Any updates about RiscOS on the Raspberry Pi?

This could, of course, be automated one day, if someone were to wrap-up OS upgrades into a suitable updater tool.

The key thing for me is to know when a particular rom upgrade demands or some new functionality depends on a difference in the disc image. This happened a few times on the Iyonix but (while the update watcher was actually still working) was fairly well communicated. ROM upgrades are numbered and well documented if something important changes. Changes in the disc image tend not to be noticed.

I am trying to use a programme called !adffs to open .adf (&fce) files on the Pi. This application loads okay but if you click on it, it complains that ADFS is missing. Is there a reason not to include ADFS in the Pi distro, other than a commendable desire to keep it lean? Can I reinsert the ADFS module without breaking SDFS??

Chris – can I make a minor constructive criticism? WHen I go to your website http://www.svrsig.org/Alpha.htm, I can’t find any link or instructions on how to download the disc image itself.

Also it seems that the links to the update archives are broken – you’re linking to “AlphaUp5/zip” instead of “AlphaUp5.zip” for example.

Chris – can I make a minor constructive criticism? WHen I go to your website http://www.svrsig.org/Alpha.htm, I can’t find any link or instructions on how to download the disc image itself.

That file is unadvertised and is only for those who have no Pi to be able to see the start up ‘welcome’ page. The links have been corrected in update 7 (oops!). It will thus only be viewed on a Pi which has already loaded the 13 July 2012 alpha distro.

Chris,

I’ve found that the cumulative update file http://www.svrsig.org/AlphaUp.zip no longer exists resulting in the links in the update page failing.

I’m assuming that http://www.svrsig.org/AlphaUp4.zip is the correct file from which updates 5-7 can then be added yes?

Sorry I had accidentally renamed it as AlphaUp4.zip (the previous cumulative ones being there as 1..2..3). Now sorted. AlphaUp4.zip has therefore now vanished. Updates 5 to 7 are both optional and incremental. (That is you can miss one out if you don’t want it. I will try to make later ones not rely on earlier ones but will, no doubt, fail.)

Thanks Chris.

Could you also update the initial post in ‘Announcements > Alpha testing on Pi’

Done.

Alex:

I am trying to use a programme called !adffs to open .adf (&fce) files on the Pi. This application loads okay but if you click on it, it complains that ADFS is missing. Is there a reason not to include ADFS in the Pi distro, other than a commendable desire to keep it lean? Can I reinsert the ADFS module without breaking SDFS??

This was new to me. What a shame that, written in an era where the sources to ADFS are published, the author chose heaven-knows what method to intercept the communication between ADFS and FileCore, rather than adding an official external floppy driver interface into ADFS. That might have made things easier for other people to add additional floppy controllers, say for the KryoFlux (which unlike standard USB floppy drives, would give us access to physical FileCore-formatted floppies on modern hardware).

At the moment, I don’t think ADFS will even build for the new machines. It has build-time options to determine what hardware controllers it expects to find – 1770 or ‘876 FDC in IOC/IOMD or the Iyonix’s PCI SouthBridge, plus ST506 or IDE controllers, similarly located. Versions of ADFS built for other machines might run, but I suspect they’d either crash or fail to initialise properly.

But feel free to try it. It certainly won’t interfere with SDFS, any more than RamFS or SCSIFS do (both are examples of other FileCore filing systems).

This was new to me. […] method to intercept the communication between ADFS and FileCore […]

Here’s the ADFFS thread, which is part of a larger project.

I am trying to use a programme called !adffs to open .adf (&fce) files on the Pi. This application loads okay but if you click on it, it complains that ADFS is missing. Is there a reason not to include ADFS in the Pi distro, other than a commendable desire to keep it lean? Can I reinsert the ADFS module without breaking SDFS??

I got it to work to a degree. I coudn’t get the filer to appear on the iconbar but double clicking on the floppy images opens them up and extracting the files works too.

Hi Ben,

ADFFS is specifically for the situation “run bloody copy-protected games from an image on old versions of RISC OS”, so the author chose the right approach to solve the problem.

However, having a real new floppy FS which communicates with KryoFlux would be also great. It doesn’t have the same nostalgia factor however ;-)

Or… why not ‘just’ write a driver for USB floppy? One that plugs into ADFS?

Where’s the best place to go for a 32-bit safe *ADFS module? I looked in CVS online and they show up as
castle/RiscOS/Sources/FileSys/ADFS/ADFS HEAD
castle/RiscOS/Sources/FileSys/ADFS/ADFSFiler HEAD

Whereas under OMAP3 there are version numbers.
castle/RiscOS/Sources/FileSys/ADFS/ADFS ADFS-3_41
castle/RiscOS/Sources/FileSys/ADFS/ADFSFiler ADFSFiler-1_03

Could someone guide me as to how to extract the module files from CVS and do the necessary building/compiling to get a module that I can try to run under RISC OS please?

I am a total newbie when it comes to compiling but want to get into this so any idiot’s guide instructions appreciated!

Now drag the file(s) from the window ‘..SDFS_Up’ to the window ‘SDFS::RISCOS.$.!Boot.Loader’. This updates you to the latest ROM image.

Is this right? I would have thought i should copy the contents of ‘..ROM_Up’ to the Loader folder, ie over right the ‘riscos/img’ file. If it is wrong then the same problem exists in the current AlphaUp help file.

Chris Hall – could I zip and mail you the iconsprites and backgrounds I mashed up for your initial thoughts please?

could I zip and mail you the iconsprites and backgrounds

Yes chris at svrsig dot org

from the window ‘..SDFS_Up’

A picture is worth a thousand words. It is indeed from the window ‘…ROM_up’. Let’s hope that didn’t cause too much difficulty… ROM updates are now just done in one step with the other updates.

Or… why not ‘just’ write a driver for USB floppy? One that plugs into ADFS?

But it would only be able to read DOS format floppies as DOS format only is reportedly hardwired into all USB floppy drives. So it can never read ADFS (Filecore) format discs:-(
or have I miss understood your suggestion.

Chris E – yes, you’re absolutely right – this was getting off topic so I followed up the top level post about USB floppy drivers where Rick M makes that point.

More relevant are Kryoflux driver references from Ben A which would be a relatively small niche but important to software preservation and getting classic software into an image file, and then what I was hoping to do originally – mount an ADF file in a drive, for which !ADFFS is designed, if I can get it to work.

Chris G – Was it on a Pi that you were trying !ADFFS? On my Pi I got the opposite response – the app appears to load happily, I get the icon reminiscent of the original floppy icon on the icon bar, and &FCE files associate properly. I can menu-click on the filer icon which gives a menu, but a select click, or dragging an ADF file to the icon, result in an error complaining that ADFS cannot be found…

Chris G – Was it on a Pi that you were trying !ADFFS? On my Pi I got the opposite response – the app appears to load happily, I get the icon reminiscent of the original floppy icon on the icon bar, and &FCE files associate properly. I can menu-click on the filer icon which gives a menu, but a select click, or dragging an ADF file to the icon, result in an error complaining that ADFS cannot be found…

I get the same without an ADFS module loaded. I built an ADFS module from CVS and loaded it manually. It’s a bit unstable though. Sometimes the machine locks up or an abort occurs. If you let me know your email address I can send you the ADFS module to try.

Hi Chris, yes please – alex atsign alexgibson fullstop net. Cheers! How do you check out and build a module? Can I rtfm somewhere?

As the author of ADFFS, I can probably add some input here. It was written with software preservation in mind and as such hijacks ADFS::0 to emulate disc copy protection.

To work, it requires a stub of ADFS containing:

- FileCore registration in the Init code
- All ADFS_ SWI’s which need to remain unchanged…they should just pass the call onto FileCore.
- Stub DiscOp and MiscOp entries which exit having done nothing.

Everything else can be stripped out, ie Service code, Interrupt handlers

If someone wants to implement this, I’ll include it in a future release and load the stub module if ADFS isn’t present. Alternatively, I can code a stub module from scratch.

EDIT: If you want to mount ADF images only, you can use v1.02 which doesn’t require ADFS:
http://adffs.filecore.net/files/old/

Distro now updated to latest ROM, firmware and HardDisc4 image. The download is now 48.2Mbytes. No further updates until I have tested it all thoroughly.

The source code archive BCM2835Dev on this site carries a note in red: “Incomplete. Pre-alpha quality.”

It was agreed a few days ago that it’s now alpha quality; but is it incomplete? If it is, what else has to be added to complete it?

I’m interpreting “incomplete” in the sense of bits missing from the archive, rather than being unfinished – but others say “Work in progress”, and we are well aware that the BCM2835 port is WIP, so my interpretation looks reasonable.

It was agreed a few days ago that it’s now alpha quality; but is it incomplete? If it is, what else has to be added to complete it?

There are several things that I would add:

• A printing definition for ‘Printers’ – probably print to PDF so that the PDF file can be sent to a printer on the network?
  
• update !Cat to 0.03 which adds a ‘search for filename’ and ‘save disc structure as draw file’ (already done but accidentally omitted)
  
• I hope to be able to have the BBC BASIC Guide and PRMs as part of the disc image rather than on a hyperlink to an external site. Also to add ‘RISC OS Style Guide’.
  
• I hope to give the package manager a configured web site link to software selected for the Pi for download.
  
• I hope to have some new icons or a theme manager.
  
• I would like to add a utility to switch on/off aligned rotate LDRB behaviour
  
• I would like to add Python if it gets ported soon.
  
• Reference to ‘alpha testing’ in the welcome page will be removed when the image goes to beta or RC1.
  
• Add link to a comprehensive ‘Welcome guide’.
  
• Add NapoleonII and MineHunt (which currently fail as they use Sound SWIs).
  
• Add Spr2Png.

I would say unfinished (what is there is substantially complete) rather than incomplete.

Please note that I am referring to the disc image in particular – there is still work in progress on the rom which is thus both unfinished and incomplete (no sound yet for example).

Fonts; could we have a unicode font and the raspberry pi official font added?

Could the image be made universal? i.e if containing beagleboard rom and loaders (and possibly even able to work on an Iyonix if configured to boot from USB)

What is the situation with screen modes? Is 1920×1080 the only possible mode at present? It would be nice to have 1024×575 so it can be used with widescreen PAL TVs.