Profile for graeme

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Email: graeme@redsquirrel.fsnet.co.uk ICQ: AOL: Yahoo:	Username: graeme Realname: Graeme Barnes About me: Homepage: Face/Logo: Comments posted: 9 (show all)

Recent comments

On Apple Mac VirtualRiscPC beta on sale:

I don't normally comment on news sites but I would like to add a little bit of reality to this thread. Like most if not all RISC OS related companies, Virtual Acorn is small. Aaron deals with the customer facing side of things - distribution, licensing, support, shows and so on; and I write the applications. That's it. Even with such a small number of staff, the income from something like VRPC after licensing, taxes, p and p, marketing, running costs etc., is nowhere near enough to support either of us. I have a full time job and VRPC is written and maintained in my rapidly dwindling spare time - evenings, weekends and holidays. VRPC is not a particularly complex piece of software, but it does touch on a lot of different areas, in multiple versions of multiple operating systems, and tries to make them do many things they don't really want to do. Getting it all developed, tested and working seamlessly is not easy. I do wish to apologise to those potential users for raising their hopes that there would be a Mac based VPRC long ago. Against Aaron's better judgement, I thought it would be good to demonstrate an early development version of a product I really believed would be completed within months. Unfortunately it wasn't stable enough, and other commitments came first, and getting from there to here has been hard work. Luckily we are now just about in a position to release it as a product but for various reasons, including saving endless hours ours of difficult support calls for Aaron, we'd like to release it as a beta to a select few customers who know what they're getting into, i.e. they know RISC OS and MAC OS X and are willing to help us turn it into a robust product which we are proud to sell. If everything goes to plan, the Intel version will hopefully available for purchase very soon. Unfortunately the PPC version doesn't run properly under Rosetta, so we won't be able to distribute beta versions to non-PPC users. graeme on 18/5/07 2:24PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On South East show report:

It performs on a par with the Windows version although it will depend on your graphics drivers how well it performs under X. It will hopefully eventually be feature equivalent to the Windows version but that will depend on time and motivation; I see no technical reason why it shouldn't be. Porting to Linux makes a Mac OS X version more viable but it is still another big step and I don't currently have the hardware available to do the port. No idea on release dates; if and when it is ready. It is a full port to Linux and doesn't use Wine. It is currently a native X or unix app depending on how it is built. There isn't that much difference in the code bases so maintaining different versions is quite easy. graeme on 31/10/04 5:50PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On Try our PC laptops says RiscStation:

Whoever wrote the article parser to recognise variants on RISC OS needs to update the exception list! graeme on 10/11/03 5:47PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On Try our PC laptops says RiscStation:

Virtual Acorn was not written to run on Linux, it was written (in my spare time) to run on Windows the platform I'm most used to using. Because of the hard work of others, Virtual Acorn can also be run under a Wine environment on Linux, if that's your OS of choice. Virtual Acorn may well get ported to Linux at some stage but it is not currently high on my list of priorities. If you have a serious need to Virtual Acorn natively on Linux, you could donate say £10k to pay for my development time to produce a port. Or if you prefer, use ArcEm, do some work on Riscose, or write your own machine emulator. graeme on 10/11/03 5:42PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On VirtualRiscPC freed from Alpha laptop?:

HOSTFS is pretty much like any other module/device combination under RISC OS. The module translates the FileSwitch calls into something more generic and exchanges commands/data with the 'device' via memory mapped registers. The device happens to use Win32 calls to access files on the host filing system, it could do just about anything. As Peter says, a HAL wouldn't make this any easier. What a HAL _might_ do in the future is avoid me having to write emulation of specific chips that RISC OS expects to see and are needed for RISC OS to boot, load modules from podules etc. I.e. VA would become a platform in its own right rather than pretending to be an A5000/RiscPC to please RISC OS. Even so, it is probable that the RISC OS 5 rom is custom compiled for each platform so VA would still need to emulate a particular platform unless it got its own custom build. graeme on 07/07/03 08:52AM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

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