Profile for killermike

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Email: Private ICQ: 51787449 AOL: Yahoo:	Username: killermike Realname: Michael Reed About me: Geekish musician/writer sort of person. Homepage: http://www.unmusic.co.uk/ Face/Logo: Comments posted: 48 (show all) Articles written: 1 (show all)

Recent comments

On In brief: Acorn World show this weekend:

Doh! The one show that I'm an interested in and that's within reasonable distance of me and I can't go. killermike on 10/9/09 5:36PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

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

Finally finished watching. Very interesting interview. killermike on 8/9/09 5:50PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

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

I asked her some questions about that for a feature but they had to be cut for length. They're at the bottom of this blog posting. [link] killermike on 6/9/09 3:19PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On First screenshot: Beagleboard runs RISC OS 5 desktop:

The first part of what I suggested, a windowed VM, is pretty easy to do. You could do it with a bit of script hacking and a copy of RPCEmu. Basically, whenever the filer (any OS) runs a RISC OS executable, it uses a script to launch RPCEmu with a modified boot sequence so that some parameters specifying which program to run can be passed along to it. Obviously, as someone else pointed out, it's not much use for an OS like RO as drag and drop, but it would work. Making it seamless is the hard part but not insurmountable. Surely, this is what Aemulator is doing? Once that was running you could abandon legacy compatibility and start integrating something like WIMP2. The other point that I was making was that a module that allowed programmers to run a piece of code on the second core would probably quite useful. Making RO a multithreaded, multi processor OS seems like too much work. I'm sure that most users would be prefer video acceleration for example. killermike on 30/5/09 8:06AM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

On First screenshot: Beagleboard runs RISC OS 5 desktop:

Some questions for the experts. Why not just run the old apps in an emulator box so that each CMT app thinks that it's the only application running on its own, with its own copy of RISC OS? This might mean that each application has an additional 4meg overhead or so. The real work would be making it seamless but it should be possible with an OS like RO and some patches to the window manager. I never understand this obsession with maintaining full binary and source compatibility with old hardware and OS. For example, Amiga OS has stuck to this and it's now pretty much an unsellable proposition due to the lack of memory protection. All to run ancient software that can be emulated at a faster speed than the original hardware anyway. Would RISC OS devs mind if there were a few new calls added to the system in order to run as a full pre-emtive app? Maybe someone who has done more WIMP programming than me (I was mainly a asm game and demos kind of guy) could tell us how big the changes would have to be. Secondly, couldn't someone make an RM for handling the second core as a co processor? All programmers need is an interface instruct the second core to run a piece of code at a certain address and deposit the result at another address. That seems like a far more realistic goal than reinventing RO as a truly multi-core operating system. killermike on 25/5/09 3:06AM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

Recent articles and quickies

The return of the 8bit-era: creating a 'neo-micro'
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