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very nicely laid out... i think ill use this and try RISC OS... ive been curious

Ahh, it's great to see that in a decade the combined efforts of thousands of highly paid programmers, interface designers and 'future' thinkers has brought us so far.

What?
Don't believe me?

I know for a fact my desktop has prettier buttons....

I was an Acornphile from 1980 up to about 1996. At that point it could no longer be ignored that Acorn were brilliant technicians and ideas people but the worst worst marketers on the entire planet and they were doomed to fail for real.

So I started moving away from them emotionally I guess so the final whimper didn't hurt as much. :/

The amazing thing is how much of our modern system ideas came from there, the taskbar is a good example that has become pretty much a standard GUIism.

There are things it had too that I've *still* not seen in Windows (not used OSX) such as the instant RAMDisk. You go to the task/memory manager and drag a bar along to allocate the memory you want and that's it! Instant RAMDisk. Brilliant.

Oh and Arthur was actually the quick-and-dirty OS to go on the Acorn Archimedes boxes because RiscOS wasn't ready, ie: they both ran on the same hardware.

I was at the Acorn computer show when the Arcs were released in London (I think it was the Barbican... a ghoulish tavern of a place with low roofs and piping...) and it was amazing. They had the "lander" demo going which became the game Zarch (and then Virus on Amiga)

I was also at a preview launch at my uni of the RiscPC with it's funky segment design. Ahhh... bittersweet.

Hi all.
Nice article!
Does sanyone knows if something similar currently EXISTS for the VMS plataform? Any Linuc/Windows Emulator fur such hardware?
Many thanks.

Forgot to put this in the article - it's a great guide to ARM assembler programming :- http://www.heyrick.co.uk/assembler/ . There's also a very interesting history of the ARM processor, and Acorn machines as a whole there :- http://www.heyrick.co.uk/assembler/history.html .

I thought it was worth mentioning that there is a RiscPC emulator (the successor to the VirtualAcorn mentioned in the article) on the market now, VirtualRPC, which does come with networking facilities and a copy of RISC OS 4.

It's a bit too expensive for a casual play though, I suspect, which is where the free ones like RedSquirrel come in.

Off topic, but yes, there is. Simh emulates a VAX, and I use it ton run OpenVMS7.3 very succesfully. http://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax-simh.html

"The predecessor of RISC OS, 'Arthur' was released in 1987, and ran on 8-bit hardware..."

Bzzt! Arthur ran on 32-bit hardware - the author is clearly thinking about MOS, from which Arthur inherited a shedload of baggage.

Very true - my mistake. Thanks for the clarification... I did mention my memory was hazy

Someone apparently replaced "riscos" with "RISC OS" throughout the article. It may have generally been a good thing, but it also broke several links that had "riscos" in them. So if you get an error when following a link in the article, replace "RISC OS" or "RISC%20OS" with "riscos" and you should get there.

Acorn emulation on Unix and MacOS X:

http://arcem.sf.net/


There's a RISC OS show this weeked too:

http://www.argonet.co.uk/acornshow/

You don't need to bugger around creating a basic !System to start with. Just remove (*) the line in !SparkPlug.!Run (**) that looks like:
if system$dir = "" Then Error
and then it will run.

(*) Using the text editor supplied in ROM
(*) Shift double-click to open !SparkPlug and shift double click to edit the !Run file

I use VirtualRiscPC with RISCOS 4 and Select.
Select allows the use of much higher screen modes with more colour as it allows the OS to 'use' 8Mbs for screen memory (VRam) and the more uptodate Desktop allows the use of Jpeg wallpaper (Backdrops) and Directories (folders) can be much larger and have a 'thumbnail' option.

RiscOS has lots of free software including the excellent
!Zap (editor) !JCut (jpeg editor) to mention just two.

Thanks for covering RiscOS emulation, Dave Cooper

I look at this and it is a nice trip for nostalgia sake, but there is really no reason to run RISC OS? Am I missing something here.

I do just fine running LINUX, MacOS X and Windows XP - yes, I run all three. I am also a OS junkie and have tried about every differing LINUX dist. out there and prefer Mac OS X to either of the other two listed above. It is more secure and stable then anything I have dealt with and the eye candy alone is worth its weight.

That being said, someone made the comment about running Mac OS X on x86 and I have to state that this isn't a far stretch for Apple to do. What I mean to say is that most of what Mac OS X is built on is the Darwin code base (BSD based) and the old NeXT/OpenStep operating environment, both of which run on x86 boxes. I would love to see the OS X run on x86 - but I digress now.

So - if someone can help me understand why I would want to run RISC OS (without flaming me) then please do so.

Peace!

Mark sounds like I did a year ago. I had three PCs loading up with eight different OSs. Each and every one of them left me hungry and unsatisfied.

While nothing is perfect. I finally found what I was looking for last year and those three PCs with those eight OSs have fallen out of favor. In fact they haven't been turned on for over six months now.

Not a fanatic. Just someone that finally has an OS that isn't a pain in the a** to do everyday things. And some not so oridinary things.

Not a fanatic. Just someone that finally has an OS that isn't a pain in the a**
to do everyday things. And some not so oridinary things.

It's easy working with digital photos.
It's easy to make home movies and burn them onto DVDs. No more VHS tapes to hassle with.
Updating and expanding my wetsite is fast and easy and everyone says it looks great.
And a new app on this OS got me back into making my own music after 20 years.

The best thing is. IT JUST WORKS. No more worrying about viruses and worms and security holes. No more blue or black screens of death of "unexpected program error." Ahhhh

So what did I find? Mac OS X.

Sabon really does say it all. RISC OS has a highly intuitive desktop system; it does everything you need very simply and without the ability to scare. That's the very reason RISC OS had its roots in the education market - because a five year old REALLY COULD use it easily.

It does lack some of the bells and whistles of a modern OS in many ways - DVD writing for example. However, as OSes go, it carries far less baggage, is *extremely* stable, and has applications for pretty much most everyday tasks for 95% of the userbase.

Virtual RISC PC (the best of the emulator offerings IMHO, by far the most advanced,) with RISC OS 4.3X should offer anyone who dislikes the Windows OS but is forced to use it an EXCELLENT alternative. And better still, if you MUST use a Windows application, simply flicking back to Windows to complete that operation is easy.

I do this at home - but I use a RISC PC and Windows box attached by crossover cable.


There are LOTS of good reasons to use RISC OS, particularly as your primary OS - I'd recommend a hunt around at www.drobe.co.uk or www.iconbar.com.

Yeah simh is probably the best bet for VMS on x86. There is also charon-vax, probably expensive. There have also been a couple of VMS on x86: freevms and pc vms. Freevms is still in alpha phase. And pc vms is ancient, and hard to find. There may be some other options, but getting a used alpha is probably the easiest route other than simh. I've seen ~ 500 mhz alpha with 128 to 1 gig ram at $100 to $150 before. Caveat: some alphas need mods to run VMS. Vaxen are cool, but probably electricity hogs.

"I would love to see the OS X run on x86 - but I digress now."

Mac seems to make money on the package, box, monitor and OS. And piecemealing them, has not worked well in the past. You noticed how they cracked down on the recent clone maker. I agree Darwin's on x86 already (to some extent) ... probably wouldn't be too much to port the rest over. There's still the possibility of emulation, the Gamecube emu is a ppc emu.

"So - if someone can help me understand why I would want to run RISC OS (without flaming me) then please do so."

For the hell of it. This is *OS* news after all. Looking at old OS can actually give insights into the future. A lot of the MS "innovations" have been done ages ago in other OS.

I generally run emulators from CD, using DirectCD. That way I can have all the ROMs, saved downloads, and the applications all in one place, and don't have to reinstall / reconfigure the emulators every time I reinstall Windows. I can even have multiple emulators on the same CD using the same ROMs.

Is the RiscOS emulator fast enough to run from CD this way?

-Bob

By the way, (oops, I was going to add a short list of Mac emulators, but those posts have been moderated)...

It's rare to find articles written about this OS from outside its community. Well done for writing a well-informed article.

I was using RISC OS pretty much from when I got an A3000 for Christmas in '89, then moved onto the RiscPC in Christmas '94, and managed to stick with it full time, until late-99. I returned to it one more time in mid-2000 to view a piece of software for Acorn User. It's been in my parent's attic back in the UK ever since. I do miss using it!

xmp:

"For the hell of it. This is *OS* news after all. Looking at old OS can actually give insights into the future."

Uhm, define and "old" OS? RISC OS has had new versions released regularly(ish) over the last few years. Although quite whether version 4.whatever of version 5 is "newer" is somehwat up for debate ;-)

"A lot of the MS "innovations" have been done ages ago in other OS."

One could make the more specific argument that a lot of the MS WIMP/UI innovations came directly from RISC OS, and not just the task bar, but Context snesitive menus etc - shame MS still haven't quite got their heads around the concept of allowing inactive (i.e. without the input focus) windows at the front... fools.