More expansion cards join RISC OS 5
Posted by Steve Revill Fri, 11 Oct 2013 14:27:00 GMT
Background
Since the first fully 32 bit RISC OS appeared over a decade ago a relatively small proportion of expansion cards have been updated compared with the number of general purpose applications that have been.
This need not be the case – the platforms running RISC OS 5 which have an expansion bus inside (Iyonix PC; Risc PC; A7000; and A7000+) are all electrically unchanged when the processor talking to them is in 32 bit mode, so a podule which works on the Iyonix PC can just as easily plug into an A7000.
It’s just the software that needs attention.
The process of updating an expansion card driver is fairly formulaic, and by using official operating system calls the result is still backwards compatible with earlier versions of RISC OS. This makes maintaining the driver a lot easier as there’s only one version to keep track of!
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