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| Iyonix Range Taken Off the Market |
| By Thom Holwerda, submitted by teigetje on 2008-09-29 16:20:35 |
| A huge blow to the already small RISC OS market and community: Castle Technology has announced that the Iyonix range of ARM-based RISC OS computers will be taken off the market after 30th September. Support will continue through the Iyonix website, the dealer network, and by email. This leaves Advantage6 as the only manufacturer of RISC OS hardware with its A9Home computer. |
|
| sad |
| By poundsmack on 2008-09-29 16:47:58 |
| it is sad but honestly no suprise. These is little to no money for Castle in these systems, as even though the markup is higher than your standard PC they don't move nearly enough of them to turn a real profit. Sad to see RISC OS Fading away, I hope Advantage6 can keep in the game as far as hardware is concerend. |
 - Score: 3 |
| killer app |
| By project_2501 on 2008-09-29 16:53:13 |
|
what they need is a killer app. if riscos is so great they it must do a particular job better than say linux. i remember back in the day when people bought acorn riscos machine spurely to run Sibelis music software. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sib... |
| - Score: 1 |
| They can start selling |
| By fithisux on 2008-09-29 17:19:34 |
| beagle boards. Cheap arm9 boards. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: killer app |
| By sbergman27 on 2008-09-29 18:12:32 |
|
> what they need is a killer app. That doesn't work anymore. Sure, it did back in the Visicalc days. But today, if the killer app is FOSS it quickly gets ported to other, more popular platforms. And if it isn't FOSS, the huge development community that exists today quickly clones it. The phenomenon of a "killer app" popularizing a platform is long dead. On PC hardware, at least. Edited 2008-09-29 18:14 UTC |
| - Score: 8 |
| I would really like to see RiscOS opened up and ported |
| By mbpark on 2008-09-29 18:51:46 |
|
I would really like to see RiscOS opened up and ported to another ARM platform. There are two out there which are well-documented, which are the GumStix or BeagleBoard platforms. The Beagleboard itself would be the perfect platform for RiscOS, IMHO, as it has 256MB onboard NAND flash, 128MB DDR RAM, and a ton of documentation on how to build drivers for the platform due to Linux running on it. The GumStix platform wouldn't be so good, as it doesn't have full VGA support. RiscOS was always known as an OS that could run out of flash, and this would enable it to do so on a more modern platform. |
| - Score: 2 |
| Good thing they've been opening up RISC OS... |
| By madcrow on 2008-09-29 19:12:00 |
|
Granted the code dumps are FAR from complete and given that Castle seems to be closing up, may never get fully finished, but there's now enough there to build a working ROM image, although its currently lacking a video driver and a USB stack... Edited 2008-09-29 19:14 UTC |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: killer app |
| By Athlander on 2008-09-29 19:30:09 |
|
> > what they need is a killer app. That doesn't work anymore. Sure, it did back in the Visicalc days. But today, if the killer app is FOSS it quickly gets ported to other, more popular platforms. And if it isn't FOSS, the huge development community that exists today quickly clones it. The phenomenon of a "killer app" popularizing a platform is long dead. On PC hardware, at least. I think this is true. The reason Sibelius was a "killer app" back in the day had a lot do with how well it used the hardware as well as the lack of competition. At the time, an Acorn machine could easily hold its own against a PC and Apple. Certainly, the earliest versions were coded in assembly, and for the time was blindingly fast. I recall that a reason cited by the programmers for switching to PC was the lack of decent C (or C++) tools, as they had moved away from assembly language. I'm pretty sure they also looked at the numbers, and decided that the PC market would be more lucrative, just as Computer Concepts/Xara did. I'm a fan of RISC OS and the old Acorn machines. In the days of floppy disks, 1gb drives, and 8mb of RAM, they were in many ways better than PCs and, debatably, a match for Macs, Amigas and STs. The desktop world is different now, and I don't think most people care about the features that still distinguish RISC OS from other operating systems. I genuinely believe there's a future for RISC OS, but any commercial attempt to expand the userbase would need a lot of capital and be willing to begin as a loss-making enterprise because, to be honest, 600GBP for a kit Iyonix to 1100GBP for a monitor-less system was only ever going to appeal to die-hard fans. Edited 2008-09-29 19:31 UTC |
| - Score: 3 |
| mac version of emulator |
| By bhuot on 2008-09-29 19:58:06 |
|
There is now a Mac version of the Acorn emulator, but it costs about $250. This is probably the best way to run it as you get the power of a modern PC processor with the efficiency and easy of use of RISC OS. http://www.virtualacorn.co.uk/ |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: I would really like to see RiscOS opened up and ported |
| By JLF65 on 2008-09-29 23:31:54 |
|
> I would really like to see RiscOS opened up and ported to another ARM platform. There are two out there which are well-documented, which are the GumStix or BeagleBoard platforms. The Beagleboard itself would be the perfect platform for RiscOS, IMHO, as it has 256MB onboard NAND flash, 128MB DDR RAM, and a ton of documentation on how to build drivers for the platform due to Linux running on it. The GumStix platform wouldn't be so good, as it doesn't have full VGA support. RiscOS was always known as an OS that could run out of flash, and this would enable it to do so on a more modern platform. If you think Beagleboard is perfect, check out Pandora. http://www.openpandora.org/index... Now THAT would be perfect for RiscOS. Edited 2008-09-29 23:32 UTC |
| - Score: 2 |
| "dead horse about to get flogged" |
| By kaiwai on 2008-09-30 07:01:38 |
| I'm always surprised and puzzled how they have not turned this into the ideal NetBook operating system/hardware combination. The desktop is lost to Windows and MacOS X - but there is still alot of jockeying for positions. Linux is really getting in there - going hard at it. Microsoft has made a come back with Windows XP. RISCOS is in a perfect position - only if someone took it by the horns and did something with it. |
| - Score: 1 |
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