RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi released

https://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2012/10/26/risc-os-pi-released-risc-os-for-the-raspberry-pi

by zdw • 14 years ago

65 28 14 years ago

codeulike3• 14 years ago

Why this is interesting:

"RISC OS is a fast, light-weight operating system specifically designed for the ARM architecture. It was developed by the same team of engineers who created the original ARM processor"

Original Acorn Archimedes (which ran RISC OS): 1988, £1000

Raspberry Pi: 2012, £27

bane• 14 years ago

Site is down, how compatible will this be with the existing software library? If I'm not mistaken there was a pretty good set of Amiga/Atari ST games ported to the Archimedes back in the day.

pepijndevos• 14 years ago

Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZIAA_ur...

danellis3• 14 years ago

Back in the day, a lot of those games made a lot of assumptions about the hardware that it directly accessed. Even going from ARM 2 to ARM 3 to StrongARM caused a lot of problems for games.

codeulike3• 14 years ago

When I was writing games for the Archimedes, I was using ARM-assembly routines to write pixels directly to the double-buffered screen memory. So I think a full blown emulator would be needed, rather than just the same OS. Unless ARM-6 can still execute ARM-1 assembly, and it still has addressable screen memory?

codeulike3• 14 years ago

Its kind of sweet how this HN post flattened their server. I don't think RISC-OS has attracted this much attention for 25 years.

meaty5• 14 years ago

Awesome. As someone who spent 10 years with RISC OS, this just rocks.

danellis3• 14 years ago

10 years ago is very late in the RISC OS lifecycle, so I'm curious -- how did you come to discover it then?

ralph2• 14 years ago

I didn't read the grandparent as meaning "the past ten years" but "ten years at some point in the past".

zem• 14 years ago

having always been mildly regretful at having missed out on the archimedes (jumped from bbc b to x86), this sounds like a wonderful thing to explore.

meaty5• 14 years ago

It was pretty good but not as good as the beeb was so you didn't miss out on a lot. The architecture was a lot more complex.

a2352• 14 years ago

for those that would like to play, raspberrypi.org has a mirror with the latest-to-release RC5: http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/images/riscos/riscos-2012-1...

mtgx• 14 years ago

Too bad Rasperry Pi didn't start on an ARMv7 Cortex A5 at least. So much effort being put into a near-death ARMv6 architecture.

timthorn• 14 years ago

Near-death? ARMv5 is still going strong, I'm pretty sure there's a decent amount of v4 being produced, too.

tudorw• 14 years ago

uh oh, if it run's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch then goodbye free time :)

89a• 14 years ago

Loved using RISC OS back in the day at school

JulianMorrison• 14 years ago

Which RISC OS version?

a2352• 14 years ago

RISC OS version 5.17

RC5 is actually a released version, so the link above contains the most recent code. More links can be found on he forum: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=2...

stevep2• 14 years ago

I'm suspecting the site is getting a bit of a bandwidth issue, but there are emulators to emulate the old archimedes, Atari and IIRC the amiga.

Various people have been testing old style games on the Pi so you guys might lose a bit of free time :-)

inopinatus• 14 years ago

This is the final inducement for me to buy a whole stack of the things. Having owned a BBC Micro as a kid, I cut my professional teeth on ARM assembler for RISC OS and it remains to this day my favourite instruction set of all time: everything that was necessary & sufficient wrapped in a neat little orthogonally conditional package, and RISC OS was the elegant icing on that cake.

I don't even know what I'll use them for yet. I'll just sit down and play with it, like being 16 again.

RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi released

Related Stories