RISC OS Pi Desktop V5.24 - Issues To Resolve
Angel Perez (2908) 84 posts |
I got word that the RISC OS Pi Desktop environment finally saw the light of day for the Raspberry Pi 3. I even set up an SD card to boot with the more hard-core, classic RISC OS Pico, too! I like Pico because you are sent warped back in time where a home computer was meant to be a home computer like the Acorn BBC Micro, Commodore 64, Atari 800 and Tandy Color Computer (an outgrowth of the Intellivision computer and its smaller Aquarius counterpart.) Pico just simply lacks the Desktop environment but it is an awesome operating system everywhere else within itself. Now, the new RISC OS Pi Desktop environment, Version 5.24, has but one notable graphics issue, and that’s the restriction on the minimum resolution required to work properly, leading to the inability of a game like Hopper to be able to run on the system. Nevertheless, I got a head start on resolving this issue, to say the least, when you write games in BASIC. To display graphics in a resolution like 320 × 256, I realized that the plotting mechanism is built around a 1280 × 1024 resolution. So in order to set the screen mode to “MODE 13,” in your code source you enter something like MODE “X1280 Y1024 C256”. But to go with that, you use this VDU routine: VDU 23,17,7,6;32;32;0;0. For a screen mode like “MODE 10,” again, do a MODE “X1280 Y1024 C256” but this time you type something like this, VDU 23,17,7,6;64;32;0;0. Hopper, for example, will need to be reprogrammed to adapt to a line of code for the screen resolution mode similar to what I describe above. Other considerations for both the RISC OS Pi Desktop and Pico include the ability to play audio files with buffers, like sound_track.WAV file, for example. From what I learned about the new RDSP module is the expansion from 8 voices to 16 voices and the reconstitution of the use of the ENVELOPE statement in BASIC. I hope the classy Pico could get a similar sound upgrade, too. |
Steffen Huber (91) 1945 posts |
Why not just use the “usual ADFFS way” to support arbitrary screen modes? Run AnyMode, add disable_mode_changes to CMDLINE.TXT of your Pi boot. If you provide the necessary mode definitions, it should also work “the standard way” of you don’t rely on the EDID response of the monitor. |