RISCOS Ltd., developer of RISC OS 4, yesterday announced its pricing scheme for RISC OS 4.39, the next major release of everybody's favourite 26 bit mode operating system. The announcement confirms our initial figures which we revealed early last month. RISCOS Ltd. have also disclosed that the price of RISC OS 4.02 ROM sets are set to increase from March this year."Another year has passed and the interest in all things RISC OS seems to be as strong, if not stronger, than ever," RISCOS Ltd.'s managing director Paul Middleton told Foundation readers yesterday.
"RISCOS Ltd has entered its sixth year of trading and sales of RISC OS 4 still continue, when many people expected the market to have died years ago. The major news for RISCOS Ltd is the forthcoming release of a new version of RISC OS on ROM. For a number of reasons the version of RISC OS released back in July 1999 has remained the standard for the last 4 years. The Select scheme has enabled us to take RISC OS development forward and we have worked hard to fit the features of the 6 MB RISC OS Select softload ROM into a standard 4 MB physical ROM."
The RISC OS 4.39 ROMs, cunningly codenamed 'RISC OS Adjust', will be compatible with RiscPCs, Kinetic RiscPCs and A7000+s. There's one notable machine missing from that list, apart from the MicroDigital Omega, and that's the Castle Iyonix. We'll be following closely where RISCOS Ltd. will be heading with their OS after the release of 4.39, in terms of future architecture support and 32 bit compatibility. Although the rise of the VirtualRiscPC emulator has helped sales of RISC OS 4, the rate at which users are upgrading to fully 32bit mode XScale powered Iyonixes has fueled concerns that RISC OS Ltd.'s target market of legacy 26 bit mode kit is rapidly shrinking.
On the subject of a 32bit compatible RISC OS 4, Paul Middleton explained: "RISC OS 4.39 has been developed to be capable of building 32 bit compatible versions, but many of the higher level features of Select (upon which 4.39 is based) rely on low level changes to the kernel that are not currently present in the RISC OS 5 kernel and supporting modules.
"RISCOS Ltd is committed to making the new features of Select available to all RISC OS users but it also requires the co-operation and support of the hardware manufacturers."
Incidentally, a 4.39 ROM image for VirtualRiscPC users will also be made available. A full features list for 4.39 is expected to be published soon although it is expected to be essentially an extension to the RISC OS Select feature set. One obvious advantage of RISC OS 4.39 over RISC OS Select, however, is that there'll be no softloading process and users can enjoy having a fully featured desktop booting within seconds.
