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The latest news to land on the RISCWorld editorial desk...

ROL and ROOL joint press release.

Right back to the days of Acorn, there have been two distinct strands of RISC OS development. These two strands were developed to exploit different markets and hardware platforms. The Castle Technology strand is used in a number of products, including the IYONIX PC and various set top boxes. The RISCOS Ltd strand is also used in a number of different products, including the A9Home, the VirtualAcorn range of software emulators and as upgrades to existing Acorn computers via the RISC OS Select scheme.

Sources to both strands are available free of charge to developers. One strand is gradually being published under the Castle Technology Shared Source initiative by RISC OS Open Ltd. The RISCOS Ltd strand is available to Registered Developers and Hardware Manufacturers under NDA or as part of the Authorised Manufacturer Scheme, for both commercial and non-commercial exploitation.

Today, RISC OS Open (ROOL) and RISCOS Ltd (ROL) are pleased to announce an agreement to enable co-operation in the development of these two strands of RISC OS.

It is envisaged that this will be a two-step process:

Step One: to jointly co-ordinate future developments in order to avoid work being carried out on one strand of RISC OS which is incompatible with work on the other. For example, ensuring that when new features are added, they are implemented in a way which can interact as smoothly as possible with those features where they already exist on the other strand. This will broadly be achieved through the publishing and maintenance of public API documentation and guiding developers to that documentation.
Step Two: to investigate ways to improve the current situation for developers of software. It is hoped that RISC OS Open and RISCOS Ltd can implement solutions to problems which developers are currently faced with, for example the existing situation with software version numbers being divergent on the two different RISC OS strands.

RISC OS Open and RISCOS Ltd are committed to ensuring that RISC OS users and developers will see real benefits from this co-operation over the coming months and into the years ahead.

For further details contact info@riscosopen.org and/or developer@riscos.com

Stephen Revill, Director
RISC OS Open Ltd
4 Townsend Mews
Wilburton
Ely
Cambridgeshire, CB6 3SQ
Tel: +44 (0) 1353 740 267

Free TFT monitor with some new Iyonix computers

Iyonix Ltd are offering a free 17" multimedia TFT monitor with every IYONIX pc ordered before the end of the year. The IYONIX pc combines a fast Xscale processor, fast DDR RAM, fast Pata hard drives and PCI infrastructure, making the IYONIX PC the fastest RISC OS computer ever made.

The IYONIX pc also supports monitor resolutions of up to 2045 x 1536 in 16 million colours. Now with this limited offer of a 'Free top quality 17inch LCD monitor', there has never been a better time to move up to an IYONIX pc.

Free LCD specifications:

Screen size 17" diagonal
Recommended resolution 1280 x 1024
Colours 16.2 million
Brightness 280cd/m2
Contrast ratio 700:1
Viewing angle H/V 160/160
Response time 5ms
Multimedia speakers built in
Input Analogue RGB
Input connectors 15-pin D-Sub
Colour Black
UK mains lead
Data cable
MDF driver for IYONIX pc
Warranty 3 years

Offer Conditions:
Offer expires at midnight on 31st December 2007 and is only available on IYONIX versions: classic, X100 & X300. Upgrades to larger LCDs available at low costs. Specifications may change with availability. Xmas delivery on orders placed before 5pm on 10/12/2007. Prices include vat and delivery to UK address.

For further details please contact the sales office on:

Tel: 0870 383 4543
Fax: 0870 705 8879
web: http://www.iyonix.com
email: sales@iyonix.com
Overseas tel: +44 1394 461050

Jack Lillingston - Iyonix Ltd

GCCSDK GCC 4.1.1 pre-release 1

About 13 months ago we started the GCCSDK 4 developments using Nick Burrett's initial GCC 4 port as a basis. Today I'm happy to announce a first pre-release of that work looking for developer feedback and to allow broader testing than we've done so far.

Featuring:

GNU C/C++ compilers based on GCC 4.1.1 and Binutils 2.17.
Object file format is now ELF based and no longer AOF/AIF (although that Absolute AIF files can be created from static built ELF programs).
Shared library support with default set of shared libraries for UnixLib, libgcc, C++ support library and dynamic loader.
UnixLib as runtime library also means a soft-float floating point implementation resulting significant speed increases for floating point intensive code.
RISC OS module support for C programs

More details can be found via !GCC.!Help (including known problems).

We consider this as a test release so any feedback on things which could be improved are more than welcome. If you as developer are happy to already release your programs with this pre-release, feel free to do so but please only with static linked libraries as we're planning some changes for the shared libraries and don't want to be a position to have to support the current shared libraries in this release.

RISC OS Binary & source download details at http://www.riscos.info/index.php/GCCSDK_Releases#GCCSDK_GCC_4.1.1_Pre-release_1.

People interested in cross-compiling can start with this information: http://www.riscos.info/websvn/filedetails.php?repname=gccsdk&path=%2Ftrunk%2Fgcc4%2FREADME&rev=0&sc=0/

Details on the development of GCCSDK GCC 4.1.1 can be found at: http://www.riscos.info/index.php/GCCSDK_Development

This release wouldn't be possible without:

Nick Burrett's initial GCC 4 port work.
Lee Noar's shared library work
John Tytgat's work on building, C modules support and all other GCCSDK 4 work
All UnixLib contributors
Justin Fletcher's CMunge
Rob Kendrick's mkresfs
riscos.info hosting
and of course all the GCC and Binutils contributors

John Tytgat

RISCWorld