Cloverleaf Campaign is Live

It’s a faster SoC and a more expensive chassis (aluminium unibody type thingy). It is rather sexy, although still no MacBook Air.

I have owned a Pinebook Pro for about a year and I am more than happy with it. The 14" screen is for me an ideal size for a working on the go laptop. When working at home, most people connect their laptop into a much larger monitor. Looking forward to when RISC OS is working natively rather than using an emulator. Great to know that Andrew is working behind the scenes

Correct on all counts :)

So the ARM laptop on the C table over one end of the sofa and powered from it is an option.
That’s one location sorted (soon-ish)

When working at home, most people connect their laptop into a much larger monitor

Until this year working from home was an occasional call on an evening or weekend so setting up a large display never became a thing. Now, because Covid, they don’t like too many IN the office/building and 24" displays are all but forced at you. Don’t like to mix work and home kit though.

“Someone” leaked a video on kickstarter page.
Worth checking out.

“Someone” leaked a video on kickstarter page.
Worth checking out.

Pity about the ANSI keyboard, but very cool!

Pity about the ANSI keyboard, but very cool!

It’s basically (hardware wise) the Pinebook Pro so check the Pinebook Pro pages – it comes in two variants ISO and ANSII

Of course that’s only the English speaking users (plus Americans :) ) so still a bit off base for yourself

It’s basically (hardware wise) the Pinebook Pro so check the Pinebook Pro pages – it comes in two variants ISO and ANSII
.
Of course that’s only the English speaking users (plus Americans :) ) so still a bit off base for yourself

Ah, that’s good! So long as it’s ISO my fingers will (mostly) find the right key.

This is what Jason Tribbeck is doing.

New Sound System overview

@ Stefan
I note that the Cloverleaf laptop will have both emmc and NVMe. Will the laptop be able to boot directly into RISC OS from the NVMe drive? If so, then perhaps a 64 GB emmc and 250 ssd would be a better option for the laptop (as offered with the desktop)?

Just pledged some money before the Black Friday deals end.

GCC contains it’s own version of compatible ARM Assembler – tested it long ago.
You can use it by itself instead of the Acorn one.

David S – I spoke with Jason after the talk, and explained that both ROOL and ROD share a desire to move to C rather than Assembler wherever possible (and why). It was agreed that only speed-critical code will be in ARM code, and the rest will be done in C.

@Norman Lawrence

If so, then perhaps a 64 GB emmc and 250 ssd would be a better option for the laptop.

Yes that is a possible option. But the NVMe driver might not be ready yet at time of the shipping. So the NVMe driver will be delivered as software update at a later point.

@Chris Hall Thanks!

@DavidS

Is not that a bit of overkill for pure ARM code?

program in ARM assembler is quiet fun and you know what your program is doing then 100%. C is of course better for portability reasons ( to 64 bit for example)

I look forward to finally having a standard method of sound input, instead of a per HW type different modules system as we have had to this point.

That was the initial motivation for the new sound system as in the past it was like everyone hacked their own hardware implemention. And we need a new one for the new RK3399 boards. So with Jason’s implementation all aspects of a modern sound system should be well organised and future proofed.

@Stefan Fröhling

Before committing to any level of pledge on the Kickstarter, please can I ask for some clarification on a few points from the text of your Kickstarter.

“Games collection (RISC OS games, Acorn Archimedes, ZX Spectrum, Acorn BBC Micro, Commodore C64, & ScummVM)”

The campaign sings the praises of retro emulation on Cloverleaf RISC OS and repeatedly mentions the inclusion of many games collections. Therefore I’d like to question the legality of what you are including. Whilst being involved in the 8 bit retroscene I’ve seen an increase in recent years regarding unpaid royalties for licensed games involving legal action being taken by a fairly substantial number of old authors who licensed their games for modern applications, plus the constant piracy and unauthorised use of old games which are commonly found on ‘ROM’ websites, compilations etc.

Please can you list the titles that you’ll be including in the game collections, along with collaborating evidence that you have full permissions for each game from the appropriate retro author or copyright holder for them to be in the bundled software with the Cloverleaf distribution.

With regards to the risks / environmental impact:

“Reusability and recyclability
We will use packaging based on paper that is fully recyclable.”

Packaing is irrelevant here. Reusability and recyclability is specifically regarding the life and end of life of the product. For example, this section would relate to ROHS issues and your responsibility as a hardware manufacturer. For example, under ROHS in the EU you would be obliged to offer a free method of return of the hardware at end of life and to then have it recycled responsibility. You would have to register under a RHOS scheme and find appropriate companies to handle the safe disposal of the equipment. The reusability aspect could relate to taking back the hardware and then donating it on to a charity organisation who could make use of it. An update on the Kickstarter would be wonderful to see to show the responsible route you will implement for this happen as a hardware supplier.

“Sustainable Distribution
We will use packaging based on paper that is fully recyclable.”

Yes, okay, we understand you’ll be using paper that is fully recyclable. Again, missing the point of the section by a mile or two! How about which courier you’ll be using for sending out the hardware, are they carbon neutral? Will you make a carbon offset if not?

Many thanks for your time, good luck with the Kickstarter and I look forward to seeing your response.

https://librefree.me/risc-os-cloverleafs-kickstarter-is-in-trouble

It’s an All or Nothing kickstarter, so the Q is what can be done with $0.

Did not know that Kickstarter had that option.

I don’t think it has any other option – if the goal isn’t reached, no money is collected; it’s always possible that the goal will be exceeded, but underfunded projects aren’t funded at all.

They also must have been using a different crowdfunding organization. Kickstarter themselves say this:

“If the goal is not met by the deadline, no funds are collected.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kickstarter

Or maybe Kickstarter changed there rules since 2013?

Seems unlikely, given that it’s the basic premise of the whole operation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract

Or maybe Kickstarter changed there rules since 2013?

I know either Kickstarter or Indiegogo.com had an option to proceed even if the target wasn’t met. I think though that had to be decided before the campaign was launched. I think Iindiegogo.com may still offer this option but I couldn’t see at a quick look.

Kickstarter started 2009 Indiegogo 2008!

While I know that we are not here for retrocomputing, I think that a larger part of the RISC OS community is than what we may wish to admit on these forums.

@DavidS – speaking as a member of the Acorn retrocomputing community (and someone that arguably knows it quite well), whilst some retrobods might quite happily spend £200 on an interesting old machine running a vintage version of RISC OS, they’re not really going to be wanting to punt more than a Raspberry Pi on something more modern in this sort of space, given that a Pi + the ROOL release does anything you’d want from a retro perspective, and they generally wouldn’t see something like this as a viable mainstream computing platform. Admittedly, I am aware of people who still write letters using Wordwise, but there are masochists everywhere… :)

So does that mean that I was correct in the assumption that having some retro target stuff would have been helpful? Such as HW that runs RO3.11 natively, and such, and in the lower price brackets, as stated?

Not really. People will buy original machines, or just run an emulator. A Pi running Linux is better for general emulation or for stuff that works with ADFFS, a Pi running RISC OS. A desktop or laptop is generally better than that. There is a negligible market for new hardware that would run RO3.11. Retrocomputing people will pay for interesting hardware that works with their old machines, they will pay for old machines, if you have a large enough community they might pay for a new-old-machine (e.g. spectrum next), but the Acorn 8bit community isn’t large enough to support that, and the 32bit retro community is nowhere near large enough.

If you’re spending proper cash, some proper market analysis rather than just taking a punt on things often goes quite a long way towards putting things in perspective…

Retro is generally drive by nostalgia. Most of that nostalgia is driven by games, a few people want to have a play with other software they played with when they were younger. By far and away the majority of that in the Acorn scene is associated with the 8bit machines as they had the most games and were fairly ubiquitous in schools. The other side of the 8bit scene is the hackable hardware. It’s very easy to mess around with. Notsomuch the 32bit machines (not to say you can’t, just less people did and do). The retro-nostalgia on the 32bit machines floats around games, and a few people who like to tinker, and the smaller pool of people who used them at school. 3.1 thru 3.7 aren’t current, they’re old, but they’re fine for what anyone is messing around with from that era. No one uses Arthur (RISC OS is Arthur) as not many did back in the day, they all got on 2.00 quite quickly. But financially – if you can get a vintage arc-era machine for under £200, or run emulation on a system you currently own, why on earth would you spend more than £200 on something that emulates less and doesn’t necessarily run the vintage stuff as well? And if you’re really in the market for something dinky, a £40 pi 4 running linux, or a £60 pi 400, and you can emulate away to your heart’s content and run RISC OS into the bargain if you so desire :) Alas I can’t see any incentive for the retro-scene to invest financially in further developing RISC OS.

Yes, I am aware, but 3.11 is still a 30 year old OS, contemporaneous with Windows 3.1… Whilst you can’t target the Win16 API anymore, you could probably target Win32s and still see things run on windows 10.

I’m not going to get yoinked into this further, but that’s patently untrue :) – I shall leave it there.