RISC OS wish list

New hardware features

• Drivers (2013-07-09) - 48 - agree - disagree - follow up
  • + IR Keyboard driver for half decent ir stuff
  • + AGP, PCI, IDRA, USB, Firewire, DVD etc..........
  • + with USB and Firewire for example don't forget the drivers for the devices themselves (Cameras, Video...) each category needs at least one generic driver
• USB support (2013-09-14) - 34 - agree - disagree - follow up
  • + USB is the way to go. We need complete USB support in any new machines and motivated development to write drivers!
• Method of controling industrial machinery (2013-07-09) - 27 - agree - disagree - follow up
  • + It would be useful if there were an OS level interface for producing cheese based products. This would require a minor redesign to the kernel, but it would be useful to those many people that own their own cheese making equipment.
  • + OS_CheeseProduction
  • - This is just code bloat - you'd need cows, grass, air, and a milking system for this to work. Get RISC OS Ltd to produce this as either a separate product (forming a division to handle *ALL* dairy produce) or get some willing coders to write it in their spare time.
  • - Exactly - useless bloat. I know hardly anybody who'll use RISC OS (or any other OS for that matter) for that sort of thing who won't just get the appropriate software for doing the job anyway! Anyhow, RISC OS has always made it easy for the machine to communicate with the outside world which is a far more important feature than specialising it for industrial use
  • + I believe industral control to be an important market for riscos where it's reliability is an important factor, but to support it requires mostly software, and would benifit from some of the other items on this wish list, eg PCI controller boards and cheap networking cards (perhapas support for I2C, RS482/232 and CAN busses)
  • + Fully agree, have a big interest for Risc OS to be used for control; instrumentaion, systems and automation. CAN bus technology especially, its used now quite a lot in the marine industry such as Nor Control and Lyngso Marine.
  • - I2C is implemented on all riscos machines as far as I know. It's used to talk to the real time clock and cmos ram I think. As far as I can remember, RS482 is supported (at least I think it was on my A3000). CAN bus would be fairly easy to implement.
  • + using the fast interrupt properties of arm processors, RiscOS- machines are exceptionally well suited for real-time control. I use my RPC for a 3 axis milling machine. (NOT MILKING-Machine ;-)
  • + CAN-bus podule please!!!!
• Central device management (2013-07-09) - 27 - agree - disagree - follow up
  • + Sorry I can't make it short. Each device type (printers, CDs, DVDs, HDs, keyboard, mouse, ..) comes with a standard API for applications wishing to access the device and a driver API they will use to physically access the device. It could be nice to have a hierachy of device types (e.g. FS devices regrouping CDs, DVDs and HD like devices with the HD likes devices regrouping in turn HDs, floppies, Zips, ...) Hardware cards (IDE, SCSI, USB, // or serial port) drivers register each connected device they recognise and the associated driver code. They also unregister deconnected devices. Device type changes should be allowed: it's annoying to see twice my DVD-RAM on the bar (as a CD and as a HD). This would give us: A way to list devices by device type or groups. Useful for Find utilities, FSCK, formatters or backup like apps. Apps could be associated to each device type/group. One could for example provide standard drive icons: empty, unformatted, RISC OS partition, DOS partition, ... In case of HD like devices, automatic support for alternative Filing Systems (DOSFS, Win95FS) without the card software having to support them explicitely (where is the DOS support on the standard IDE interface?). Also a standard partitionning method could be used. Easier integration of new technologies like USB and USB2 (with 480 Mbits/sec, this one will IIRC support harddiscs and could eradicate the need for IDE and SCSI cards).
  • - That's too long to bother reading. Summarise.
• Support for PC100 RAM (2013-05-09) - 26 - agree - disagree - follow up
  • + Add Support for the new PC Dimms when M/board Manufacturers incorporate them into hardware
  • + What about DDR ram (266MHz)? shurely this would be better to aim for as PC100 ram will be as outdated as FPM and EDO is now by the time we get it.
• Support for DMA66 Hard Drives (2013-05-11) - 23 - agree - disagree - follow up
  • + DMA 66 Hard Disc Drives are now becoming cheaper and larger than standard IDE ones.
  • + We should directly go for ATA100. And of course a faster bus.
• MIDI (2013-07-09) - 23 - agree - disagree - follow up
  • + MIDI synth (software) which works with the MIDI SWIs.
  • - Bundled with RO4. Unfortunately, it doesn't come with any sounds! It's actually ESP's Synth.
  • + More importantly, computers that actually have MIDI sound facilities
• Support for TFT LCD Monitore (2013-02-07) - 20 - agree - disagree - follow up
  • + um LCD Monitore am RiscPC anschließen zu können
  • - don't they just have an analogue VGA mode you can just plug in?
  • + We need support for the direct digital out to these things though.
• Support For DVD (2013-07-09) - 12 - agree - disagree - follow up
  • + Castle supplied Web Wizzards with DVD drives but there is nothing to use DVD's with.
• Better sound cards! (2013-05-09) - 8 - agree - disagree - follow up
  • + True 24-bit (192kHz) sampling sound cards, with 16 channels and proper mixer software.
• Support AGP Cards (2013-05-11) - 7 - agree - disagree - follow up
  • + Support of high bandwidth (4x) graphics cards
  • + + Viewfinder AGP uses only Podule DMA but at least enables use of certain AGP cards and their on board hardware acceleration
• SCSI built in (2013-02-07) - 7 - agree - disagree - follow up
  • + No card needed, SCSI on motherboard.
• USB Support (2013-07-09) - 5 - agree - disagree - follow up
• Use Media Enhanced ARMs (2013-07-09) - 4 - agree - disagree - follow up
  • + Use of Machines based other ARM derivatives eg new Dragonball with ARM core and MP3 on-board, Thumb-Devices used in mobile phones, PDA's.. There is so much running with ARM's
• Auto-switch off on RiscStation (2013-05-10) - 3 - agree - disagree - follow up
  • + You have to hold in the 'software'power button.....just like Wintel PC's switch themselves off with ATX form motherboards, so should the RiscStation....maybe RiscOS 4.04?
  • + This is a nice feature, some people want it, what harm could it do?
  • - PCs only have this sort of system because people can't be bothered to wait for the machine to carry out the shutdown procedure. RiscOS machines should continue to be Switch-off-at-the-wallable.
  • + I would like this feature as would like to be able to switch machines off remotely - and this ability would enable the use of smart UPS systems
  • - Only if this feature can be disabled
  • + Or selected when shutting the machine down (shutdown with power off / without power off)
  • + AFter shutdown you could have a Reboot and SwitchOff buttons, A auto freeze of the desktop and powerdown would also be nice.
  • + My RiscStation shuts down and turns off when I press Ctrl-Shift-F12, and when I press Ctrl-Break it shuts down and restarts, leaving the reset button for when it crashes. Works a treat too! I suggest you get the newest RS !boot, then tinker with it a bit :-)
  • + My RiscPC used to switch on and off periodically due to a small hardware-addition that uses the 'alarm signal' of the real time clock. With the clock battery and an electronic relay this allows a software switch off and timed switch on of the whole system. Additional load on battery is only during startup of the Power supply (1 LED load for fractions of a second)
• A New Bus (2013-05-09) - -11 - agree - disagree - follow up
  • + The Podule bus is great for low bandwidth I/O. However we are limited to 7-8Mb/sec on drive interfaces. I think that we should develop a whole new bus for processors/graphics/drives etc. Spec - as fast/wide as possible! (width - 256bits, speed 200MHz) Please!
  • + I like the form factor of the podule card. Like Mellipede Electronic Graphic said, it is easier rackmount the computer. Though improvment the to data bandwidth is needed.
  • + Although a high bandwidth podule bus would be nice, peripherals & chipsets would be much cheaper if PCI was used, but the current bus does need replacing. It would be nice to see 4xAGP sockets, to allow very high bandwidth graphics.
  • + How about CompactPCI, which is PCI on a Eurocard (ie podule sized)? We can then use the range of embedded systems cards designed for this - not as wide as plain PCI, but better than ordinary podules...
• PCI API support (2013-05-11) - -12 - agree - disagree - follow up
  • + When RiscStation finally get their PCI machine out, write a generic API so PCI drivers can be written machine independently (making like Linux's aids in porting drivers)
• Floating point co-processor for Strong Arm (2013-05-11) - -535 - agree - disagree - follow up
  • + There are many programs ported from other platforms that have large amounts of floating point stuff. For instance Quake or the MP3 encoders. These are badly crippled on our Integer only system.
  • + Millipede could put it into one of their FPGAs. Then there would still be a spare slot for 2nd processors!
  • + MP3 decoders could run without slowing the main processor down much!
  • + ARM Prime would work.
  • + This would allow embedded MP3s in flash files to work.
  • - Pointless for MP3s - AMPlayer already plays MP3s exceptionally fast.
  • + as the old FPU architecture has now been dropped by arm it would make sence in adopting a new FPA for the ARM VFP floating point unit when it eventually reaches a RISCOS machine, MP3s will be aided by the SIMD multiply accumilate extensions to the architecture.
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