Various virtualization fun, including games & productivity!
Virtual Acorn – Fun with Virtualized RISC OS
(this is a guest post from Tenox)
Virtual Acorn let’s you run RISC OS on a Windows or Mac OS X host like VMware, VirtualBox or Qemu. The company page has this picture:
…you probably don’t want to do this for real!
Currently there is a sale going on and you can buy VirtualRPC-SA for about $100. My primary reason for getting it was of course porting aclock to RISC OS. I have also decided to purchase the original compiler because it allows to target the funky 26 bit CPU. Alternatively GCC is available.
VirtualRPC comes “pre-installed” with the OS on a ROM image. The operating system at first glance is nice looking and for a while it’s good fun in to explore and play. You can even browse the web and use weird applications like you never seen. You can find a lot of software apps here and here and here. However for any more than that it’s not very unusable.
Porting of aclock was was by far a most difficult one ever, maybe except Plan 9. To display text on the screen you need to use system calls directly, for which you use a special function called _swi() or _swix(). There is no concept of sleep() so I had to improvise with an empty loop. Fortunately there are screen codes that allow to position the cursor, clear screen etc.
void cls(void) {
(void) _swix(OS_WriteI + 12, 0);
}
The result is far from pretty but it will do for version 1:
Some funnies, which actually weren’t that funny at the time:
A directory separator in RISC OS is “.” (yes a dot) for example: root.folder.subfolder.file. The C compiler expects .c as a file extension as it would on Unix or Windows. Except naming file “aclock.c” would make a directory aclock with c file in it. Fortunately, or maybe not, extensions in RISC OS are actually prefixing, not postfixing a file. So you have c.aclock or o.aclock. Except c and o are directories. You can see c and o folders in the screenshot above. Are you confused yet?
The operating system does actually have concept of a command line interface. Try to figure out the commands!
- dir - change directory aka “cd” on the planet Earth
- cat - list directory aka “ls” or “dir” in your normal OS
There is more, so I encourage you to try yourself just for the fun!
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The Brits liked this stuff? Most be the drugs.
That seems pretty counter-intuitive
This and Spectrums and Atari’s. It really is a strange place. Hard to imagine their home grown RISC CPU is so prevalent these days.
Just try to comprehend 26 bit CPU…
Sounds about as insane as DEC’s 36bit stuff..
I’d get RPi and install RISC on it
s/Rice/RISC/;
I uh fixed that for you!
WOW!
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2338
I may actually buy RPi to get it running!
My friend has one! … I’ll have to get a CF card, and boot it up!
Try SD
Also, have any idea where to get CALs (or something maybe else?) for NT TSE? I’d like to get one set up for fun and profit.
nvm, figured out it relies purely on goodwill licensing – MS doesn’t care, right…?
If you want access though, ask on IRC – it’s purely a function of my PC and the fact I leave VMware running in the background. Maybe I’ll move it to a VPS, so we have NT 4 whereever.
I should get back on IRC but I’m recovering from my own 2/14 pitty party..
the only “catch” I’ve found is that the NT 4.0 Terminal Server needs the old client, which they stopped shipping years ago… but I kept a copy here.
I bought 2 copies for $20 a pop, and a pack of 10 cals. So *legally* I can run 2 server with 20 users…!
Where did you buy these?
TSE works!
Back to IRC pl0x, we moved TSE to a VPS