RISC OS

RISC OS

A screenshot of RISC OS 4
Developer	Castle Technology & RISC OS Open (version 5), RISCOS Ltd (versions 4 & 6)
Written in	BBC BASIC, C, C++, assembly language
Working state	Current
Initial release	1987[1]
Latest release	5.22 or 6.20 / 25 April 2015[2] or 1 December 2009
Latest preview	5.23 / daily
Available in	English
Update method	Flash ROM, OTP ROM or loadable ROM image
Platforms	ARM
License	Dual-license[3] (version 5), Proprietary (version 6)
Official website	riscosopen.org RISC OS Open Ltd, riscos.com RISCOS Ltd

RISC OS /rɪskoʊˈɛs/^[4] is a computer operating system originally designed by Acorn Computers Ltd in Cambridge, England. First released in 1987, it was specifically designed to run on the ARM chipset, which Acorn had designed concurrently for use in its new line of Archimedes personal computers. RISC OS takes its name from the RISC (reduced instruction set computing) architecture supported.

Between 1987 and 1998, RISC OS was bundled with every ARM-based Acorn computer model. These included the Acorn Archimedes range, Acorn's R line of computers (with RISC iX as a dual boot option), RiscPC, A7000 and also prototype models such as the Acorn NewsPad and Phoebe computer. A version of the OS (called NCOS) was also used in Oracle's Network Computer and compatible systems.

After the break-up of Acorn in 1998, development of the OS was forked and separately continued by several companies, including RISCOS Ltd, Pace Micro Technology and Castle Technology. Since then, it has been bundled with a number of ARM-based desktop computers such as the Iyonix^[5] and A9home. As of 2012, the OS remains forked and is independently developed by RISCOS Ltd and the RISC OS Open community.

Most recent stable versions run on the ARMv3/ARMv4 RiscPC, the ARMv5 Iyonix,^[6] ARMv7 Cortex-A8 processors^[7][8] (such as that used in the BeagleBoard and Touch Book) and Cortex-A9 processors^[2] (such as that used in the PandaBoard). There is a development version for the Raspberry Pi.^[9][10][11] SD card images have been made available free of charge to Raspberry Pi users with a full graphical user interface version^[12] and a command-line interface only version (RISC OS Pico).^[13]

History

RISC OS was originally released in 1987 as Arthur 1.20. The next version, Arthur 2, became RISC OS 2 and was made available in April 1989. RISC OS 3.00 was released with the A5000 in 1991 and contained a series of new features. By 1996 RISC OS had been shipped on over 500,000 systems.^[14]

Acorn officially halted work on the OS in January 1999, renaming themselves Element 14. In March 1999 a new company called RISCOS Ltd licensed the rights to develop a desktop version of RISC OS from Element 14, and continued the development of RISC OS 3.8, releasing it as RISC OS 4 in July 1999. Meanwhile, Element 14 had also kept a copy of RISC OS 3.8 in house, which they developed into NCOS for use in set-top boxes. In 2000, Element 14 sold RISC OS to a company called Pace Micro Technology, who later sold it to Castle Technology Ltd.

In May 2001 RISCOS Ltd launched RISC OS Select, a subscription scheme allowing users access to the latest RISC OS 4 updates. These upgrades are released as soft-loadable ROM images, separate to the ROM where the boot OS is stored, and are loaded at boot time. Select 1 was shipped in May 2002, with Select 2 following in November 2002 and the final release of Select 3 in June 2004. In the same month, RISC OS 4.39, dubbed RISC OS Adjust, was released. RISC OS Adjust was a culmination of all the Select Scheme updates to date, released as a physical set of replaceable ROMs for the RiscPC and A7000 series of machines.

Meanwhile, in October 2002, Castle Technology released the Acorn clone Iyonix PC. This ran a 32-bit (as opposed to 26-bit) variant of RISC OS, known as RISC OS 5. RISC OS 5 is a separate evolution of RISC OS based upon the NCOS work done by Pace. The following year, Castle Technology bought RISC OS from Pace for an undisclosed sum. In October 2006, Castle announced a source sharing license plan for elements of RISC OS 5. This Shared Source Initiative (SSI) is managed by RISC OS Open Limited.

Supported hardware

Versions of RISC OS run or have run on the following hardware.

RISC OS compatible hardware

Machine	Introduced	Acorn version		RISCOS Ltd version		Castle Technology / RISC OS Open version
		First	Last	First	Latest	First	Latest
ARM with 26-bit program counter
Acorn Archimedes	1987 – 1992	0.20	3.1x	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
ARM with 26- & 32-bit program counter
Acorn Risc PC	1994[15]	3.50[15]	3.71	4.00	6.20[16]	5.15	5.22[17]/5.23
Acorn A7000 and A7000+	1995[18] – 1997[19]	3.60[18][19]	3.71	4.00	6.20[16]	5.15	5.22[17]/5.23
Acorn Phoebe	1998 (Cancelled)	3.80 (Ursula)	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
MicroDigital Medi[20]	1998[21]	3.71[21]	N/A	4.02	6.20	N/A	N/A
MicroDigital Mico	1999[22]	N/A	N/A	4.03[22]	4.39[16]	N/A	N/A
RiscStation R7500	1999[23]	N/A	N/A	4.03[23]	4.39[16]	N/A	N/A
Castle Kinetic RiscPC	2000[24]	N/A	N/A	4.03	6.20	5.19[25]	5.22[17]/5.23
MicroDigital Omega	2003[26]	N/A	N/A	4.03[27]	4.39[16]	N/A	N/A
Advantage Six A75	2004[28]	N/A	N/A	4.39[29]		N/A	N/A
ARM with 32-bit program counter (ARMv7 or more compatible with RISC OS's applications, older ARMv6 or ARMv5 based, where stated)
Iyonix Ltd Iyonix PC (ARMv5)	2002	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	5.01	5.22[30]/5.23
Advantage Six A9 (Home/RM/Loc) (ARMv5)	2005	N/A	N/A	4.42[16]		N/A	N/A
BeagleBoard[7]	2008	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	5.15	5.22[31]/5.23
Always Innovating Touch Book	2009	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	5.15	5.23
OpenPandora's Pandora	2010	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	5.17[32]	5.23
PandaBoard[33]	2011	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	5.17	5.22[2]/5.23
Raspberry Pi[10][34][35][36] (ARMv6 / ARMv7 / ARMv8)	2012	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	5.19	5.23
ARMX6[37]	2015	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	5.21	5.23
Titanium[38]	2015	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	5.23	5.23

Note that RISC OS Open Limited adopted the 'even numbers are stable' version numbering scheme post version 5.14, hence some table entries above include two latest releases – the last stable one and the more recent development one.

RISC OS has also been used by both Acorn and Pace Micro Technology in various TV connected set-top boxes, sometimes referred to instead as NCOS.

RISC OS can also run on a range of computer system emulators that emulate the earlier Acorn machines listed above.

RISC OS capable hardware emulators

Emulator	Machines emulated	Host platforms supported	Latest release
!A310Emu[39]	Archimedes	RISC OS	0.59
Archie[40]	Archimedes	Windows, DOS	0.9 – 10 February 2001
ArchiEmu[41]	Archimedes	RISC OS	0.53.3 – 7 December 2014
ArcEm[42]	Archimedes	Windows, Linux, Mac OS, RISC OS	1.50.1 – 18 December 2015
Arculator[43]	Archimedes	Windows, Linux	0.99 – 15 August 2009
Virtual A5000	Archimedes	Windows	1.4
Red Squirrel[44]	Archimedes, Risc PC, A7000	Windows	0.6 – 28 October 2002
RPCEmu[45]	Risc PC, A7000, Phoebe	Windows, Linux, Mac OS, OpenBSD	0.8.14 – 8 February 2016
VirtualRPC	Risc PC	Windows, Mac OS	5 September 2014[46]

Features

OS core

The OS is single-user and employs cooperative multitasking (CMT).^[47] While most current desktop OSes use preemptive multitasking (PMT) and multithreading, RISC OS remains with a CMT system. By 2003, many users had called for the OS to migrate to PMT.^[48] The OS memory protection is not comprehensive.^[49][50]

The core of the OS is stored in ROM, giving a fast bootup time and safety from operating system corruption. RISC OS 4 and 5 are stored in 4 MB of flash memory, allowing the operating system to be updated without having to replace the ROM chip. The OS is made up of a number of modules. These can be added to and replaced, including soft-loading of modules not present in ROM at run time and on-the-fly replacement. This design has led to OS developers releasing rolling updates to their versions of the OS, while third parties are able to write OS replacement modules to add new features. OS modules are accessed via software interrupts (SWIs), similar to system calls in other operating systems.

Most of the OS has defined ABIs to handle filters and vectors. The OS provides many ways in which the programmer can intercept and modify its operation. This simplifies the task of modifying its behaviour, either in the GUI or deeper. As a result, there is a number of third-party programs which allow the OS look and feel to be customised.

File system

The file system is volume-oriented: the top level of the file hierarchy is a volume (disc, network share) prefixed by the filesystem type. To determine file type, the OS uses metadata instead of file extensions. Colons are used to separate the filesystem from the rest of the path; the root is represented by a dollar ($) sign and directories are separated by a full stop (.). Extensions from foreign filesystems are shown using a slash (example.txt becomes example/txt).^[51] For example, ADFS::HardDisc4.$ is the root of the disc named HardDisc4 using the ADFS filesystem. RISC OS filetypes can be preserved on other systems by appending the hexadecimal type as '.xxx' to filenames.^[51][52] When using cross-platform software, filetypes can be invoked on other systems by naming appending '/[extension]' to the filename under RISC OS.^[53]

A file system can present a file of a particular type as a volume in its own right, similar to a loop device. The OS refers to this functionality as an image filing system. This allows transparent handling of archives and similar files, which appear as directories with some special properties. Files inside the image file appear in the hierarchy underneath the parent archive. It is not necessary for the archive to contain the data it refers to: some symbolic link and network share filesystems put a reference inside the image file and go elsewhere for the data.

The file system abstraction layer API uses 32 bit file offsets, making the largest single file 4 GiB (-1 byte) long. However, prior to RISC OS 5.20 the file system abstraction layer and many RISC OS-native file systems limited support to 31 bits (just under 2 GiB) to avoid dealing with apparently negative file extents when expressed in two's complement notation.

File formats

The OS uses metadata to distinguish file formats. Some common file formats from other systems are mapped to filetypes by the MimeMap module.^[54]

Kernel

The RISC OS kernel is single-tasking (the cooperative multi-tasking is provided by the WindowManager module) and controls handling of interrupts, DMA services, memory allocation and the video display.^[47]

Desktop

The WIMP interface is based around a stacking window manager and incorporates three mouse buttons^[55] (named Select, Menu and Adjust), context-sensitive menus, window order control (i.e. send to back) and dynamic window focus (a window can have input focus at any position on the stack). The Icon bar (Dock) holds icons which represent mounted disc drives, RAM discs, running applications, system utilities and docked: Files, Directories or inactive Applications. These icons have context-sensitive menus and support drag-and-drop behaviour. They represent the running application as a whole, irrespective of whether it has open windows.

The GUI is centred around the concept of files. The Filer, a spatial file manager, displays the contents of a disc. Applications are run from the Filer view and files can be dragged to the Filer view from applications to perform saves. Application directories are used to store applications. The OS differentiates them from normal directories through the use of a pling (exclamation mark, also called shriek) prefix. Double-clicking on such a directory launches the application rather than opening the directory. The application's executable files and resources are contained within the directory, but normally they remain hidden from the user. Because applications are self-contained, this allows drag-and-drop installation and removal.

The RISC OS Style Guide encourages a consistent look and feel across applications. This was introduced in RISC OS 3 and specifies application appearance and behaviour. Acorn's own main bundled applications were not updated to comply with the guide until RISCOS Ltd's Select release in 2001.^[56]

Font manager

The outline font manager provides spatial anti-aliasing of fonts, the OS being the first operating system to include such a feature,^{[57][58][59][60]} having included it since before January 1989.^[61] Since 1994, in RISC OS 3.5, it has been possible to use an outline anti-aliased font in the WindowManager for UI elements, rather than the bitmap system font from previous versions.^[62]

RISC OS 4 does not support Unicode but "RISC OS 5 provides a Unicode Font Manager which is able to display Unicode characters and accept text in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32. Other parts of the RISC OS kernel and core modules support text described in UTF-8."^[63]

Bundled applications

RISC OS is delivered with a number of desktop applications in the form of pre-installed software.

Backward compatibility

Limited software portability exists with subsequent versions of the OS and hardware. Single-tasking BBC BASIC applications often require only trivial changes, if any. Successive OS upgrades have raised more serious issues of backward compatibility for desktop applications and games.^[64] Applications still being maintained by their author(s) or others have sometimes historically been amended to provide compatibility.

The introduction of the RiscPC in 1994 and its later StrongARM upgrade raised issues of incompatible code sequences and proprietary squeezing (compression). Patching of applications for the StrongARM was facilitated and Acorn's UnsqueezeAIF software unsqueezed images according to their AIF header.^[65] The incompatibilities prompted release by The ARM Club of its Game On!^[66][67] and StrongGuard software.^[66][68][69] They allowed some previously incompatible software to be run on new and upgraded systems. The version of the OS for the A9home prevented the running of software without an AIF header (in accordance with Application Note 295)^[70] to stop "trashing the desktop".^[71]

The Iyonix PC (RISC OS 5) and A9home (custom RISC OS 4) saw further software incompatibility because of the deprecated 26-bit addressing modes. Most applications under active development have since been rewritten.^[72][73][74] Static code analysis to detect 26-bit only sequences can be undertaken using ARMalyser.^[75] Its output can be helpful in making 32-bit versions of older applications for which the source code is unavailable.^[76][75][77] Some older 26-bit software can be run without modification using the Aemulor emulator.^[74][78][79]

Additional incompatibilities were introduced with newer ARM cores, such as ARMv7 in the BeagleBoard and ARMv8 in the Raspberry Pi.

See also

• Acorn C/C++
• Drobe
• riscos.info
• ROX Desktop, a graphical desktop environment for the X Window System, inspired by the user interface of RISC OS

References

1. copyright notice Arthur 1.20 (25 September 1987)
2. Revill, Steve (25 April 2015). "RISC OS 5.22 stable is now available". RISC OS Open. Retrieved 2015-04-25.
3. RISC OS Shared Source FAQ, RISC OS Open, accessed 2011-01-06
4. "About us: RISC OS Open Limited FAQ". RISC OS Open. Retrieved 2011-06-13.
5. "Acorn announces distribution deal with Castle Technology for RISC based products". Acorn Computers Ltd (Press release). Acorn Computers Ltd. 12 October 1998. Archived from the original on 6 May 1999. Retrieved 2011-01-06. (October 12th 1998), Cambridge, UK-Acorn announced today that it has completed negotiations with Castle Technology for them to distribute Acorn products.
6. "RISC OS 5 features". Iyonix Ltd. Retrieved 2011-01-31. All IYONIX pcs ship with RISC OS 5 in flash ROM.
7. Farrell, Nick (27 April 2009). "Snaps leak of RISC OS5 on BeagleBoard". The Inquirer. Retrieved 2011-06-28. A snap of an RISC OS 5, running on a BeagleBoard device powered by a 600MHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor with a built-in graphics chip, has tipped up on the world wide wibble. The port developed by Jeffrey Lee is a breakthrough for the shared-source project because it has ported the OS without an army of engineers.
8. "Cortex-A8 port status". RISC OS Open. Retrieved 2011-01-31. [The port includes] a modified version of the RISC OS kernel containing support for (all) Cortex-A8 CPU cores.
9. Lee, Jeffrey. "Newsround". The Icon Bar. Retrieved 17 October 2011.
10. Holwerda, Thom (31 October 2011). "Raspberry Pi To Embrace RISC OS". OSNews. Retrieved 1 November 2011.
11. Dewhurst, Christopher (December 2011). "The London show 2011". Archive (magazine) 23 (3). p. 3.
12. "Downloads". Raspberry Pi. Retrieved 2013-09-02.
13. "RISC OS Open: Raspberry Pi". riscosopen.org.
14. "ART – Acorn RISC OS" (PDF). acorn.chriswhy.co.uk.
15. Chris's Acorns – Risc PC
16. RISC OS Six Frequently Asked Questions
17. RISC OS Open: downloads/riscpc
18. "Chris's Acorns: Acorn A7000". computinghistory.org.uk.
19. "Chris's Acorns: Acorn A7000+". computinghistory.org.uk.
20. repackaged A7000+
21. "Chris's Acorns: MicroDigital". computinghistory.org.uk.
22. "Chris's Acorns: MicroDigital". computinghistory.org.uk.
23. "Chris's Acorns: RISC OS After Acorn". computinghistory.org.uk.
24. "The Icon Bar: Castle reveal Kinetic to the press". iconbar.com.
25. "Bugs and sources:". RISC OS Open. 2013-03-28. Retrieved 2013-09-02.
26. "Omega production saga continues - Drobe.co.uk archives". drobe.co.uk.
27. "Chris's Acorns: MicroDigital". computinghistory.org.uk.
28. "A75 is ARM7500FE ruggable - Drobe.co.uk archives". drobe.co.uk.
29. "Advantage6: Thea75". advantagesix.com.
30. "RISC OS Open: Iyonix". riscosopen.org.
31. "RISC OS Open: BeagleBoard". riscosopen.org.
32. "RISC OS Open: Forum: Let's get started with a Pandora port". riscosopen.org.
33. Lee, Jeffrey (2 August 2011). "Have I Got Old News For You". The Icon Bar. Retrieved 28 September 2011. [...] Willi Theiss has recently announced that he's been working on a port of RISC OS to the PandaBoard [...]
34. raspberrypi.org Archived 5 April 2012 at the Wayback Machine.
35. "Raspberry Pi B+". 15 July 2014. Retrieved 13 August 2014.
36. "Raspberry Pi 3". 29 February 2016.
37. Hudd, Vince (1 February 2015). "ARMX6 formally announced at last". Riscository. Retrieved 1 November 2015. [...] The heart of the machine is a Freescale i.MX 6 series processor [...]
38. "Preview of a whole new RISC OS platform". 23 October 2015. Retrieved 23 October 2015.
39. "Welcome to my homepage!". Home.tiscali.nl. Retrieved 2013-09-02.
40. "Archie - Acorn Archimedes Emulator". Web.archive.org. 2001-08-12. Archived from the original on 6 February 2004. Retrieved 2013-09-02.
41. "Tellima". Retrieved 2015-12-13.
42. "ArcEm - The Acorn Archimedes Emulator". Arcem.sourceforge.net. Retrieved 2013-09-02.
43. "Arculator - The Acorn Archimedes Emulator". B-em.bbcmicro.com. Retrieved 2013-09-02.
44. "Red Squirrel Acorn Archimedes Emulator". Redsquirrel.fsnet.co.uk. Retrieved 2013-09-02.
45. "RPCEmu". Marutan.net. Retrieved 2016-03-21.
46. "VirtualAcorn". virtualacorn.co.uk.
47. Palmer, Stewart (December 1996). "A RISC OS for all Seasons: Tired of OSes that require acres of memory and huge hard drives?". Byte 21 (12): 49. ISSN 0360-5280. OCLC 208951251.
48. Williams, Chris (26 July 2003). "Imagining RISC OS and PMT". Drobe. Retrieved 10 July 2012.
49. Michael Reed Tech Book 1 – Published articles Oct 2006 – June 2008
50. "RISC OS Memory Protection - Drobe.co.uk archives". drobe.co.uk.
51. Naulls, Peter (2 January 2004). "RISC OS filename translation". Drobe. Retrieved 25 April 2012.
52. "OSNews.com". osnews.com.
53. Fitton, Gerald (August 1994), "Fireworkz for Windows" (PDF), Archive (Glastonbury: Abbey Press) 7 (11), p. 21, OCLC 222434223
54. "Iyonix: MIMEMap". iyonix.com.
55. Dan Ryan (13 April 2011). History of Computer Graphics: DLR Associates Series. AuthorHouse. p. 358. ISBN 978-1-4567-5115-9. Retrieved 13 June 2013.
56. Mellor, Phil (23 March 2007). "An arbitrary number of possibly influential RISC OS things". The Icon Bar. Retrieved 27 September 2011. Admittedly it wasn't until RISC OS Select was released, almost 10 years later, that the standard Acorn applications (Draw, Edit, and Paint) implemented the style guide's clipboard recommendations, but most products followed it with care.
57. Round, Mark (26 February 2004). "Emulating RISC OS under Windows". OSnews. OSNews. Retrieved 2011-05-12. Many of the UI concepts that we take for granted were first pioneered in RISC OS, for instance: scalable anti-aliased fonts and an operating system extendable by 'modules', while most of the PC world was still on Windows 3.0.
58. Ghiraddje (22 December 2009). "The RISC OS GUI". Telcontar.net. Retrieved 2011-05-12. Only with Mac OS X did any mainstream graphical interface provide the smoothly rendered, fractionally spaced type that Acorn accomplished in 1992 or earlier.
59. Reimer, Jeremy (May 2005). "A History of the GUI". ArsTechnica. Retrieved 2011-05-25. [...] in 1987, the UK-based company Acorn Computers introduced their [...] GUI, called "Arthur", also was the first to feature anti-aliased display of on-screen fonts, even in 16-color mode!
60. Holwerda, Thom (23 June 2005). "Screen Fonts: Shape Accuracy or On-Screen Readability?". OSNews. Retrieved 2011-06-13. [...] it was RISC OS that had the first system-wide, intricate [...] font rendering in operating systems.
61. Pountain, Dick (December 1988). "Screentest: Archie RISC OS" (PDF). Personal Computer World. p. 154. Retrieved 2011-01-14. [ArcDraw] can also add text in multiple sizes and fonts to a drawing (including anti-aliased fonts)
62. "Acorn Computers Support Group Application Notice 253 – New features of RISC OS version 3.5" (PDF). acorn.chriswhy.co.uk.
63. "Unicode in RISC OS". riscos.info.
64. "ARM architecture versions cheat sheet". Retrieved 14 January 2015.
65. "Application Note 295". Engineering Support Application Note. Acorn Computers. 4 October 1996. Retrieved 28 June 2012.
66. Foggy (11 July 2001). "Games FAQ". Acorn Arcade. Retrieved 27 June 2012.
67. "Game On!". The ARM Club – Software Products. The ARM Club. Archived from the original on 4 October 2001. Retrieved 27 June 2012.
68. "StrongGuard". The ARM Club – Software Products. The ARM Club. Archived from the original on 12 February 2009. Retrieved 27 June 2012.
69. McKillop, Keith (22 November 2000). "RISC OS 2000: Show Report". Acorn Arcade. Retrieved 27 June 2012.
70. "RISCOS Ltd News" (PDF). RISCOS Ltd. May 2006. Retrieved 28 June 2012.
71. Williams, Chris (17 April 2006). "ROL release C99 SCL to A9home users". Drobe. Retrieved 28 June 2012.
72. Thompson, Matt. "Iyonix Issues". RISC World 7 (2). Retrieved 27 June 2012.
73. Thompson, Matt. "Iyonix Issues". RISC World 8 (2). Retrieved 27 June 2012.
74. "A Guide to RISC OS Versions". WROCC website. Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club. Retrieved 27 June 2012.
75. Brett, Paul. "PD World". RISC World 7 (1). Retrieved 27 June 2012.
76. Brett, Paul. "PD World". RISC World 3 (1). Retrieved 27 June 2012.
77. "Free Software". The ARM Club website. The ARM Club. Retrieved 27 June 2012.
78. Williams, Chris (19 November 2002). "Aemulor: Number of apps working on Iyonix 'growing daily'". Drobe. Retrieved 21 June 2012.
79. Williams, Chris (25 March 2003). "Aemulor sees the light of day". Drobe. Retrieved 27 June 2012.

External links

• "What is RISC OS?". The RISC OS Products Directory. 2 November 2006. Archived from the original on 19 February 2007. Retrieved 26 August 2014.
• Gilbert, Michael. "Archiology: relics from Acorn's past". lewisgilbert.co.uk. Retrieved 26 August 2014.
• Watson, Jamie A. (8 January 2014). "Raspberry Pi: Hands-on with RISC OS". ZDNet. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 26 August 2014.
• Watts, Robin. "Documentation on Acorn Computers". Warm Silence Software. Pink Noise Productions. Retrieved 26 August 2014.