Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?

Re:Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancien... by lowbloodsugar on Saturday October 10, 2020 @12:19AM (#24736659)

"A software emulation of 32-bit ARM would be needed, with perhaps a 10x performance drop."

Well, my Archimedes was 8Mhz, and my Pi is 1500Mhz, so we have some room there perhaps?

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Re:Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancien... by qwerty456127 on Saturday October 10, 2020 @08:43AM (#24738570)

Don't forger the fact 187.5 times the frequency is not the only improvement. Today you also have 4x the cores, 8x the bits and hardware 4Kp60 HEVC en/de-coding. There probably are more things (like AES encryption, linear algebra and FPU) hardware-accelerated, I don't really know. This way your emulated Archimedes can probably do much much more than it was supposed to.

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Re:Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancien... by marktangotango on Saturday October 10, 2020 @08:27AM (#24738493)

Gameboy advance emulators emulate 32bit arm, plenty of those around.

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Re:Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancien... by LeoPanthera on Saturday October 10, 2020 @12:33AM (#24736708)

Which is fine, but the things we do with our home computers today are not the same things we did in the late 80s.

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Re:Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancien... by wk_end on Saturday October 10, 2020 @02:46AM (#24737099)

Maybe so, but I'd imagine most of the legacy 32-bit apps you'd be running in emulation here on your 64-bit RISC OS system are from the late 80s (or maybe the early-to-mid-90s), doing those late 80s things.

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Re:Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancien... by pjmlp on Saturday October 10, 2020 @05:47AM (#24737786)

Plenty of them actually are.

A rusty Amiga 2000, with Internet connection could handle like 80% of the stuff I use my 2009 laptop for.

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Re:Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancien... by 082349872349872 on Saturday October 10, 2020 @01:53AM (#24736934)

If the things we do with with our home computers are crunching in kernel space instead of in userland, someone's done something wrong.

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Re:Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancien... by wk_end on Saturday October 10, 2020 @02:44AM (#24737091)

The article's talking about running 32-bit applications in emulation, with a 64-bit native kernel.

> Then a rewrite of RISC OS for 64-bit ARM chips would require a 32-bit emulation layer for old apps to run -- and very slowly at that, when ARM chips no longer execute 32-bit code directly. A software emulation of 32-bit ARM would be needed, with perhaps a 10x performance drop.

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Re:Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancien... by Teongot on Saturday October 10, 2020 @07:40AM (#24738261)

The cost of simulating 32-bit ARM on 64-bit ARM is nothing like 10x if you try hard enough

https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/files/56078084/...

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Re:Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancien... by lproven on Sunday October 11, 2020 @09:53AM (#24745769)

So I have been informed, in some detail, over on Lobste.rs.

I am glad to hear it. I like this little OS and I want to see it survive!

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Re:Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancien... by ilaksh on Saturday October 10, 2020 @01:33AM (#24736877)

I saw some YouTube videos of RISC OS running on Pi.

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Re:Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancien... by lproven on Saturday October 10, 2020 @09:27AM (#24738850)

[Author here]

I have RISC OS running on a Pi, and it's not the first one I've had, either.

https://twitter.com/lproven/status/1310304554395860996

http://blog.tynemouthsoftware.co.uk/2015/12/day-8-zx-spectru...

I don't just make this stuff up, you know. :-)

I still have my A305, too, and an A5000 as well.

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