There are two main strands of RISC OS. Version 5 and Select. Many consider the latter to be the most feature rich version, and therefore preferable for desktop use. Interestingly, the Iyonix, currently the platform’s fastest machine, uses RISC OS 5. Drobe looks at the exciting prospect of a new RISC OS Select machine.
RISC OS Select on new hardware?
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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that would be pretty cool. I wish someone would come out with a os5/select machine for less than 800 usd. The iyonix is just to far out of my price range being a student and all
they need to hit the magic $500 mark. THey should build a small tight system.
I’d be happy with a tiny box that had a cd-rw, 256mb ram, 600mhz xscale and usb ports
while other operating systems are moving into the 64bit relm. risc os is moving into the 32bit relm :p
In reply to sgtarky:
No, this is a common misconception that unfortunately isn’t helped by the confusing terminology used by the RISC OS community.
RISC OS has been running on what most people would call 32-bit hardware since 1989 (that’s the 16-bit Windows 2.0 era).
However, historically ARM chips used only 26 bits of the full 32 bit PC register for the program counter (the other bits being used as flags). More recent ARM chips have ditched this mode of operation and use the full width PC register. Large parts of RISC OS needed updating to allow it to work with this new addressing mode. See here for more details:
http://www.heyrick.co.uk/assembler/32bit.html
So RISC OS users refer to the two versions of RISC OS as 26-bit and 32-bit, even though they both run on 32-bit hardware, since the two are not totally compatible.
Hope this clarifies things