
RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi released - zdw
https://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2012/10/26/risc-os-pi-released-risc-os-for-the-raspberry-pi
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codeulike
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

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

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a235
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...](http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/images/riscos/riscos-2012-10-16-RC5/)

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bane
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.

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danellis
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.

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codeulike
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?

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pm215
ARMv5 dropped support for the 26-bit-addressing mode back-compatibility, so v5
and above definitely can't run ARM1/ARM2 binaries. (Even in v4 the back-compat
support was optional.)

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meaty
RISC OS and most applications are now 32-bit OK.

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inopinatus
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.

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

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

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

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

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meaty
That is correct. 1987 - 1997...

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stevep2
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 :-)

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JulianMorrison
Which RISC OS version?

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a235
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...](http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=21184)

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89a
Loved using RISC OS back in the day at school

