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A9home first impressions review By Paul Stewart. Published: 5th Nov 2006, 21:08:20 | Permalink | PrintableGetting up close and personal with an A9home
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Portable yet not a laptop
While various people over the years have called for someone to make a RISC OS portable computer, and RiscStation tried to produce one, no RISC OS hardware manufacturer has been able to build one, save for Acorn's A4 portable in 1992. Alas, for true notebook RISC OS computing we are left with VirtualRiscPC running on Microsoft Windows-based laptop computers. However, now there is an alternative.
Due to its diminutive size, the A9home is pretty close to portable native RISC OS computing as it can easily fit in a briefcase or backpack. The difference between this and the VirtualAcorn solution is that with VRPC, you can use RISC OS on the move, such as on a train or in the back of a taxi. The A9home is ideal for moving between fixed locations such as the study at home and the office at work. Only enterprising electrical engineers could hack the A9home into a true laptop.
I, myself, on several occasions have slipped the A9home into its flight case for use at another location, away from home. This is very much a desktop computer that is easy to carry from place to place, but it's not a computer for people who want to easily bash out documents on a plane over the Atlantic.
The flight case can only really be described as a vanity box, minus the mirror, of course. However, it is functional. The A9home, complete with a DVD drive, its PSU and a mouse will fit in the box, as Ad6's Matt Edgar has demonstrated to crowds at shows. I'm quite sure one of those fold up keyboards will fit, too. I can't help but think that something a little more stylish would have been better, though. It's as if Ad6 simply picked the first thing they found from one of those cheap back street mini-marts. However, all is not lost, as for the more style conscious people, Maplin do a range of flight cases that will easily accommodate the A9. You could even throw in an LCD panel.
 
32bit checking
One of the more controversial features of the A9home is the enforcement of valid AIF headers in programs, pictured above. This was silently introduced when FlashROM revision two was rolled out. While most people agree it is a good check to enforce, the way it was slipped in without any warning caused a stir among developers, and was seen as an own goal for Ad6 and RISCOS Ltd.
As part of the AIF checking, the operating system makes sure application executables declare themselves as being 32bit compatible beforing running them. If an application says it's not 32bit compatible, RISC OS 4 will stop the software and show the user a nice error message informing them of this - rather than trying to execute code that will invariably crash later, possibly requiring the user to reset their machine. There have been various discussions about this subject on Drobe and the newsgroups.
The top and bottom of it is that the A9home is shipped with AIF header checking switched on. This is fully configurable via a compatibility plugin in Configure, and advanced users can switch it off.
Bundled software
The A9home as sold by Ad6 via CJE Micros does not come with any bundled software outside of the usual collection of Paint, Edit, Chars, SockStats, some freely available programs including FTPc and NetSurf, and so on. CJE Micros are planning to put together a bundle of software including Messenger and DialUp, but require a 32bit serial port driver for people still tied to dialup modems. In the meantime, I suspect that while existing users will not worry too much about the lack of bundled software, new users may be little annoyed at the lack of a basic, user friendly Internet connectivity software package, considering the price of the unit.
The Select networking system, which is designed to allow users to plug their computers into a network with little or no configuration twiddling, means an A9home can be up and running on the Internet pretty quickly with NetSurf, FTPc and Messenger. But the lack of an inclusive email, news and web package could leave newbies feeling stranded. Aemulor should be thrown in too, as users upgrading from 26bit hardware would no doubt find it particularly useful.
In everyday use, the A9home desktop works as any other RISC OS based computer system. In terms of performance, here's how the computer paces itself using some rudimentary tests.
| Artworks Apple load time in AWViewer 1.76 | 4 seconds | | Copying a 104MB file to another directory on the internal hard disc | 28-31 seconds | | Copying 389 files, totalling 8.7MB, to another directory on the internal hard disc | 19 seconds | | Copying said 389 files to a Memphis RAM disc | 4 seconds | | Moving 101 files, totalling 207MB, from a USB memory stick to the hard disc | 19 minutes 28 seconds | | Moving said 101 files back to the memory stick from the hard disc | 22 mins 43 seconds | | Deleting said 101 files from the memory stick | 2 mins 12 seconds | | Copying 104MB file to a USB memory stick from the hard disc | 8 mins 40 seconds | | Deleting said 104MB file from the memory stick | 2 seconds |
The memory stick used was a Creative MuVo V200, and its entry in the OtherDevs file was 041e:4129=LtC. The Filer operations were carried out with 'faster' enabled. Firefox on RISC OS took 18 seconds to load, although once it had reached the desktop, the time taken to render a page was acceptable for everyday use.
It's understood that RISC OS 4.42 is still technically a beta release, and hopefully will not be the final release for the A9home. There are still one or two bugs being worked out. Although I may have missed out one or two issues, from my own perspective the A9home is currently lacking in the following areas:
- Newshound unable to send news
- No software to utilise the audio-in port
- Audio playback sometimes stops for no apparent reason
- No 32bit version of Printers from RISCOS Ltd
- No driver for the serial port
- No driver for USB printing
- No CMOS/NVRAM support
- An occasional bug in the PS2 driver that requires the mouse to be unplugged, then plugged back in again to carry on working
- An occasional bug in the networking stack that requires the network cable to be unplugged and plugged back in again - although this may depend on the router you use
Could the A9home be your next RISC OS computer? It depends on what you are looking for. The A9home is currently the cheapest native modern RISC OS computer available. I believe it is the smallest RISC OS computer ever to be sold. It will certainly be adequate for the requirements of the average user. In my mind it is the equivalent to the A7000, with the Iyonix being equivalent to the RiscPC. The A9home is also the only production computer that comes with RISC OS Adjust.
In my opinion, the lack of USB 2 is something that could really hurt the sales of this neat little computer. Fitting only 128MB of RAM could also put people off. I believe 256B would be a more sensible amount, when you consider the RAM is fixed and can not be expanded. The 40GB hard disc is also a little small for today's users.
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