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VirtualRiscPC network upgrade pulled

By Chris Williams. Published: 29th Oct 2003, 13:24:04.

Some cunning person wanted a free ride

VirtualAcorn have removed from their website the free networking support update for their commercial VirtualRiscPC emulation software. The decision to pull the update was made after a drobe.co.uk reader revealed that the upgrade could be used to enable networking support in RedSquirrel. RedSquirrel is also an Acorn hardware emulator developed by Graeme Barnes, who later wrote VirtualRiscPC, and is available for free.

"It's a bit naughty downloading a VirtualAcorn upgrade for use with Red Squirrel, so regretfully I have temporarily removed the upgrade from the downloads area", Aaron Timbrell of VirtualAcorn told us after we asked VA to confirm our reader's findings.

"I'm a bit suprised it works but now legitimate users will be inconvenienced while we investigate".

Update
Exploit details removed at the request of VirtualAcorn. The original email we were sent is below, but censored appropriately.

Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 23:15:56 -0000
From: sk s-k@blueyonder.co.uk
To: news@drobe.co.uk
Subject: Redsquirrel internet

Dear Drobe,

I have just managed to get !Netsurf working successfully in Redsquirrel 0.6 (RiscOS 3.7) !Oregano2 & ping keeps crashing Redsquirrel; but I am still working on it (Any help is appreciated).

Note: When Redsquirrel crashes, I do not know if data corruption occurs. Therefore I suggest you make a copy of harddisc4. !Netsurf can be found in c:vrpcharddisc4networking (along with many other useful files)

Enjoy...

SK6

Links
VirtualAcorn website

Discussion

Viewing threaded comments | View comments unthreaded, listed by date

Advice to Aaron on how to prevent legitimate users being inconvenienced, give the update away for free, the information and data is in the wild now. Any attempts to prevent it now are kindof late.

Peter

flibble on 29/10/03 2:10PM [ Reply | Report ]

I wonder how many people will have kept the upgrade app after they upgraded though? And these ppl are hardly likely to share it either because they had to pay for VRPC.

AndrewDuffell on 29/10/03 4:07PM [ Reply | Report ]

What about people who have paid for VA5000?

jess on 29/10/03 4:20PM [ Reply | Report ]

jess: I'd like networking for va5000 too

VA5000 was a great product, VRPC is a little out of my budget

Peter

flibble on 29/10/03 4:38PM [ Reply | Report ]

It still is nice, especially with the addition of callwin32 - sorts out the dodgy mouse and slowdown of windows. Making networking avaible to it would be a big enhancement.

jess on 29/10/03 4:58PM [ Reply | Report ]

Jess: People who paid for VA5000 paid for a product as it is. If they want networking they should upgrade.

AndrewDuffell on 29/10/03 5:08PM [ Reply | Report ]

People who paid for VRPC paid for a product as it is. If they want networking .... oh.

flibble on 29/10/03 5:22PM [ Reply | Report ]

I think it's a great shame that someone would try and con Graeme, Aaron and co out of dosh. They've clearly worked very hard to bring us networking in VRPC, and for someone, clearly an Acorn enthusiast, to be buggering up our own small software scene is ridiculous. If we ever find out who it is, may they be publically hogtied with cheesewires and horsewhipped. I hope VA can release a VRPC with locked-in networking support, or perhaps resort to the "standard" way of upgrading -- only sending updates out to registered customers.

On the subject of networking VA5000 - has anyone yet bothered to ASK them if they've got it on the cards?

imj on 29/10/03 6:34PM [ Reply | Report ]

imj: So you missed the bit earlier on where drobe was hosting the helper file and detailed instructions on how to do this .... maybe you should hogtie and horsewhip them ... but maybe the drobe staffers like that

hey this comment deserves to be moderated down

flibble on 29/10/03 6:57PM [ Reply | Report ]

imj: Aren't you going a little over the top? It could be that 'sk' is already a registered user of VRPC and tried the upgrade with RedSquirel out of curiosity. Also, if the upgrade works with RedSquirel, which is older than VA5000, then surely the upgrade will also work with VA5000? Just thinking through it logically it would make sense. Unless of course the upgrade requires emulated RPC hardware. I wouldn't know anything about that. *NB.* I do not endorse this kind of behaviour in any way.

Smiler on 29/10/03 6:57PM [ Reply | Report ]

Assuming that the plugin system for all three (VRPC, VA5000 and RedSquirrel), I see no reason why it wouldn't work for all three. The only way of stopping this that I can see is implementing some form of version check in the plugin to see what program is trying to access it.

On the topic of the hogtie and horsewhip, perhaps this should just be for people who followed the instructions

Andy. Just me.

andypoole on 29/10/03 7:02PM [ Reply | Report ]

version checks are easy to get around. Even for a DIV like me.

PS it was not me. I intend to buy VRPC at some time but was waiting for the network side to be working.

Ahh well just need to wait.

Cheers Bob

nijinsky on 29/10/03 7:25PM [ Reply | Report ]

I believe that if you buy VirtualRPC at the moment then the CD you get comes with the networking update on it. So no need to wait. Give them a ring or send an email and find out to be sure though. Cheers!

The Doctor on 29/10/03 7:37PM [ Reply | Report ]

-nijinsky True version checks can be gotten round, but it should in thoery be possible to add code to both the plugin *and* VRPC itself. They wouldn't have to tell people how this works, which would make it much harder to use it on something it shouldn't be used on.

andypoole on 29/10/03 7:49PM [ Reply | Report ]

IMJ said

> ..and for someone, clearly an Acorn enthusiast, to be buggering up our own small software scene is ridiculous.

Meanwhile emulators b*gger up our hardware scene. (or are you still blaming CTL for that?) ;-)

-- Spriteman

Spriteman on 29/10/03 7:51PM [ Reply | Report ]

Spriteman: Well it certainly does add fuel to the controversy about whether some people who use RISC OS emulators are or are not software pirates :-)

dgs

dgs on 29/10/03 9:04PM [ Reply | Report ]

Aargh! Why such fury over emulators? If it sells the OS it's doing some good. I still don't believe it prevents many sales of Iyonixes etc as hard-core Acorners will still buy them; for many the choice is an emulator or total migration to PC. Which would you rather we did? We're not all made of money, you know.

hutchies on 29/10/03 9:13PM [ Reply | Report ]

dgs: I used the method described in the (original) article to install network support in VA5000, it's a tad flakey. Oh and BTW I'm not a software pirate (thanks for asking). Just to let the VA team know, I'd be happy to pay for an upgraded version of VA5000 with network support, particulaly of the non flakey variety

flibble on 29/10/03 9:45PM [ Reply | Report ]

flib: it burns my trolls.

mrchocky on 29/10/03 9:48PM [ Reply | Report ]

I may be missing somethinghere, but I don't see what the biggy is - if you use RedSquirrel with this plugin, you only get networking, you don't get the JIT which makes VRPC different from vanilla RedSquirrel.

If this works with VA5000, then it may be iffy, although I doubt there will ever be an official upgrade anyway, so it's not as if there's money to be lost.

simo on 29/10/03 9:54PM [ Reply | Report ]

simo: You may be missing that networking support is a sweetener to persaude people to buy VRPC as opposed to VA5000 or just red squirrel. A feature used to tempt people to spend 160ukp instead of 30ukp. Whilst you yourself consider the fast JIT or maybe RO4 to be the prime requirement, others may see network support as more important, and thus the availability of something that gives away that for free will probably lose VA sales/profit.

flibble on 29/10/03 10:00PM [ Reply | Report ]

Personally, I'd like to see networking supported in VA5000 having bought that one a while back and not having the funds available to upgrade to VRPC.

andypoole on 29/10/03 11:34PM [ Reply | Report ]

How much would you pay for networking support in VA5000?

mavhc on 30/10/03 11:36AM [ Reply | Report ]

Personally I'd be willing to pay 10-20 ukp for an upgrade, about the cost of a 2nd hand network card for a 3.1 generation machine. This is ontop of the 30 I have already paid for the emulator.

Peter

flibble on 30/10/03 11:47AM [ Reply | Report ]

Well, if you must venture into the jungle of Windows based software, you shouldn't be too surprised at this sort of thing. I gather software piracy is the norm on that platform, and anyone who does not take steps to protect their software against illegal use will be lucky to sell more than one copy. Of course, such protection adds to the cost!

Martin

mrtd on 30/10/03 1:07PM [ Reply | Report ]

mrtd: "Well, if you must venture into the jungle of Windows based software, you shouldn't be too surprised at this sort of thing. I gather software piracy is the norm on that platform, and anyone who does not take steps to protect their software against illegal use will be lucky to sell more than one copy. Of course, such protection adds to the cost!"

Oh, the classic anti-Windows "they're all pirate scum" argument! The RISC OS platform, according to various anecdotes, was just as rife with "piracy" (although "licence misuse" is a more appropriate term) before it sank down to levels of noise on the platform radar.

If you read up on "warez", you'll find that elaborate protection schemes are more inconvenient to paying customers and the developers than they are to crackers. Moreover, the enlightened approach to encouraging "genuine licensing" goes beyond the technical and into the sociological. Developers should encourage building actual communities rather than acting like small-time "software gods".

One could claim that pure misfortune has caused this particular sequence of events: Red Squirrel was released for free (as in beer) to get people interested; it was subsequently commercialised; the compatibility of the uncommercialised and commercialised variants actually undermine other commercial activities. On the other hand, one could argue that when teasing people with not-genuinely-free software, the users are (perhaps justifiably) going to return the favour by treating the developers with contempt.

guestx on 30/10/03 4:00PM [ Reply | Report ]

IN reply to mrtd "Well, if you must venture into the jungle of Windows based software, you shouldn't be too surprised at this sort of thing. I gather software piracy is the norm on that platform, and anyone who does not take steps to protect their software against illegal use will be lucky to sell more than one copy."

Ohh you mean like the company that is pirated more often than any other--- Micro$%^t? Ohhh yeah they are doing really badly. As is Adobe etc etc etc. And do you really think that this had been done from someone that is a windows devotee?

Well think about it. It was dont to run on RedSquirrell and RO4. IE Someone that knows how to rip a RISC OS ROM. Now that smells fo someone that is well clued up on RISC OS and NOT a windows person.

Cheers Bob

nijinsky on 30/10/03 4:07PM [ Reply | Report ]

flibble: "Advice to Aaron on how to prevent legitimate users being inconvenienced, give the update away for free, the information and data is in the wild now. Any attempts to prevent it now are kindof late."

Actually, there's an interesting point here, almost. Given that "legitimate users" must all be known to the supplier, why is the update available for public download? If you're going to do the proprietary software thing, why not do it properly?

guestx on 30/10/03 5:17PM [ Reply | Report ]

guestx: The inconveniences of the post (especially at the moment) make it an impractical way of sending updates to all users. I don't know if the supplier has the email addresses of all its users, but software via email doesn't exactly have a good reputation these days (it would also be a bit rich to criticise Windows users who spread viruses when they actually believe MS has emailed them an update, then expect people to run an emailed update to VRPC).

SimonC on 30/10/03 5:54PM [ Reply | Report ]

Rather than Emailing the update, it would probably be better if they created a directory on their website and gave all registered users a password to access it, sort of like what ROL do with Select.

Andy. My 2p.

andypoole on 30/10/03 6:16PM [ Reply | Report ]

On a slightly different note. Development on VRPC is going really well. Are there any more speed increases in the pipeline? Increases in PC performance helps of course. So, how long until VRPC out-performs the Iyonix? Soon, I hope.

-- Spiteman

Spriteman on 30/10/03 9:58PM [ Reply | Report ]

Cor, that's a leading question! I've been looking for sensible "real world" benchmarks. In the absence of Steffen's (he's got copyright and time issues), I had a quick play with Paul Vigay's graphics test on the A6 (currently stopwatch times, I'll release "officially" when I can prove them absolutely). Iyonix times from Paul's website.

Loading image was 2.6 seconds (Iyonix 2.51) Rotating image was 4.5 seconds (Iyonix 9.09) Unsharpen mask was 117 seconds (Iyonix 74.91) Scale was 2.2 seconds (Iyonix 2.26)

The A6 seems to perform faster than the Iyonix when it's "shifting data" with little transforms (eg when you're scrolling around a large DTP document); The Iyonix scores better on cache-based repeated operations where more instructions act on each bit of data (which hits the long pipeline on the A6 reasonably hard).

Your percieved speed of a machine will depend very much on the profile of what you do with it. The A6 subjectively feels slickest for many "user" tasks, but YMMV and I'm biased ;-)

stdevel on 30/10/03 10:37PM [ Reply | Report ]

It's so very nice to see diversity in the market, finally.

Chris. Just me.

diomus on 31/10/03 00:13AM [ Reply | Report ]

If the A6 can match or better the Iyonix accross a range of functions, Castle should be looking hard at lowering the cost of ARM hardware and getting the 800mhz version of the Xscale into the next production run.

Sure some people would go for the 'cool factor' of having a real ARM computer, the silent operation, the instant boot times and the feeling that they're supporting the company that really got 32bit RISC OS out there. Many would just say, 'I get better than SA RPC performance for 150 quid that I can slap onto the PC I probably own anyway(as long as it's running Windows)'. Now if emulation led to RISC OS for Intel/PowerPC, bootable without Windows, and with the operating system gradually made less dependent on ARM emulation, that might be exciting. Ok, a pipedream. But then a 32bit RISC OS was too, as was aemulor.

anon/62.49.14.90 on 31/10/03 11:49AM [ Reply | Report ]

JessFranco: "Sure some people would go for the 'cool factor' of having a real ARM computer, the silent operation, the instant boot times and the feeling that they're supporting the company that really got 32bit RISC OS out there."

It's quite possible that Castle can play the role of an Apple-like outfit, selling "luxury" versions of the mainstream stuff, although they'd have to make their cases a bit nicer. :-)

And it'd be amusing to consider things like the A6 as being the norm rather than the exception.

guestx on 31/10/03 1:19PM [ Reply | Report ]

If it performs that well with only an XP2500 then a 3200 (or higher) should outperform an Iyonix comprehensively, be able to run Select be capable of photo printing (via uniprint) and still be cheaper to build. That's the one for me! Cheers!

anon/212.159.108.146 on 31/10/03 9:58PM [ Reply | Report ]

Sad, isn't it? That our flagship machine is in danger of being overtaken by an emulator on a vastly different machine.

Spriteman - For real

anon/81.104.108.63 on 01/11/03 01:29AM [ Reply | Report ]

Yeah! So much for all the 'British built and proud' Acorn mentalitity. Now they get the same cheap m/b cobbled together by 80hour weekers in korea as everyone else.

JessFranco on 01/11/03 08:30AM [ Reply | Report ]

Only if you believe in some random benchmarks from the people selling you the other machine.

mavhc on 01/11/03 1:01PM [ Reply | Report ]

Mark - I'm sure that you'd like to take the opportunity to clarify the meaning of your last post. In the meantime you'll appreciate that it would be suicide for us to make claims in a commercial environment which will be subject to peer review, advertising standards, press comment etc which were anything but presentable and proveable.

I have been extremely careful with statements I have made. If you don't like them, then fair enough, but please take care not to imply that I have not taken due diligence.

stdevel on 01/11/03 2:36PM [ Reply | Report ]

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Iyonix got beat by fast PCs. I'm sure the VRPC crowd armed with the latest and greatest PC hardware do not need to massage everthing Apple style-ee to get good results. After all, the latest PC CPUS have stupid amounts of power and RISC OS is a low-overhead OS. That's why my SARPC is often more responsive in the GUI dept. than my G4 800mhz, although obviously the latter can do 101 things the RPC simply can't.

At the SE Show, Impression on VirtualAcorn's big Athlon was certainly flying, although I found for ArtWorks redraws the Iyonix was performing better. Either way, they both seemed to be running RISC OS very fast, which won't be lost on anyone who witnesses either. Of course, one costs £1249, the other costs £150 if you already have a fast PC, or a few hundred more if you don't. Of course, you have to boot the PC and run Windows before you run RISC OS, so it's not as if RISC OS has suddenly become an alternative OS for Intel.

I thought 'advertising' in comments was not allowed anyway?

JessFranco on 01/11/03 4:10PM [ Reply | Report ]

Ah, OK. I see.

So David asks "are we likely to see VRPC run faster that the Iyonix", and I'm supposed to sit back and watch the conjecture and random backbiting rather than answer the question with information which is pertinant, because a statement of fact might be interpreted as advertising.

Sorry, I hadn't realised that was the objection - I'm primarily an engineer and I expect information to be digested and stand in its own right rather than massaged into a "message". If my information is going to be interpreted as advertising I might as well only post opinions which present the A6 in a "perfect" light rather than also showing its weaker points, surely?

I'm not into the whole marketing-speak like "The fastest ABC-OS machine is a great development platform. We're pleased to see XYZ on ABCMachine". I hope vague meaningless comments we've seen like this recently aren't going to mean that every scrap of data from all of us is going to be viewed with equal suspicion.

stdevel on 01/11/03 6:34PM [ Reply | Report ]

I agree - it's a shame when someone who clearly knows far more about his product than most others is essentially accused of lying to sell his product, merely because he says facts which the Iyonix hard-liners don't want to hear.

TBH, I don't really like the fact that a PC running an emulator can apparently outperform the fastest native machine RISC OS has to offer ATM. That doesn't mean, however, that I'm arrogant enough to claim I know more about the subject than someone who has been around long enough and has enough technical know-how to be justifiably viewed as an expert.

hutchies on 01/11/03 8:03PM [ Reply | Report ]

I'm sure there's enough Iyonixes and VRPCs out there for drobe to run a comprehensive benchmarking feature sometime soon including all the popular configurations. It'd be a darned good feature! Then people can know what would suit them best - sticking with/upgrading their RPC, going 32-bit Iyonix, going VRPC or whatever.

JessFranco on 01/11/03 8:09PM [ Reply | Report ]

As anyone knows benchmarks aren't the whole story, of course the person selling the machine would give the results that showed his machine in the best light. Just because one system has faster benchmarks than another doesn't make it better, it makes it faster at those benchmarks.

> I'm biased See

mavhc on 01/11/03 9:52PM [ Reply | Report ]

For Mavhc.

Yes benchmarks are not the whole story. They can be synically manipulated. There are many people in the RISC OS world that would do this, but NOT Stuart. I have known Stuart for years since I bouglt my Simtec Special A5000 from him in the early 90's. I have phoned him for advice over the years nd he has always been forthcoming with FREE advice.

I really find this "chinese whispers" about his integrity rather unpleasant.

We (the programmers in Armbase, well we have another company but I wont mention it here) had considered writing some applications for VRPC once the windows and Palm apps are finished. But why should we if all we are going to get would be Oh YOU develop for windows etc and get our good name muddied.

Let me state for the record. "Stuart Tyrrell is one of the most honest people I have ever dealt with in business and personally". If he states the benchmarks, I believe him more than most.

Unless you know better, have better benchmarks, can quote some yourself, know his are false; then give us all a break.

Perhaps you are one of these "it has to be on ARM" brigade" and you dont like the thought of the OS (AND IT IS AN OS) running on wintel because Gates gets money. That is like me not dealling with a company because I dont like them even if I believe it is the best option. This would be plain stupid.

AND Let me tell you about the "wonderfull" ARM RISC OS hardware developers. We asked one of them about the possibility of developing a Hardware solution for US based on RISC OS.

They said "dont bother" "RISC OS is not good anymore compared to other operating systems freely available".

Guess what wed have a x86 based system that runs "server side"I could not care less if our windows apps run on intel or even ARM. If they run faultlessly and quickly then that is OK.

Cheers Bob

nijinsky on 02/11/03 11:00AM [ Reply | Report ]

Ohh and before you ask. The hardware thing was [link]

Not my company I hasten to add. But I had the idea 2 years ago.

Cheers Bob

nijinsky on 02/11/03 12:54AM [ Reply | Report ]

nijinsky: I notice that you moan about "Chinese whispers", then indulge in them yourself later in the same article.

I think if people do want to sell Windows machines running emulators, then they should at least sell them on their own merits, not get involved in rubbishing other companies' ways of operating. Negative advertising rarely helps sell a product, it just shows that the advertiser has a chip on their shoulder about their competitor.

dgs

dgs on 02/11/03 3:31PM [ Reply | Report ]

From my limited dealings with Stuart Tyrell he does seem to be an honest sort of guy, so I do not believe he would purposefully misrepresent benchmarks. I don't believe anyone suggesting that he is being less than honest is being fair.

That notwidthstanding I would point out that there were only a few benchmarks run and that (therefore) they do *not* present a complete picture. Stuart has said that he timed them by stopwatch (which any time I've ever tried it would suggest an error of +/- 0.2 to 0.3 seconds). As some of the benchmarks presented complete fairly quickly and in some instances (scale for example) the difference between the Iyonix and VRPC is less than that error it would not be possible to define which machine is faster (other than they are close).

The number and types of benchmarking were limited, so one should not (I humbly suggest) put too much emphasis on them. With a more complete set of benchmarks run I am confident that the situation won't be a case of a walkover for the A6 - again that will await the requisite benchmarks being run.

Oh and Bob technically RISC OS run under emulation is *not* an OS when run on an x86 under windows. VRPC is a windows application (its the only bit that "runs" on windows), the "RISC OS" is data used by VPRC to do its work. If you like (IMHO) RISC OS on VRPC is much like what a WORD DOCUMENT is to WORD - just DATA. The fact the user believes it behaves that it *is* an OS is simply testimony to how *good* a job Grahame Barnes did, the reality however is that RISC OS on the PC is just data interpreted by VRPC.

Kind regards

Annraoi

AMS on 02/11/03 4:32PM [ Reply | Report ]

If anyone does have access to or thoughts on a decent set of *user* benchmarks (I will be publishing technical benchmarks, but they take a /lot/ of interpretation - if one series of low-level operations are half the speed of another machine, and another series twice as fast, what's the comparative speeds of the machines?), I'll be happy to run them. The marks that Steffen Huber published the results between the Iyonix and Omega are great (well, OK, maybe not so great for one machine) - but at the moment he's not able to publish the source files as originally promised. We (RISC OS users) need a set of suitable, reasonably independent set of user-benchmark files which can be distributed and peer-reviewed, and I think given comments above I'm not the person to arrange this.

The "results" I posted regarding a simple "user" test above are stopwatched (or at least at the moment that's all I'm saying they are), however I will always err on the side of caution. The reason why I'm claiming they are stopwatched at this stage is it really isn't important whether one machine is faster than the other to within 5%, the pertinant facts are some tests are similar, others faster, others slower and this can be used as an illustration of the type of actions which are likely to give certain results in other tests. If I wanted to claim actual speeds of machines I'd choose or make up some suitable benchmarks which favoured the A6, rather than choosing the only publically available user-benchmark that we seem to have.

However, again, when someone asks directly "Will VARPC ever match the speed of the Iyonix", am I to sit back and watch conjecture? The A6 and its ilk will live or die on their merits alone - that's the reason why in the first days I didn't even mention the processor speed of the machine - until the uninformed started suggesting I had something to hide. I'm sure it won't be long before someone runs Paul Vigay's test on some random XP2500+ shared-memory over PC133 box and claims that I must be massaging results......

stdevel on 02/11/03 5:08PM [ Reply | Report ]

to dgs

Yes I'm sorry about that. You are entirely correct. I shouldn't have resorted to the slagging, I was just so annoyed at the flak ST was getting.

And AMS, Interestign point. I never thought of it that way.

cheers bob; in a hurry again

nijinsky on 02/11/03 7:46PM [ Reply | Report ]

In reply to AMS,

It is still on OS. Just not the OS for the x86 machine but instead the OS for the virtual machine presented by the emulator. Of course, Windows doesn't know this and just views it as data.

-- Spriteman

anon/81.104.108.63 on 02/11/03 8:57PM [ Reply | Report ]

The Artworks Apple redraw is one of the real-world benchmarks used for the developer (JIT) version of RedSquirrel.

So far it has shown that a 1.6GHz PC can outperform an SA233 *on that limited set of tasks*, and personally I find my [ageing] 1.6GHz PC's "feel" easily as fast as my SA287/VF2.

I would expect that a 2.4GHz A6 could beat a Kinetic/Omega easily, and probably on a lot of tasks, beat an Iyonix (memory, screen, disk etc.) basically because the PC hardware can outperform the Iyonix by miles, so the [thin layer] of emulation wouldn't slow those aspects down very much.

Solaris 8 under VMWare on that same PC actually outperforms my Sun Sparc Ultra10, boo hoo.

I'm sure the Iyonix could be tweaked a bit more - e.g. more development of the graphics card, 800MHz XScale etc; but it's not going to be able to keep up with PC development - jees we're already getting 64-Bit 3.2GHz processors (or quad processors!)

So don't go questionning people's crediblity on things you've not tried, just because you don't like what you're hearing. I for one am not a bit surprised by Stuart's benchmark results.

simo on 02/11/03 11:40PM [ Reply | Report ]

simo: It's not a matter of credibility, it's a matter of peer review and accuracy. As indeed, your posts fails in some aspects - the statement about the "thin layer of emulation" is very misleading. How an emulated machine accesses the underlying host hardware for any given operation can be very complex, or very simple, and making statements about how they wouldn't slow things down just isn't going to be correct.

If an emulated machine _is_ faster than Iyonix on some tasks, then no, it isn't surpring - but not for reasons you've stated. I've however yet to see justification that this is the case, just some claims - in particular, a claim I saw on the Select list which I asked to be substantiated went unreplied.

mrchocky on 03/11/03 10:46AM [ Reply | Report ]

AMS: "Oh and Bob technically RISC OS run under emulation is not an OS when run on an x86 under windows."

Yes it is! It's an operating system for that virtual machine.

AMS: "VRPC is a windows application (its the only bit that "runs" on windows), the "RISC OS" is data used by VPRC to do its work. If you like (IMHO) RISC OS on VRPC is much like what a WORD DOCUMENT is to WORD - just DATA."

And? Windows is just data to the Intel/AMD CPU. There's no magic pixie dust added by elves on Michael Dell's/Bill Gates's secret Arctic production line.

AMS: "The fact the user believes it behaves that it is an OS is simply testimony to how good a job Grahame Barnes did, the reality however is that RISC OS on the PC is just data interpreted by VRPC."

I can imagine that IBM are so upset having Linux running in multiple virtual machines on their mainframes. I bet their engineers find it hard to sleep at night.

As far as I can see, for most of the platform die-hards this emulation issue isn't about the viability of the platform - it's just a "test of faith" to let them define who their "friends" are. If you're not running on "British built and proud" (cue carnival images, dancers, outrageously camp behaviour?) then it would seem that you just can't be part of the gang.

guestx on 03/11/03 12:26AM [ Reply | Report ]

GuestX:

Nice of you to say what I said but using 7 times more text ;-)

Spriteman on 03/11/03 5:35PM [ Reply | Report ]

Hmm, I think we can all agree the world would be a better place with more space lego.

Everyone knows the best computer was this ...

[link]

flibble on 03/11/03 5:37PM [ Reply | Report ]

GuestX>

As I am not British the origin of the ARM, or RISC OS is utterly moot and has no influence on me. Hey I use Delphi and like it (and that's from the US).

Java runs on a virtual machine and no one (that I know of) calls it an "OS".

The native PC hardware does not run RISC OS as it's OS (which you've already conceded). I'd also point out that the PC can continue to run Windows even if the RISC OS emulated by the VARPC crashes - the converse is *not* true. Emulation is the faith of dead platforms like the Spectrum and the Commodore 64, if saying RISC OS is still an operating system on a PC even it only runs on a sophisticated emulator (aka virtual machine) makes you happy fine - who am I to argue !

Regards

Annraoi

AMS on 03/11/03 6:53PM [ Reply | Report ]

Sorry Guys if that sounds all a bit negative (and it probably is) I am sorry.....

Regards

Annraoi

AMS on 03/11/03 7:12PM [ Reply | Report ]

I can't say that I'm an expert here, but surely the reason the PC can still run Windows even if VARPC crashes is because Windows is the OS for the PC and RISC OS the OS for the _virtual machine_ provided by VARPC? Isn't it really like two computers on one machine, one hardware and one virtual?

As to Java, isn't the VM it uses more emulating some kind of processor than a full OS - there's no GUI or filesystem or anything in the VM is there, isn't it all provided by the host OS? Not everything that runs on a VM is an OS, granted, but in this case the program running on VARPC's emulated RiscPC processor happens to be RISC OS, which is an OS. It seems to make sense to me, anyway :-)

hutchies on 03/11/03 8:04PM [ Reply | Report ]

repeat after me,

"It doesn't matter"

-- Spriteman

Spriteman on 03/11/03 10:35PM [ Reply | Report ]

It doesn't matter.

flibble on 03/11/03 10:45PM [ Reply | Report ]

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