It targets the Risc PC era machines, including the A7000 and A7000+, and therefore RPCEmu as well.
I've been aware that it should be possible to build a 26bit rom from the source tree since approx 2005 when I bought a Risc PC off ebay with an 'Internal Pace Build' of RISC OS on. However I've only started really hacking on it since last December.
The build is mostly made by checking out the whole ROOL tree from approximately 2002 (the date of the Pace build) and using a contemporary set of the build tools (DDE). Then fixing up various build failures, sometimes moving a git submodule forwards or back to find a fix. The kernel however was moved back to 2000, the last commit before the HAL became a requirement. Other changes have generally involved making small changes to get things to compile, tweaks to paths etc.
Unfortunately this isn't under version control yet, though the build is reproducible (I've taken extensive notes of every change I've made), I think ideally it would make sense to be checked into a branch on ROOL, as such I've requested a ROOL gitlab account.
I suppose I should answer some questions.
Why?
Mostly just for fun, it has been quite enjoyable getting each subsection working, and progressively building up a more and more capable ROM.
There are some other advantages, I think this is the first 26bit rom that is unambiguously freely-licenced and freely-available, no worries about coughing up money or worrying about copyrights to set up an emulator to run an old copy of Impression, Lemmings, or Sibelius or whatnot.
What features does it have?
It has the feature set of RISC OS 3.8 or ROL RISC OS 4 and it does have DHCP (which was a Select 1 feature I think), so in terms of ROL a feature set of between 4.0x and 4.1x. In terms of Castle, it has most of the features that would have been in 5.00 on the Iyonix.
Is it 'ready' yet?
Probably not. I've only done some very minimal smoke-testing, whilst it seems capable, it has not been extensively tested, it dates to a period in RISC OS history when desktop builds weren't being released from this tree. It is likely to have bugs in that have already been fixed in future ROOL releases. There is also the risk of integration bugs, where components of different ages have not been tested well against each other.
Can you make a real ROM of it?
Theoretically yes, I wouldn't at the moment though, see 'Is it ready yet?'.
Where?
https://www.marutan.net/ro26/
There are some 'known issues' listed on that page.
There are instructions on how to install it on both real hardware (using softload) and RPCEmu.
Want to help?
If you would like to help work on this let me know, at the moment one of the most useful things is testing, finding out what doesn't work and what is missing would be very useful in working out how much there is still to do.
