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

CDs Available
Drobe Special Projects
 2 comments, latest by piemmm on 21/10/03 12:23PM. Published: 23 Jul 2003

Random article

Letters
Open source RISC OS and USB on a RiscPC
 7 comments, latest by druck on 1/11/05 9:32AM. Published: 27 Oct 2005

Useful links