RISC OS on the Raspberry Pi

I noticed that in the Pi Documentation section: “Hardware-accelerated rectangle copies (done)”
Is this in the ROM already? When was it added? Why did no-one shout and “whoop”? ;-)

1. Yes
2. 4 weeks ago
3. I was probably too busy doing other things :-)

The HW accelerated rectangle copies are about 5x faster than doing it in software. Nowhere near Iyonix speeds, but significantly better than the BB seems to manage.

Whoop! lovely.

My next whoop would be for hardware-accelerated JPEG plotting. :)

I just got artworks running on the Pi, it’s nice, really nice. I was shocked how quick it is to be honest, pretty much instant quick on all the examples.

Steve: That would be really, really good :-D
One thing I’d like to point out, 5x faster on RISC OS isn’t like 5x faster than c**p. It’s 5x faster than great.

Back on page 1 of this thread with regard to Scratch and Squeak, the question was posed

Is Tim Rowledge still around ?

{voice=“David Tennant Dr Who”}Oh yes!{/voice}

Just when I wanted to check out what Squeak the potential killer app for “Acorn RiscOS” (Ahem) is, I find you here ;-)
Allons-y!

Well patric, you’ve found me. There’s always been a Smalltalk for RISC OS, since before the ARM was even announced to the world; I’ve been pushing both like some deranged cult evangelist ever since.
The really cool thing about having an opened version of RISC OS is that there might be some chance of working out how to better support Smalltalk with tweaks that simply can’t be done otherwise. For example it’s always been again to get the data I wanted regarding key presses – we get either raw key codes that are tricky to translate, or very pre-chewed events that I have to deconstruct to get all the details needed. At the very least I can read the relevant code and find out what is really happening!
Having RISC OS on a new and popular platform like the pi is great because with people wanting to use Scratch, I get to have a good reason to care about Squeak again. And maybe some will be interested in the under lying system and end up learning the only software system actually good enough to be worth criticizing.
Right now it appears that the old package doesn’t quite work, so when my pi arrives I’ll see if I can spot why. Plans for the future would likely include building a dynamic translator to improve performance (usually 3-10X) and seeing what might be done to take advantage of the GPu.