ROOL News: Latest news: Category New documentation

New offers and new prices for the latest Developer Tools

Steve Revill — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:25:00 +0100

RISC OS Open is pleased to announce the formal release of version 22 of the ROOL Desktop Development Environment (DDE) tools. Building upon the interim version 21, which was released earlier this year, the main feature of these releases is a major upgrade to the assembler ObjAsm and its associated documentation. ROOL is also announcing new reduced prices and special offers.

ObjAsm Updates

ObjAsm now fully supports the new UAL variant of the ARM instruction set, including over 400 new instructions. UAL syntax is supported up to ARMv7, VFPv4 and NEON™, for CPUs up to the Cortex™-A9. Pre-UAL syntax for ARM and Thumb is extended to its final version for ARMv6 and VFPv3. A significant number of extensions to the supporting assembly language have also been added, many of which have up to now only been available in ObjAsm’s counterpart in ARM’s RVDS™ toolchain, and the ObjAsm manual (supplied in PDF format) has been fully revised and updated so you can make best use of these.

All the new instructions, and some related new relocation types, are fully supported by Link and the disassembly tool DecAOF. An extension to the AOF object file format, to support new types of floating point linkage (mainly related to the introduction of VFP support) is supported in ObjAsm, Link and DecAOF.

Other Updates

Updated versions of SparkFS and !PDF are included. Squeeze has been adapted for compatibility with the A9Home. There have been a number of bugfixes to various components too. For full details, see here and here.

Roadmap for the future of RISC OS

Steve Revill — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 22:51:00 +0100

Following from the publishing of the source code on the ROOL site, RISC OS development has gained momentum over the past couple of years. We are close to a point where we can say one flavour of the OS, RISC OS 5, can run on most of the current platforms: Beagle Board, IYONIX pc, RiscPC, A7000 and emulation.

Within ROOL, we don’t want things to stop there. What we would like to see is for all of the talented developers out there to be paired up with tasks that they are interested in working on which contribute to the ‘greater good’ of the system.

As a tentative first step in that direction, we have published a list of the sorts of tasks which we feel could be adopted in order to move things along. We haven’t prioritised them or done anything more than simply enumerate everything (significant) that we can think of.

We’re sure there are more good ideas out there and there is probably some stuff in our Wish Lists forum that we’ve missed. We would very much welcome feedback from the community – so add the things to our list that you think are important to the future development of our favourite operating system.

Information for Building RISC OS

Steve Revill — Sun, 20 May 2007 19:48:00 +0100

Now that we have published some sources, we would like everyone to have all of the information they require in order to build and modify the components which have been released.

This is something which will evolve over time so keep your eye on the documentation because it is a moving target!

The first place to look if you have any problems or questions will be our wiki here at our web site.