Latest news

We're here to guide all RISC OS users

Posted by Steve Revill Sun, 31 Oct 2021 12:03:00 GMT

With a little help from our friends at CJE Micro’s we’re now delighted to be able to offer a free download of the User Guide for the latest stable release of RISC OS 5.

Posted in Web site, New documentation, Press release | 2 comments

ObjAsm becomes self-aware in latest DDE update

Posted by Steve Revill Thu, 25 Feb 2021 22:27:00 GMT

The assembler tool, one of the cornerstones of the Desktop Development Environment (DDE), has taken on a life of its own in the latest update which was made available to eligible developers today. The main changes include:

• The addition of support for instructions from ARMv8.0 to the very latest ARMv8.6
• Support for the IEEE half-precision floating point instructions in the VFP instruction set
• A new data type for BFloat16
• More thorough rules checking around ‘IT’ blocks
• A number of bug fixes and improvements to warning and error text
• The table of known CPUs to target has been updated, right up to the Cortex-X1
• Extra built-in variables to allow conditional assembly for a given target

Posted in New documentation, New product, Community | 4 comments

New Desktop Development Environment reaches out

Posted by Steve Revill Fri, 21 Feb 2020 22:39:00 GMT

Last year’s London show saw the snappily titled DDE29 becoming generally available.

Packing in some 300 changes, the main highlights are:

• Latest Norcroft C compiler
  • Code generation now tailored to use ARMv6/v7/v8 extended instructions where possible
  • Optimisations to substitute selected code sequences with ARMv6/v7/v8 media instructions where possible
  • Inline assembler updated to accept ARMv6/v7/v8 mnemonics
  • Literal pool reductions where available and enabled through use of MOVW+MOVT
  • New intrinsic functions to get access to operations not normally accessible from C
• ABC (the BASIC compiler) now supports hexadecimal entered in mixed case
• Revised User Interface Toolbox and ABC manuals plus detailed change logs for all the provided tools
• Library improvements to the TCP/IP library adds RFC2553 supporting functions, part of the TCP/IP bounty work getting ready for IPv6, and stronger type checking for all functions in the Toolbox library
• DDT (the desktop debugger) now uses the same disassembly engine as other tools, and can step the new instructions which the compiler emits
• Technical enhancements to AMU, CMHG, and ABC’s command line processing

Posted in Web site, New documentation, New product, Press release | no comments

Fruit of community effort ready to pick

Posted by Steve Revill Tue, 29 May 2018 10:59:00 GMT

Updating the User Guide from the parrot’s previous outing in 1996 has been a huge task. We’ve incorporated some of the introductory chapters about using RISC OS from the Welcome Guide (your supplier should still give you specific instructions about plugging the computer together), plus adding new chapters to cover the extra bundled applications and features in RISC OS 5.

A total of 62 chapters and over 900 images were brought together, with contributions and reviewing from the community. There’s now also some tutorial material included in the latest HardDisc4 to accompany the text.

In light of the community input we’ve squeezed the price down to just £20.00 (plus delivery, cost depends on destination) with an electronic copy following shortly for those who prefer to read on screen.

Posted in New documentation, Community | 5 comments