Any updates about RiscOS on the Raspberry Pi?

RISC OS doesn’t support JTAG.

You need OS support? I thought you just plugged it in and talked directly to the processor core…

Rick:

And that’s the “problem”…

That’s what I’ve been telling them, but nobody actually believes you till you show them! It’s almost “It couldn’t possibly do all that” hence needing to take it in. Bear in mind, these people have NO interest in the technical side of things, but are likely to be swayed by the “look and feel” of things. And that’s where the old looking yellow paper textures need replacing.

To be fair, one of them (whose daughter is a teacher) asked me a couple of months ago if I’d heard about this new little computer thing for schools called a Raspberry Tart… after laughing to myself for a bit, that’s when I realised the Raspberry Pi Foundation had probably cracked the publicity angle!

A

And I think most people actually like the icon bar concept. It’s remarkably straight forward, and what can be better than running a bucketload of programs all at the same time, and not needing to have a single window open (not just minimised) till you need it?!

That said, accidentally pressing F12 undoes everything useful about the icon bar (and everything else for that matter!) if you don’t realise…

But I like the idea of a time trial against their phones! I think it stands a fair chance against their bog standard, no web Nokia job, as well as the iphone 4!

Winston Smith wrote:

I’d be interested in updating the theme if you wouldn’t mind providing some details.

You could try the ToolSprites I proposed in the ROOL ROM branding thread.

Has anyone understood/explained why I should get a stable all-black screen with the cursor flashing at the right place as you type at the (invisible) supervisor prompt and responding as you would expect (dropping two lines in response to ‘FX 0’ for example).

Everyone else seems to be getting text appearing on the screen.

I have included a ‘config. sys txt’ (edited) file with the recommended items

hdmi_mode=16

disable_overscan=1

framebuffer_ignore_alpha=1

and my monitor (says it) is displaying at 1920×1080 at 60Hz.

Hopefully not being too pedantic, but shouldn’t it be a config.txt file?

hi,

I just tried and boot successfully at the ROS supervisor prompt.
The problem is that the fonts are freakin’ small!!
I m using the TV out of the RPI, Looks like the ‘current’ ROM is for HDMI use only?

cheers

Winston:

Michael Drake suggested that

You could try the ToolSprites I proposed in the ROOL ROM branding thread.

You could also try the Theme Manager available from here

That’s roughly the theme I use, I’ve just altered the odd icon here and there, and added a Raspberry Pi switcher icon and taskmanager icon. Not that it’s visible for the most part. Just cos I can!

Has anyone understood/explained why I should get a stable all-black screen

Well, I have just downloaded the debain 19 April 2012 image (rather than the 13 April 2012 image) from the Raspberry Pi downloads site and the latest:
start.elf
loader.bin
bootcode.bin

added a file ‘config.txt’ containing:

hdmi_mode=16

#arm_freq=800

disable_overscan=1

framebuffer_ignore_alpha=1

[Have tried adding ‘overscan_bottom=20’ to the config.txt file but the bottom bit of the iconbar still invisible – known problem].

Excellent – the USB drive works – superb work guys.

The default filesystem is 8 (ADFS) rather than 26 (SCSIFS) so it will not boot from a USB pen drive (which appears as SCSI drive 0) – SCSIFSDrive default is drive 0. Might be worth changing the default until a ‘cmos’ method is introduced?

Understand it is currently ‘hardwired’ to 1920×1080.

Anyway – excellent work guys – it’s so nice to see

RISC OS 127MB

ARM1176JZF-S Processor

No keyboard present – autobooting

Supervisor

*

Is there any reason we seem to be getting 127MB RAM? I thought the Pi had 256MB, and even 128MB would seem more likely. Is this also imposed by the ROM?

Is there any reason we seem to be getting 127MB RAM?

Perhaps shades of problems we saw on the Iyonix with memory above 128Mbytes in the early days? Perhaps just temporary at the moment to simplify things?

I’m impressed – my many-years-ago application works on the Pi see screenshot

But we need a new logo – the snow-topped jellybean from the Iyonix should at least be a fruit – perhaps even a raspberry! A different raspberry from the Pi logo to avoid copyright issues…

Here you go:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Raspberry_Pi_Logo.svg

I’m sure the RPi Foundation would give ROOL permission to use it since ROOL has so kindly agreed to Eben’s port request.

BTW: Your app looks really cool, I assume your screen grab is grabbing the whole screen from video memory which is why we can see the icon bar …

The logo has been used in Archive magazine. ISTR Jim saying it was available in Artworks format.

Your app looks really cool

Are you going to brave taking your monitor on the bus for the next BRU meeting?

Are you going to brave taking your monitor on the bus for the next BRU meeting?

Yes. When is it?

I assume your screen grab is grabbing the whole screen from video memory which is why we can see the icon bar …

Yes – RISC OS doesn’t know the bottom bit of the screen is invisible to the user. It thinks it is there.

That’s what I assumed, I just wanted to make sure I hadn’t missed a fix for the icon bar!

When is it?

Beards away: 11 July.

Just after the MUG show then (7th July).

There’s WAUG tomorrow (mailing list). Pretty sure I won’t be able to make it :-(

Just FYI, if you don’t have a 1920×1080 monitor you can tweak things to use a different screen size:

• Add an appropriate hdmi_mode to config.txt on the SD card
• Adjust the numbers 1920 and 1080 in mixed/Sources/RiscOS/HAL/BCM2835/s/Video and rebuild the ROM

But doesn’t fix the iconbar issue.

The 128MB question is due to RAM being taken by the GPU. On github there are other start.elf files with different GPU/CPU RAM splits you could try.

(all this completely unsupported, of course).

I take it that a fixed screen size for the Pi ROM image is a temporary matter? (I understand that it has to start up in a fixed size as there’s no cmos to specify a boot file system or screen size but it won’t let you select a different size from the display icon on the icon bar.)

The iconbar issue (where most of the icon bar renders as black) – it would be interesting to know how/why this rather odd quirk arose and how difficult it is likely to be to overcome.

After some research, turns out my LCD TV is in fact 1920×1080p. Turns out the issue with the clipped screen is not enough overscan; add the following lines to config.txt to narrow up the display:

overscan_left=15
overscan_top=15
overscan_right=15
overscan_bottom=15

YMMV, these values can be adjusted to suit your display.

NOTE: The desktop is still missing the icon bar.

Some feedback for anyone who’s interested, since I’ve just spent a few hours playing…

The absence of the bottom part of the screen can be bodged around by adding 100 to the height passed across to the GPU (mbyres and virtual res in s.Top in the HAL). I’ll try to track down what’s going on, since I can see both sides of the comms; no such hack was necessary with earlier code. It’s don’t think it’s do with the base address, and we can choose our own (though the Linux build doesn’t do this, so it may have issues).

I built a from the downloaded tarball, but found that USB didn’t work for me then, though it works in the ROM image I downloaded. Perhaps something’s been broken/is unreliable. I’ve also had the working ROM ignore the mouse once, until I unplugged and reattached it.

An ageing RO5 boot sequence is fine, StrongED runs, Aemulor can run simple apps but it looks like complex ones are taken down by a single fault currently. Cino runs, unaccelerated, and looks pretty promising; the memory latency (B-frame decoding) is better on our chip and we have a L2 cache, so with YUV→RGB and upsampling down by the GPU it may achieve MPEG-2/DVD playback on the ARM. For licensing reasons it can’t be done on the GPU.

I can’t get EtherUSB to play at the moment, but I perhaps don’t know how to drive it. I can probably learn something from the ARMini, unless someone’s got advice? NetSurf starts up but had rendering issues; it was an old version though I suspect that’s not relevant, and of course I can’t go online.

Oh, and yes, only 1920×1080 is supported in various places (HAL + kernel) at the moment. I’m assured the GPU-side software support scaling now, though I’ve not yet tried it.

I have also had an ignored mouse (and I think its LED was off – it was an optical mouse) and I had to plug/unplug it. Fiddling with the ‘dead’ mouse after a ‘SCSI *Run !Boot’ and it seemed to generate a ‘RETURN’ when I clicked it (pointing to the middle of the screen) as the ‘Retry’ button of the ‘network unable to start up’ [no ethernet cable] ended up clicked. Will try network and let you know.