It's Going Well.

I am finding that having RISC OS Select on my two main RiscPC computers is very natural for me, despite not having handled any version of Select since before moving home over two years ago, and not very much before then, just on the diminutive A9home.

There are a couple of the changes from earlier versions that occasionally catch me out, such as single-clicking on something iconised to the icon bar and wondering why it didn't restore: it now needs a double-click as a single-click merely selects the icon(s) because there are options associated with it that weren't there previously (Tidy, Open, Remove).

I have installed a VPod in the three-slice RiscPC and it has done wonders for the display, using the new video drivers in the RISC OS Six version of Select I finally decided to install on that machine (a change from my original plan) and providing a number of hardware accelerations as well.

It's brilliant, and fits the (widescreen 16 x 9) display like a glove, after auto-detecting what it is and compiling a list of modes that the monitor supports. Here's its status display, from which one can pick another resolution, colour depth and/or frame rate, and try it out before committing (it reverts back after ten seconds, or sooner if the user clicks the Revert button that pops up during this time)...

You might notice from the images here just how clear and accurate the text is relative to other systems around. This is the long-time world-leading Acorn outline font system, which although not designed for modern flat displays and ostensibly optimised for CRT monitors, still works as well today.

However, not all people find it so on the modern TFT-type displays and prefer alternatives such as ClearType – although that (unavoidably) leaves odd colour fringes to text, though they aren't noticeable in all situations, seemingly only with some fonts at certain sizes, as far as I can determine from my own experiences.

The font system is what made the Acorn/RISC OS system far and away the best in the world for accurate desktop publishing, and gave me the edge when competing for work in that field some years ago, beating off over thirty competitiors for one contract, for example. I thenceforth did almost all that company's such work (one exception when I was too ill to do a job) until that company's owner decided to close down.

Anyway, just out of passing interest, here's RISC OS 6's font anti-aliasing choices window...

Those are my settings, quite a lot more than the defaults as I have plenty of memory in the 3-slice RiscPC (128 MegaBytes). I have a half-MB cache set on the two-slicer, as it has just 48 MB of memory (a 32 MB SIMM and a 16 MB one in the second socket) and, for the same reason, a smaller RAM disc.

Not that even that machine is ever short of memory for what I do, despite RISC OS having no virtual memory system (in the sense of disc substituting for RAM: we do use virtual memory addressing). There is a utility to provide that facility, called Virtualise, and I had an early version of that many years ago.

Indeed, back in those early days there were (cheap) utilities around that overcame all sorts of perceived shortcomings in older versions of RISC OS, most of which became redundant over the years as those facilities and capabilities were in time added to the OS.

My own greatest wish was for the outline font system to be adopted for the desktop itself, and this was done in 1994 as a result of pressure from me and others. The reason it wasn't there sooner was that it takes a fair amount of processing power to manage, and back then the ARM processors we had – powerful though they were – and associated chipset just weren't up to handling that task properly without a very noticeable slowing down of the computer's overall performance.

I got hold of a (free) utility to add the capability to my A540, and it worked well enough despite that computer having only a single-core ARM3 processor at its heart, clocked at just 25 MegaHertz (MHz). The slow-down was minimal, but would have been a lot greater on any of the many ARM2 Acorns still around at the time, operating on a mere 8 MHz clock.

I used to test processing power in the excellent game Tower of Babel, in which a few very complex towers would slow down on an ARM2 machine in places where the greatest number of objects/graphics primitives (e.g. rectangles) had to be drawn for each frame. These ran almost perfectly on the ARM3 A540, demonstrating just how much that extra processing power tipped the balance.

Nowadays, these two RiscPCs running Select have a 202 MHz StrongARM processor apiece, and run surprisingly smoothly for the present age, where multi-core processors running at thousands of MHz are the norm.

Here I have almost twenty-year-old technology still doing very useful work every day, although unsurprisingly there are some tasks that neither these nor the more powerful still Iyonix can handle optimally, such as modern HD video formats. Part of that is down to licensing costs that our small market cannot afford, and some is sheer horsepower.

Whereas the ARM-based Acorn Archimedes once led the world in speed and power (and I have PCW magazine's huge 1988 chart of just about everything available at that time to prove it!) the big players have watched and learned, and have beefed-up their own products to catch up and pass us by a considerable margin.

Though nothing comes close to the RISC OS experience in handling and sheer usability, especially with the most recent versions of the OS, and it can be by far the most productive (and least frustrating!) user environment around, it needs to be brought fully into the 21st century. Moves are afoot on both the hardware and OS fronts to do this, as the BeagleBoard and Raspberry Pi exemplify on the former, and the work being down by ROOL in conjunction with TBA Software does regarding the latter.

Notice that ROOL has just this past week released a new version of the OS for the Iyonix, which I have just downloaded. This market is still very much alive, and kicking too!