Profile for ninja

Contact	About me
Email: Private ICQ: AOL: Yahoo:	Username: ninja Realname: Iain Williamson About me: Homepage: Face/Logo: Comments posted: 184 (show all)

Recent comments

Message board post:

I hadn't noticed Sophie's cameo in the pub Personally I thought the pacing at the end was fine, though it felt rather rushed at the start, skipping over a number of details that could have set up the relationship between Curry and Sinclair a bit better. But once the film entered the home computer era it really kicked up a gear. This film, and the recent featuring of a BBC Micro on Electric Dreams make this a good time to get a little nostalgic about the good old days ninja on 12/10/09 1:58PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On Video: Prof Steve Furber on 8-bit Acorn days and beyond:

Yeah, good interview and lots of interesting stuff about the development of the ARM1. I didn't know they started work on it in 1983 before. ninja on 4/9/09 1:34PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On ARM-powered computer firm in RISC OS port talks :

I can't find any documentation for ADFS-E and F formats as used by RISC OS - all my googling seems to bring up are details of the 8-bit ADFS implementation from the BBC micro. Apparently the modern linux kernel has an ADFS kernel module which can read E and F format discs (certainly floppy discs - I believe hard discs are formatted the same). This may be as good a starting point as any. Abstracting away the disc interface would certainly be a good idea, since RISC OS's ADFS implementation doesn't understand partitions, so can only use the first partition on a disc. If the interface presented a certain parition as being a full disc to RISC OS, the RISC OS partition could be put anywhere. ninja on 3/9/09 1:36PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On ARM-powered computer firm in RISC OS port talks :

ADFS is a class of file systems used by RISC OS for floppy and hard discs - open drivers have been available for this for years now, so I can't believe it would be hard to apply this so the linux side could see the RISC OS side's discs. It used to require a rebuild of the kernel last time I used it, but that was many years ago. ninja on 3/9/09 12:53AM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On ARM-powered computer firm in RISC OS port talks :

Interesting - so a port to your hardware would be a port to your firmware (which I guess is Aura), and so a port to any other Genesi device would just (ha!) need to consider ARM instruction set differences, pipeline lengths, that sort of thing? I quite like that idea, though it doesn't lessen the need for a good HAL in RISC OS if it's going to be truly portable. ninja on 2/9/09 6:28PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

Search the archives

Today's featured article

Desktop Repton Plus review
It hurt my brain
 10 comments, latest by AW on 12/2/05 8:06PM. Published: 10 Feb 2005

Random article

Star Fighter 3000: The Next Generation review
Star Fighter 3000: The Next Generation was born from the 3D0 version of the original SF3K that was ported back to RISC OS and this year freed from programmers' hard discs for the platform to enjoy, writes Andrew Weston. In this review Andrew weighs up much-improved graphics and sound against playability and stability.
 19 comments, latest by AW on 9/12/08 8:45PM. Published: 17 Nov 2008

Useful links