RISC OS Open at Acorn World
Posted by Steve Revill Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:26:00 GMT
This weekend, RISC OS Open will be attending the Acorn World part of Britain’s largest celebration of vintage computing: the Vintage Computing Festival in Bletchley Park from 19th-20th June 2010.
We will be proving that RISC OS is still alive and well with a range of demonstrations, including:
- RISC OS on the Beagle Board
- RISC OS under emulation
- Future RISC OS hardware platforms (Touch Book)
Come along and find out what all of the fuss is about! You can also help support the cause and pick up some ROOL merchandise, including:
- Mugs
- T-shirts
- Show CDs with the latest software and sources
- Developer tools
The Acorn World section is supported by the RISC OS User Group of London.
Wow – you guys are certainly keeping busy, promoting the fruits of all the work being done by attending another show… and, this being vintage computing, perhaps someone will fancy experimenting with 6502Em and/or Labyrinth on the BeagleBoard!
Hi comrades in ARMs,
I am just on the way back from the Vintage Computer Festival. There was a good attendance with quite a lot of folk interested in my BB (BeagleBoard) running RISC OS 5. I was on the ROUGOL stand, but there was another BB working on the ROOL stand. Both stands are part of RISC OS World which is the largest part of the VCF. Although the BB is quite the opposite of vintage, I managed to sneak it in before the show got going.
The VCF carries on tomorrow, Sunday, so you can still come, show support for RISC OS and pay homage to Alan Turing in Hut 8 while you are here.
I was there on Sunday and I purchased the RISC OS OPEN Source Code. The man showing the RISC OS running through the BEAGLE BOARD and he was also showing the Touch Book, was quite good (BAD ENGLISH). I am 9 years old and am VERY good at computing. It took a very long time to get there!
Ah, good to hear from you! I was the person you spoke to at the VCF. Following on from that, in case you have yet to discovered it via Google or riscos.info, RPCEmu is here:
http://www.marutan.net/rpcemuspoon/
You may have success with the IOMD ROM image on your CD in “RISCOS/517BETA/soft-omd.5.17.zip” with Spoon 0.8.6 on Windows or Linux. Alternatively, if you scroll to the bottom of the page you can find out how to access the very latest (but not necessarily tested / stable) source code to compile it and see if it works better. It’s going to be a steep learning curve but I’m sure people will be happy to answer any questions you might have on the Forum (see the link in the brown navigation bar at the top of this page).
If you don’t mind spending another £5, a quick way to get a working version of RISC OS would be to buy the commercial RISC OS 4.02, designed for emulator use, which runs well under RPCEmu 0.8.6 without needing any special hacks, tricks, or whatever. It comes with reasonably detailed installation instructions too. You can find it here:
http://www.e-junkie.com/43789
Forgive the strange address – RISC OS Limited, who sell this, have a rather odd web site! Look for the “Virtually Free” download package.
Getting RISC OS 4 to work may help you familiarise yourself with the environment and help with getting RISC OS 5 to boot too, though in theory, you ought to be able to get RISC OS 5 basically up and running (in a crude form) without paying any money.
Whether running RISC OS 4 or 5 inside an emulator, you may find you need to know more about using RISC OS itself. We did a quick “tour” at the show, but for more information, please see:
http://www.riscos.info/index.php/Introduction_to_RISC_OS
…and of course, as we discussed at the show, your CD can be read on any operating system and you can browse the source at your leisure, without any need to have RISC OS present. Just remember that there’s the strange convention of a directory called “c” containing ‘C’ language source without a “.c” filename extension, or “s” containing ARM assembler source code and so-forth, which is different from how other operating systems tend to work. There are all sorts of different languages in use for the full RISC OS ROM, so you should have plenty to get your teeth into!