Personally, though there are many things I'd like to see, I think that a new Motherboard is top of my list.
The board should have;
PCI slots (at least 4)
Support for at least 4 IDE devices
Fit into Standard PC cases
High speed memory bus (66mhz+ )
2nd Processor slot

I wonder why Castle haven't designed one.

The fast development in the IBM-PC section is only possible, because all the money spent in development is earned back through the sales of millions of machines/boards/memory strips a.s.o.

Compared with us...we are the loosers...

Millipede have done it with the Imago board.
I admit, this board is aimed at High power graphics users (a.k.a. Nucleus!), but they have developed a new board!

MicroDigital have also done this (Though why they used the 7500CPU and ISA slots is beyond me)

Same with RiscStations PCI project. (Again based on the 7500 CPU, so rather pointless)

I believe RiscOS Ltd are working towards a 32bit OS for the future, which is good.

Maybe we should petition Castle (or the other manufacturers) to keep it.

Who'd want the development costs though? Keeping the processor technology up to date with the "real" PC world (and relevent new software) was abviously too much risk for Aleph 1

If we are more i think that some company will work in this way...

Yes we are not more but i think if all togeter try to work arround RISC OS (everyone like he can) we can build a lot of good ideas and tecnologies i think that this is not a dream...

Acorn/RiscOS machines are NOT middle of the road bog standard PC's (nor would I suspect most of us would want them to be). The most important aspect in MAD NURSE's wish list was fast memory (Millipede offer 100MHz+).

The 2nd processor slot is a must but the data bus should be widened to support (if a PC Co-pro is fitted) a Celeron or AMD Spitfire with (say) a clock speed of 400MHz plus.

[Edited by 127 at 21:16, 2/06/2000]

I believe that faster systems are imperative because I disagree with the comment that PCs are old as soon you buy one. This rather depends on what you use it for - if you're not a games player then a relatively low spec PC is more than adequate for even large development. A friend also claims that the beta release of Windows Millenium is significantly faster than Win98 which could make RISC OS machines look less impressive still. However I also believe we shouldn't fall into the Mhz (now Ghz) trap that the PC market is in. We need to market RISC OS in different ways (and if I knew how I'd be in marketing and not computing 8) )

I'm curious about this 3DEngine people refer to. Is it the one developed by Martin Piper and Robin Watts? If so while I applaud the effort both put into it (and I learnt a fair bit from it - thanks guys), in comparison to DirectX or OpenGL it's not too hot.

Finally I'd like to see a decent shared DLL system. The most immediate benefit of such a system is that is would allow the creation of a component style system (a la COM).

I wish 2nd Generation StrongArms were here already :-)

It came as a surprise to me when my old 3010 clocked at just 6-12MHz could match the scroll speed of a PC with a 133MHz clock (an SA RPC left both dead in the water !).

Still I won't object to multi-megahertz bus speeds when they come

[Edited by 144 at 21:31, 9/06/2000]

Of course, that's all my opinion, and I reserve the right to talk rubbish.

It could also be done in software but that would be slower than a hardware solution.

Regarding PCI, it is a complex and often troublesome system (early versions were renound for corrupting data going to harddisks and the i820 (a recent PCI chipset) was reported as causing booting problems on some PCs when using certain types of RAM). True the problems eventually get resolved but if you happen to own a machine with them TOUGH.

Why stick to PCI and its 66MHz (max) limit ? It is after all an arbitrary limit set by Intel, you could have a bridge from a faster bus system to PCI if you really needed it.

As for AGP I remember seeing an (unintentionally humerous) report that showed AGPx1 video cards were slightly slower than the same video chipsets when run through PCI. A faster bus that gave slower graphics - neat !

By the way AGP's intention is to acchieve for the PC what the RiscPC had for years a shared Video and Main RAM system where the processor and graphics chipset could share resources (big deal).

The reason we have the ARM and a neat machine like the RPC is because we DID NOT try to use a fully PC standard.

I did buy it a lot of years ago, and now it is ever a new machine (not very new) but it work fast like a pentium 400 and some time better of a pentium 500 well it only problem is and old motherboard and an O.S. (that is very nice and very fast) but with old concept of system...

Going back to the original proposal here. I dont see the point of a second processor slot and would gladly live without it.

I would also want ensure my existing expansion cards are also compatible (RapideIDE, NIC card and I hope to have ViewFinder soon, there must be others out there with SCSI etc) since we have to pay so much for these I would not want to have to replace these too.

I believe that anyone hoping to upgrade to a faster processor when (if?) they become available while keeping their current board is being somewhat unrealistic. At the very least it should be accepted that there will be a need to upgrade.

However this does not mean that it will be necessary to throw away all your Acorn podules. Phoebe (sp?) was going to have both podule and PCI slots and there is no reason why this could not be the case with a new motherboard providing it fits the RPC case. This is where problems will really strike. Phoebe was going to have a new case. Evolution will use a different case and it sounds like Imago is going to be a tight squeeze.

What may happen is that new machines will not support Acorn podules. Certainly the RiscStation / Simtec efforts do not seem to offer this facility and I personally believe that new machines shouldn't. At some point we have to make the break and to be honest that time is either now or it will never happen. If Castle continue to upgrade the RPC (and this seems to be their current plans) then they may provide backwards compatibility. However I would expect to pay a fair premium and possibly suffer some performance drawbacks in order to achieve this. The question then becomes one of whether it is cost effective. Remember RiscStation, Simtec and Microdigital have a clean slate to work with.

Software compatibility is an issue too. I have a large investment in RISC OS software and it's one of the things tying me to the platform. However it may be that backwards compatibility is not a major consideration in a 32bit RISC OS (certainly there has been some speculation to this effect in the newsgroups). If software is not upgradable as well, it will make it easier for people to jump to another platform as they'll have to start afresh anyway. If the new machines use standard parts (eg PCI) then replacing hardware can in fact be quite cheap. On the other hand software can be extremely expensive (cheap compared to other platforms possibly but replacing something like Top Model will cost a lot more than say a network card).

As you can see the situation is quite complex.

Surely it's name is its point...?

However wonderful RISCOS and some of its native softwae is, in today's world having the ability to run certain PC products is unavoidably necessary, and I for one don't want 2 computers on the desk.

It's the defining feature of the RISC PC and if it didn't exist, I'd have been forced into PC ownership and occasional use of an A3000 for things like !draw etc...
The PC Card (and its slot!) have surely kept a lot of people using RISCOS for similar reasons...
(and it's d**n flash - puts windoze in its place)

:)

Oh well, no McCoy quotes then...?

"God Dang it Jim, I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer"

Maybe ;-)

PS the PC Card rules :)

(sorry - seem to be getting a bit carried away tonight!)