How do you compile RISC OS OPEN 5 using windows into a ROM image?

I was wondering how you compile RISC OS OPEN 5 using windows into a ROM image. i am using either VirtualRPC (recommended at Acorn World) or Arculator (Other).

You need the RiscOS development kit. There is a link on this page.

However I found it was much easier to buy a riscpc and use that.

I would point you towards a page on the wiki, but the wiki just died again :(

As Stephen says, the first step is to make sure you’ve got a copy of the C/C++ tools

I’ve restarted the Wiki. Jeffrey probably meant this page:

http://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/pages/Building+RISC+OS+for+the+Risc+PC

(EDIT: There’s also a FAQ document here:

http://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/pages/Build+FAQ

...which may be of use later on).

There is also the option of GCC, an open source compiler. You can find information on the GCCSDK on riscos.info – however it is not at present possible to build a complete ROM using this. I think there’s been some discussion on the forums about doing so, but it’s a huge job to convert the whole source tree over to cross compilation. At present, only a limited number of components support it. Of course, in time, if you learned enough to and were interested in upgrading other components so they supported cross compilation too and submitted those patches back to us, that would be fantastic.

FYI I had a go with RISC OS 5 on the CD you got, and RPCEmu’s latest build from the Mercurial tree (the repository mentioned at the very bottom of the RPCEmu “spoon” web page). It took a while to persuade it to build on Mac OS but after that it runs OK. I can’t persuade it to work with ADFS (I think the CD image pre-dates those patches and I’m not even sure if they’ve been fed back into the main source tree yet) and HostFS doesn’t seem to be built in at present, which is odd; this means you’ve no filing system apart from that in ROM. So it’s a bit boring – you can run ROM applications like Draw and Paint, but not do much else. Still – it shows that the emulator is capable of running the OS.

Cheers Andrew!

I was actually going to point Matthew towards the Cortex-A8 port source code page, since it provides step-by-step instruction on how to build a ROM image (unlike the “building for the RiscPC page” which is mostly a discussion of the hurdles someone would face with polishing off a RiscPC ROM image). Note that although the Cortex-A8 page obviously focuses on building an OMAP3 ROM, the steps to set up a build tree and build a ROM image are pretty much the same for the Iyonix (aka Tungsten) or RiscPC (aka IOMD) ROM images. And if getting the source code from CVS is too much hassle then there are also autobuilt source code archives available from the bottom of this page.

A few shows ago, I did a screen recording of the commercial Virtual Acorn emulator which shows (ish) how to do a build under RISC OS. Without a verbal commentary – just on-screen notes I type in – and if you don’t know too much about RISC OS, it may seem a bit arbitrary and confusing. However, I still think it’s worth uploading as at least it helps give a ‘feel’ for the process.

To try and cover all OS bases, I have an MKV file with a Theora video stream inside (no audio) here:

http://www.riscosopen.org/objects/risc_os_open/building.mkv

...which should render with VLC on most platforms, plus an MP4 file with H.264 (encoded by x264) video stream here:

http://www.riscosopen.org/objects/risc_os_open/building.mp4

...with both at around 960×560-ish resolution, scaled down from the laptop’s native 1440×900, which should render without much trouble on Windows, with no trouble at all on Mac OS X, and may or may not work on Linux (distro dependent, doubtless). It should also work on iPod v5 and later devices (so iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad and any Android platform with H.264 support).

Aside: I’ve not been drawn into comparisons about Theora versus H.264 (for HTML5 video), but it’s quite clear from comparing these two very similar sized file that the H.264 result is far, far better. This result could be as much an artefact of the compressor quality as the CODEC, but this is a decent enough – if unintentional – real world test IMHO.

...oh, almost forgot – the strange blank rectangle that shows up around files in the Filer when they’re dragged is down to some kind of bug in RISC OS 4 when run under emulation.

Or you could just use it all as an excuse to get a real RPC. They really are very nice. :)

Following on from this – the latest IOMD compatible ROM image which can run on RPCEmu, if RPCEmu is built from the latest Mercurial source code, has been uploaded. Check the following forum thread for details:

https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/5/topics/410#posts-3892

Thanks guys! I will go for the open source compiler!

Matthew, I just wondered how you’re getting on with this. Any joy?