RISC OS source code
RISC OS sources are available from CVS or you can download our source code archives on this page. If you download anything, please consider donating to help support the ongoing shared source project. Thanks!
Source code archives
You can either download our old batches of source code as a single merged-together archive (not all that useful now) or you can download an archive containing the complete source tree (including build environment) for the build you are interested in. We currently supply:
A list of the components in all of our old source code batch releases can be found here.
Other material
The gpl-build.tar.bz2 file is only required if you want to rebuild the GPL-licenced tools which are used in the main build, and can be used either by itself or merged in with the other tarballs. It includes a binary copy of GCC 2.95.4 release 3, pre-installed into the build environment for your convenience. Since this is unmodified from the well-known RISC OS release, we are not including its sources. If you need them, you can get them from the riscos.info Subversion repository:
svn checkout svn://svn.riscos.info/gccsdk/tags/release_2_95_4_v3
Unpacking
You should unpack any zipfile download, those which end in ”.zip”, using SparkFS, SparkPlug or a similar unzipping program – see our additional instructions below. Any downloads which are supplied as a (compressed) tarball, those which end in ”.tar” or ”.tar.bz2”, should be unpacked using our UnTarBZ2 application, which can be downloaded here. This application includes a Help file so you should be able to refer to that for further instructions.
Ensure you unpack the archive contents onto a filesystem that supports long filenames and more than 77 files per directory!
Viewing
The RISC OS sources are written in a mixture of languages, including C, ARM assembler and even BBC BASIC. For RISC OS desktop users, there are a number of editors which are capable of viewing this source code including Zap and StrongEd. For windows users, it may be hard to find editors which provide syntax colouring for ARM assembler. To help you to read these sources, you can use the freeware ROView program, illustrated here. It’s not an editor, but it is a configurable ARM assembler source code viewer with syntax colouring.
Building
To build the sources, download the source code archive(s) you are interested in. You will need to add in your C toolset and the C library using script included in the build environment (RiscOS.Library.InstallTools). For more information, please see the detailed Wiki page which describes the process in full. It may also help to understand the directory structure inside some of the tarballs if you read about the CVS repository layout too.
A note for SparkFS users
If using SparkFS to read the Tar files, you need to tell it to give unknown filetype files RISC OS filetype &fff (Text) rather than its default of &ffd (Data). It is a good idea to set its filename truncation value to a high number so that it doesn’t accidentally shorten any filenames, too. From the command line, issue the following commands before opening your Tar archive:
*SparkFSExtension fff *SparkFSTruncate 255
With these commands issued, SparkFS should extract the archive contents correctly. Note that while the *SparkFSTruncate command can be added to !SparkFS.!Run – indeed, it seems that some versions of SparkFS have this included by default – the *SparkFSExtension fff command only works if issued after SparkFS has started. To work around the problem, modify file !SparkFS.CONFIG.Extensions instead of using the command. Change the first line to read, simply:
0xfff
This should have the same effect as *SparkFSExtension but will be set up by default when SparkFS starts.
