It's been reported that Castle Technology are no longer in a position to manufacture new RiscPCs. The 'Bar were first to break the story after a RISC OS dealer spilled the beans to usenet. We're awaiting confirmation from Castle."I've just confirmed with Castle that they haven't been able to source a number of key RiscPC components and are therefore not able to produce another batch", wrote Chris Evans, of CJE Micros. CJE has since pulled new RiscPCs from their price list, although 2nd hand RiscPCs are available.
Although this will mean that there will be no new RiscPCs, there are a number of new solutions available to take the legacy RiscPC's place, (depending on your definition of available): the XScale Iyonix, the elusive StrongARM Omega and the controversial emulation route. Incidentally, Steffen Huber recently posted online some Iyonix vs. Omega benchmarks.
The RiscPC was officially, publically launched in 1994 with RISC OS 3.5 and the 30MHz ARM610. It allowed a second slave processor to be fitted, supported up to 2MB of VRAM and used the Acorn VIDC'n'IOMD chipset. For 1699 quid, you could get two slices, 8 Mb of main memory, 1 Mb of VRAM and a 420 Mb hard drive and a 14 inch monitor. Later came the 200+MHz StrongARM processor card and newer versions of RISC OS. When the Acorn era eneded following the 1998 break up of Acorn group, Castle were quick to grab the rights to the RiscPC and later developed the Kinetic card for the machine. For many RISC OS users, the RiscPC may be out of production and well on its way to its 10th birthday, but it's impact on the RISC OS world will never be forgotten.
Links
Castle website
History of Acorn