Guest post by Since the opening up of the RISC OS source code, developers have been experimenting with the OS on modern ARM hardware. Recently, work has progressed on porting some vintage Acorn games to other platforms, including iOS and Windows. Paradise Games has released an iOS port of Inferno, and TBA Software has rendered BHP in OpenGL on Windows. TBA has also ported its TBAFS filing system to ARMv7 hardware and is investigating its TAG games engine and the modernisation of BBC BASIC. The Icon Bar has further details.
I understand the game revival, but why the file system? The description pretty much warns people that its not very reliable ( no journaling) and likely has bugs so it shouldn’t be used by anyone for anything important. Am I missing something? Or are people really looking for a high performance low reliable Risc OS file system ?
My understanding is that journaling could be added. http://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/1/topics/630?page=1#posts-70…
And the proposed TBAFS64 could give access to larger discs. http://www.tbasoftware.co.uk/2011/05/threading-and-tbafs64.html
Edited 2011-06-21 08:37 UTC
I’m clearly missing something here. Hasn’t Linux had ADFS support since forever?
As for the file system, I can imagine two things:
First, it’s useful for reading old disks and disk images.
Second, if you’re trying to run RISC OS and associated applications on modern hardware, might it not be easier to work with a modernized version of something it already supports, instead of adding a new one?
Yeah, I guess if you’re running RISC OS it makes sense. The interesting part of this article that makes sense to me is the porting of applications from RISC to other operating systems. For that task, its not very useful other operating systems already have their file systems and that doesn’t sound like it would provide any non legacy disk reading benefit to porting over.
For info, TBA have said that VFP/NEON support in BASIC is their priority.
http://www.tbasoftware.co.uk/2011/06/basic-assembler-update.html