On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 03:25:56PM +0000, Michael Dales wrote: > > Okay, I think Ralph missed my point. I'm not proposing a Mac OS X only fork, > but rather a way of handling the difference between "pure" emulation of > the hardware and a version of ArcEm that uses module based shims to cut > through to functionality embedded in the emulator. All ports should come > from the same source tree as they currently do. > > Not forking is fine, I'm just pointing out though that the active developer > base at the moment do not agree with Ralph's original statement that we > should stick to pure emulation of hardware. I'm not the most active > developer on the project, but in talking to Rob and Peter we all seem to > agree that modules that shim onto ArcEm (as done already with hostfs > support) is the way forward. >
Actually, this isn't quite how I feel. I agree with Ralph that the ideal way to add a feature is to find the coresponding piece of real hardware and emulate that. The would allow maximum compatabilty with other OSs. However some features such as HostFS offer features far beyond what emulating real hardware would, and as such is good (> 512MB, long filenames, ease of getting data into risc os). Another example is Daniel Clarkes mousewheel support. However real life often isn't as simple, everyone that works on the project does so in their own time and with only their own skills. I for example have very little experience of ARM code, so would be more likely to emulate hardware in the C backend than to write ARM modules for RISC OS. For others it may well be the other way around. In regard to forking/not forking, there's not a need to fork as both hardware and software implimentation can run side by side without conflicting with each other. Ok, here's a recap of the thread for those of you that wern't present earlier. Ian Jeffray annoucned the GP2X port and asked us to keep it under our hat as it was for a competition that hadn't annoucned it's winners yet, it now has. Ian has made the RISC OS build compile again (woo) Ian offered to update the website with new infromation and asked for a quick summary of the new features, hostfs, extnrom, sound etc. Matthew and I provides the info and talked briefly about some future code that we'd gotten a little way towards writting. Matthew: A5000 style machine, IOEB, 82C710 and IDE/ATA emulation. Two different ways of implimenting networking (real hardware emulator and DCI 4 driver). (82C710 IO is largely duplicated in RPC IO chip) Peter: ARM 3 copressor support (also needed for ARM 6/7 chips) Ralph sent us back to the mailing list as the embargo with regards to the gpx2 code is over and some of the stuff we're discussing is generally useful info. There was a little discussion about whether the POSIX layer could be used to give windows hostfs support and expressiong prefered methods of emulating networking. That's where the rest of you arrived. Here's snippets from the earlier mails that you might find useful. -------------------------------------------------------- Me There's more work on the way, but probably not worth mentioning on the webpages yet. More refactoring of the display layer, there's probably 2 or 3 more functions at least that don't need to be in every platforms DispKbd.c. 82C710/82C711 support (A5000 style machines) which provides 80%+ of the work needed for the Risc PC IO chip. ARM3 support requires me to rebuild parts of armrdi.c from the original Armulator sources, Dave G stripped a little too much out (also needed for future Arm 6 and 7 support). Some very early work regarding networking, but I'll leave Matthew to explain that one more. -------------------------------------------------------- Matthew Just to add to this: Recent work has improved the correctness and stability of HostFS considerably. However, there are still some known problems. There is still a problem with '/'s in RISC OS files being converted on the Host side, though this should turn out to be a minor fix. Upcoming changes include improvements to error handling (most errors are currently trapped, but never reported on the RISC OS side). I am also planning a Windows port of HostFS, so some refactoring for multi-platform support will be arriving soon. I have some code which adds IOEB, 82C710, and IDE support. The code is quite early in development, but is progressing well, and I have nearly implemented enough to fool HForm into thinking it's formatting a disk. I have also been experimenting with implementing networking in a couple of different ways: Either emulating a real network card (an Ether1 looks promising), or writing a RISC OS module that implements DCI4, and passes network packets directly to the Host. I haven't got very far with either of these ideas yet, as I have been working on other things. -------------------------------------------------- Hope this clears some things up. Peter -- Peter Howkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=110944&bid=241720&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ arcem-devel mailing list arcem-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/arcem-devel
