Boot RISC OS
RISC OS 3.71 — the RiscPC desktop of 1996 — running in your browser. Nothing to install, no plug-ins, and the hard disc keeps what you leave on it.
What is here
The Wimp and its window furniture, the icon bar, the Filer, the Pinboard and the Task Manager, a hard disc that remembers what you put on it, and a BBC BASIC V interpreter. The applications are ports of the original sources: !Draw, !Paint, !Edit, !Chars, !Alarm, !Help, !Configure, !SciCalc, !Maestro, !ChangeFSI and the Diversions games among them.
Open the hard disc and start with $.Docs, which explains what this desktop adds to RISC OS 3.71.
Before you start
- Use a recent Chrome, Firefox or Safari. The first visit shows the boot sequence; later visits go straight to the desktop.
- The desktop wants a keyboard and a mouse, and it uses the Acorn button order, so Menu is the middle button.
- Your hard disc is stored in your own browser. Clearing the site's data empties it.
- Two features need the project's own Node server and so are not available here: !Browse's built-in browser engine, which falls back to showing pages in a frame, and mounting folders from the server. Folders from your own computer still work in Chrome.
Credits
RISC OS 3.71 is © Acorn Computers Ltd 1987–1997, and the sprites, fonts, window templates, messages, help text and the seed hard disc all come from its source tree. The applications are ports of the original sources, with their authors credited in each application's Info box. !Hopper is © 1994 Simon Foster under the BSD 3-clause licence and !Madness © 2016 Castle Technology under the Apache License 2.0, both from RISC OS Open. !Lander is © D. J. Braben 1987; the port follows Mark Moxon's documented source, and the original program is not included. The bundled fonts are used under the MIT and SIL Open Font licences. The project README carries the full credits.