RISC OS News

The London Show was a great success. The theatre was full, and the response to 64-bit RISC OS was outstanding. Developers who had never used RISC OS before were keen to help take it forward, and several of them left with development kits so they can get started.

Bringing the 64-bit project together has been a real pleasure, and I’m grateful to the many members of the community who have offered their time and expertise. So I was disappointed to see the familiar negativity return to the RISC OS Open forums after the show. I’d like to clear up some points from those discussions.

DiscMedic

We developed DiscMedic for 64-bit RISC OS because the developer of DiscKnight has said clearly that he won’t support an operating system whose filesystems were developed with the help of AI. That left us needing a disc repair tool that supports UFS2, the filesystem RISC OS 64 now uses. This was a practical decision, not the result of a falling-out, and suggestions on the forums that it was are unfounded.

We’ve also released DiscMedic to RISC OS 5 users, so they can choose whichever tool suits them. Competition is healthy, and RISC OS usually has two of everything these days anyway.

3D acceleration on the Raspberry Pi 5 and CM5

The 3D acceleration driver is built on Mesa3D, which is released under the permissive MIT licence. The GPU support uses a userspace UNIX-based driver. It does not use a Linux kernel driver. I’d ask people to wait until the source code is released before forming an opinion, rather than spreading inaccurate claims. Speculation of this kind on the forums has caused real distress to members of the community for many years.

RISCSurf

RISCSurf is based on the NetSurf web engine. NetSurf development has been slow for some years, so I contacted the NetSurf team directly, offering to support their work and help maintain the browser. I received no reply.

NetSurf’s licence permits anyone to develop the engine further and release it under a new name, provided the licence terms are kept and the licence is included with the application. RISCSurf has been developed on that basis and will continue to be, and its source code is available at https://gitlab.com/martin.eastwood82/netsurf. My offer still stands, and if the NetSurf developers would like to work together, I’d welcome an email from them directly rather than comments made on their behalf on the forums.

Contact

If you have concerns about the development of 64-bit RISC OS, please contact RISC OS Developments directly, or contact me at RISCOS Technologies.

Looking ahead

The response in London showed that most of the community is excited about the next few years. It’s worth remembering that without AI-assisted development, 64-bit RISC OS would have been a decade-long project.