Six months after purchasing a Castle Iyonix, drobe.co.uk writer Martin Hansen recounts his experiences with RISC OS 5 and his new XScale powered hardware, serving an illustration of life with the latest generation of RISC OS machines.
My Iyonix and I
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
People have been saying good things about RISC OS for years; I knew some happy RISC users when I lived in the UK. Do States-side vendors exist? Is there a user community in the U.S.? Doing the rough pounds-to-dollars conversion, the machines aren’t especially inexpensive. Can someone with RISC experience comment on how the hardware compares with comparably priced PC’s and Apple products?
There are no RISC OS dealers in the USA(to the best of my knowledge). Simon Wilson is probably the most well known user living state side.
http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~wilsonsl/iyonix/tvcard.html
RISC OS is very responsive compared to PC’s despite the PC’s obvious clock speed advantage. There are areas where RISC OS is much slower e.g. MP3 conversion (due to a lack of floating point maths hardware). The Iyonix is the first new generation RISC OS system using XScale processor to appear and is a considerable step up from older machines.
The RISCPC is still a very good machine for its age and can be picked up quite cheaply on eBay. Look for a StrongARM processor and RISC OS 4 operating system when buying.
When I went to college, I remember using the teachers Acorn laptop running RiscOS, it just seemed to keep going and going on the piddly little battery that was included with it.
Just read the article, and the Acorn people remind me of the Atari, Amiga and Apple users 🙂 we’re small in number but we’re happy with the opportunity to use something other than the status quo.
The laptop kaiwai is talking about it the Acorn A4. Unfortunately their are no RISC OS laptops using native ARM chips these days, only “virtual” ones. RISC OS system use ARM processors that have very low power requirements (that’s why you find ARM chips in cellphones, PDA’s, iPOD and Gameboy). Acorn is the company that originally developed the ARM chip before spin off ARM as a seperate company.
http://www.virtualacorn.co.uk
http://www.arm.com
True, when I went to primary school, the main computers used were either Atari, Amiga or Acorn, there were a couple of Apples, but not one PC in sight.
I would love to see a nice Xscale ARM processor, throw on a nice floating point processor and it would be a nice little laptop running either NetBSD or Linux.
I love risc OS. I have yet to manage to lay my hands on a risc pc (I’m on a student budget
) but a friend of mine had an old archimedes 3010. That thing was awesome. Very fast. A ton of fun to play with 
I’d love to see a laptop powered by an arm cpu like the new 1ghz capable TI OMAPs. Pop in 512mb of ram, 40gb hdd, a MONSTER battery, risc os 4 and your good to go 