LinuxMusicians

Yesterday was the 10th London RISC OS show. For those that don't know, RISC OS is the operating system for the Acorn "Archimedes" Computer that saw the debut of the original ARM processor.

Although a minnow in today's world of sharks, the OS has survived, had considerable development, and a crop of new hardware (including the Raspberry Pi) is now available. It has an incredibly small and lightweight footprint, and is very fast - being designed very specifically for ARM processors. Also, right from the start there was an application programmers style guide which the vast majority of developers adhered to. This has resulted in a beautifully integrated look and feel.

For some years, the status of this OS has been in doubt due to split ownership. However, the big news is that people have got their heads together (and a few were I suspect banged together) and the OS has now been made available under an open Apache license. The result is that there is a definite uptick in interest.

Currently the big issue is the lack of a fully featured modern web browser, but as reported on the show, plans are afoot to resolve that too.

The RISC OS was an IBM thing isn't it ?

jonetsu wrote:The RISC OS was an IBM thing isn't it ?

No, far from it. Like the ARM itself it is a 100% British creation.
ARM, RISC OS and the Archimedes were all developed together.

The designer of the original ARM instruction set is Sophie Wilson who at the time was rated one of the best 6502 developers, and if you compare the instruction sets you can see where she expanded on the good and binned the bad.

What is the audio system status? When did the first ink flow
on the standalone Yoshimi port? pi-shimi?
Cheers

Unfortunately it is unlikely that a port of Yoshimi could be made. This is because of the co-operative multi-tasking mode that RISC OS uses. It currently has no true threading capability, nor can it use more than one core of a processor..

The audio subsystem works well within those limitations - Sibelius started out there don't forget.