worth remembering I guess.

She writes real-time systems

You should introduce her around here – half of our species is rather under represented (not just here, but in tech in general, and people such as Lottie Dexter really aren’t helping!).

I saw nicer graphics, heard nicer sounds, saw a decrease in desktop responsiveness and loads of features that I wouldn’t ever use.

I absolutely love the way an error message pops up on my 1.6GHz Atom XP box, and if I’m real quick with the touchpad, sometimes I can dismiss the window before the error ‘ding!’ sounds. I mean, if SMPlayer can cope with downmixing 5.1 audio to stereo headphones, HD video, and subtitles… why is it so hard for Microsoft to show a report box and make a ‘ding!’ sound at the same time?
And while there may be “oh crap, no I didn’t” benefits to how Windows does actions on a mouse release – if you are used to RISC OS, it makes the UI seem just a little bit laggy.

How many tools do you see with overly decorative pictures or features on?

Depends upon the tool. Tables, ovens, fridges… once wooden or generic white goods, they are starting to adopt patterns and designs. Look at your phone, if modern enough it probably has some sort of styling that doesn’t do anything other than make it look better.
Loads of tea pots and mugs have designs. Plates too. Sometimes cutlery. A plate with a big daisy on it doesn’t make it a better plate, it’s still a round ceramic thing for heaping pasta on. But it looks nicer for the sake of looking nicer.

Even power drills have decorative features. Okay, it is manly rubber and plastic, but you’ll notice that a non-slip grip could be a heck of a lot simpler and still be functional.

The epitome? Probably stuff like the Ferrari. Most of how it looks is purely style over substance.
But managing to one-up the Italians is what the Japanese do with their scooters – feast your eyes on this lot: http://pinktentacle.com/2010/03/custom-scooters-from-japan/

Hi, David. :) The footprint of BBC BASIC applications (indeed RISC OS Software,) IMHO, seems to make it a viable development language, along with the RISC OS SWIs – Fast and open. That BASIC spreadsheet is an impressive feat, BTW :)

It’s funny. But as usual, I spend more time on interface than on algorithms.
We really need some RAD tool :)

I remember starting a game engine and an alternative desktop environment written in BASIC lol

BBC Basic programming contest is open…
https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/1/topics/3042

What are you recording with that sort of data set? SETI project data?

I don’t know, and don’t care :). That was just a stupid idea to push EVAL to its limits.
And in fact, it works well and can be useful for data collected with some device.

I’m bored with the interface thing (CLI for now), but will try to make a kind of demo before the summer.
I hope to provide some fill commands to help using the spreadsheet.
I hope too to encapsulate the CLI interface in a Wimp window. Should not be very difficult.

Why is RISC OS limited to 2GiB? I know there is a shortage due to how memory is mapped, but wasn’t the “logical memory followed by physical memory with everything mapped into address space together” a quirk of how the MEMC was designed? Or does RISC OS depend upon this behaviour to the point where it needs to be duplicated today?

IIRC Jeffrey has explained previously that the current way the memory map is organised is the problem.
Found it here
If I understand his posting correctly without masses of work, total DA (Dynamic Areas) could be increased to 3GB with the other 1GB used for non DA requirements. Also I seem to recall that some of the necessary memory changes have already been made but more are required and they are not high on his to do list.

Is the processor on the board 64 bit capable? I’m just wondering how you’d deal with hardware and I/O mapping on a machine with 4GiB RAM and a 4GiB address space. Or do you just accept that you’ll lose a few megabytes?

The processor (unless Chris is thinking about a different 4GB RAM system to the one I’m thinking of) is 32bit. But it has the Large Physical Address Extension to allow up to 40bit physical addresses to be used.

The SoC memory map is (iIRC) set up such that all the hardware peripherals are in the first GB of physical address space, and RAM is placed after it. So we could theoretically support 3GB of RAM on the system before needing to add support for LPAE (which would be a fair amount of work – updating all the existing APIs which deal with physical addresses to use 40 or 64bit addresses instead of 32bit)

Why is RISC OS limited to 2GiB? I know there is a shortage due to how memory is mapped, but wasn’t the “logical memory followed by physical memory with everything mapped into address space together” a quirk of how the MEMC was designed? Or does RISC OS depend upon this behaviour to the point where it needs to be duplicated today?

The “logical followed by physical” issue was certainly resolved when we stopped using MEMC (although RISC OS 3/4 still used a similar scheme on IOMD – there’s a flat mapping of physical RAM starting at logical address 512MB). The big problem we’re facing now is down to the fact that the free pool is (and always has been) mapped into the logical address space. As explained in the other thread Chris has linked to, once you start getting beyond 2GB you’re going to run into serious issues with logical address exhaustion. Plus I suspect there are still a fair number of bugs dotted around the place related to using signed arithmetic for dynamic area sizes, amounts of free memory, etc. (so a free pool >=2GB, or total amount of memory >=2GB, will run into those problems)

Also I seem to recall that some of the necessary memory changes have already been made but more are required and they are not high on his to do list.

Indeed! Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to it sometime in the next few months.

The processor (unless Chris is thinking about a different 4GB RAM system to the one I’m thinking of) is 32bit.

The processor I’m thinking about which almost certainly is the one Jeffrey is thinking about is the OMAP5432

Cool – Always good to know diverse peoples :)

Oh, that’s easy at work. IT wise:
Checkpoint firewalls, various security items and Citrix / Netscaler implementations – off to my left by the window.

Unix / Linux variants – next desk clockwise from firewalls etc

ComVault storage and Unix – adjacent to previous

VMWare and various MS server builds – slightly left of forward close to the printer and coffee maker number 1

Wireless tech – straight over the divider from my desk

MS Exchange etc – annexe to office

Interfacing – up the corridor by two doors.

LAN support(Nortel/Avaya, Cisco,odds n’ sods), RADIUS – at my fingetips :)

The complicated stuff¹ is in the building across the car park or the smaller hospital site.

¹ They say it’s complicated, but then again they do tend to be poking a self-repairing system and claiming credit when it fixes itself quite often :^)

After a long hiatus, I’m back, and I have a landline connection where my computing bits are. Think it’s time to try getting this sucker online since I had so many issues with WiFi. Is there a document I should look at for this, as just hooking up to Ethernet seems to not be enough. Thanks!

Is there a document I should look at for this, as just hooking up to Ethernet seems to not be enough. Thanks!

Pi networking is disabled by default (to remove delays when it looks for a connection and can’t find it)

The welcome to the Pi document on the install image contains what you need.
There’s a copy here on the ROOL site.

While you’ve been away ROOL did some zero page protection enabling work so you might want to steer clear of any ROM image after July 4th unless you have one SD card for normal booting and another for the experimental.

I’m still not able to get online, I just don’t know what settings it is looking for…

Keep getting, “Could not resolve host, error containing DNS servers.”