From dmurphy@acorn.co.uk (Dean Murphy) Tue Apr 19 17:31:29 1994 Path: doc.ic.ac.uk!lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk!pipex!uknet!acorn!not-for-mail From: dmurphy@acorn.co.uk (Dean Murphy) Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn Subject: RISC OS 3 Version 3.5 - Whats New? Date: 18 Apr 1994 22:08:27 +0100 Organization: Acorn Computers Ltd, Cambridge, England Lines: 431 Message-ID: <2oussb$cod@acorn.acorn.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: acorn.acorn.co.uk People, Below is the text only version of the 'New Features of RISC OS 3 Version 3.5' application note. A version which includes diagrams will be available from the Acorn FTP server tomorrow (19/4/94). Dean Murphy Acorn Computers ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Support Group Application Note Number: 253 Issue : 0.05 Author: Dean Murphy This document details the major differences between RISC OS 3 Version 3.10 and RISC OS 3 Version 3.5 which is supplied with the Risc PC range of computers. Applicable Hardware: Acorn Risc PC Copyright (C) Acorn Computers Limited 1994 Every effort has been made to ensure that the information in this leaflet is true and correct at the time of printing. However, the products described in this leaflet are subject to continuous development and improvements and Acorn Computers Limited reserves the right to change its specifications at any time. Acorn Computers Limited cannot accept liability for any loss or damage arising from the use of any information or particulars in this leaflet. ACORN, ECONET and ARCHIMEDES are trademarks of Acorn Computers Limited. HEW FEATURES OF RISC OS 3 VERSION 3.5 (TEXT ONLY VERSION) The RISC OS Window Manager now supports the use of outline fonts. This will allow users to choose an alternative to the standard system font which has up until now been the only option open to the user. Please note that the recommended outline font for use with RISC OS 3 Version 3.5 is Homerton.Medium. Video hardware in the Acorn Risc PC has been dramatically enhanced and can now provide screen modes which are capable of displaying up to 16 million colours on screen at very high resolutions. Because of the versatility of the new hardware, it is no longer practical to work with the system of mode numbers which has been used in all previous versions of RISC OS. Instead, screen modes are now selected using a list of possible resolutions (display quality) and the number of colours available. Colour Picker With RISC OS now supporting up to 16 million colours on screen it was necessary to provide a more suitable means of selecting colours for use within applications. The new colour picker allows the user to use three different mechanisms to choose a colour, RGB, CMYK and HSV. RGB The "physicist's model:" the quantity of each primary colour (red, green, blue). A colour can modelled as a mixture of the 3 primary colours of light: red, green and blue: RGB. This is the colour selection model used by hardware, both electronic and organic (the human eye has receptors for red, green and blue light). It is widely used in computer systems because of this, but it is not really "intuitive." CMYK The "printer's model:" the quantity of each secondary colour (cyan, magenta, yellow), along with the key (black). For mixing of pigments, it is better to use the secondary colours, since they mix subtractively instead of additively. The secondary colours of light are cyan, magenta and yellow, which correspond to the primary colours of pigment (blue, red and yellow). In addition, although black could be obtained by mixing these three in equal proportions, in four-colour printing it always has its own ink. This gives the CMYK model. (The K stands for 'Key' or 'blacK,' so as not to cause confusion with the B in RGB.) HSV The "artist's model:" hue (or "tint"), saturation (or "shade") and value (or "tone"). A third model is closer to the intuitive understanding of colour: the most important thing about a colour is its hue: this is just the basic colour it has. Then we think of what shade (how light or dark) - this is the saturation, and finally the amount of colour present - the value. NOTE: In all of these models for colour selection, it is still possible to choose one of the standard desktop colours using only one mouse click. New sprite facilities The sprite facilities have been improved to handle the new 'deep sprite format' which will allow users to take advantage of the new 32 thousand and 16 million colour modes. Sprites that have been created on machines using the Computer Concepts colour card should be compatible with the new machines. Desktop Filer Several cosmetic changes have been made to the Filer module in version 3.5. The most noticeable changes are evident when dragging files around the Desktop. A new system of translucent drags has been implemented. Whilst dragging a file, even though the user can see an image of the file which is being dragged, it is still possible to see what lies behind the icon. When dragging a selection of files the filer will no longer display a bounding box but will instead display a 'package' icon. Directories which are open are now represented by an 'open directory' icon. It is also possible now to close an open directory by Shift-Double-Clicking on it's directory icon. Task Manager The new task manager is similar in most respects to older versions but differs in two areas. The first thing that users of previous versions of RISC OS will notice is that when dragging the slider bars to allocate memory, the value slider will increment in greater steps as the size memory slot increases. This is called logarithmic scaling and will allow users to allocate large amounts of RAM with minimum mouse movement. An section has been added to the task display window for the Dynamic Areas. Dynamic Areas will be described later in this document. Improved Error Messages The operating system error messages have been improved to be generally more friendly and informative to the novice user. By the same token, the way in which the new operating system reports errors has been made more user friendly by giving applications the opportunity to include a 'Describe' button in the error window on which the user can click to find out what exactly has gone wrong. In fact, the operating system will now allow an application to provide custom buttons in an error window. Applications supplied with RISC OS 3 Version 3.5 As with all previous versions of RISC OS, version 3.5 is supplied with several applications as standard. The hard disc contains over 50Mb of applications and demonstration files. Of all the titles supplied, thirteen are new, these new titles are listed below. The standard applications Alarm, Calc, Chars, Configure, Draw, Edit, Help and Paint have all been moved from ROM onto disc. With the exception of Configure these applications still appear in the ROM Apps directory but can be removed quite easily if necessary. ARPlayer This is the Acorn Replay Movie player. This application will allow Acorn Replay movies to be shown in the desktop in up to 32 thousand colours! AWViewer An application which will allow pictures generated in the Computer Concepts graphic design application ArtWorks to be shown in up to 16 million colours (full 24 bit resolution). SlideShow A rolling demo which will cycle through the 100 high quality JPEG images supplied with the machine. JPEG is an industry standard for compressing and decompressing high resolution images. ChangeFSI Acorn's image conversion and manipulation application which will allow images stored using most of the industry standard formats to be displayed and saved as an Acorn Sprite file. This latest version of ChangeFSI can handle the new deep sprite format (24 bit) and includes support for the new Kodak PhotoCD format. Products Acorns Risc PC product compatibility database. This database contains information on over 1,900 software titles and will allow users to find out (using a method of drag and drop) if current versions of existing software will work on the new machines. ResetBoot An application that will allow the Risc PC's !Boot sequence to be restored to its factory default. SaveCMOS This application will save and restore the machine's current CMOS RAM settings thus allowing the user to keep a backup copy of the machine's current configuration. ShowScrap Running this application will open the current Scrap (temporary workspace) directory. Blocks A desktop game based on Tetris. Meteors A desktop game based on Asteroids. MineHunt A desktop game. MemNow A small utility that displays the amount of free memory on the icon bar whilst you work. Flasher A utility that will make the desktop caret (current text position pointer) flash. Pointer A utility that can dynamically resize the on screen pointer to make it more visible in very high resolution screen modes. FSLock A hard disc locking utility which is supplied as part of the operating system. FSLock is described in more detail later on in this document. VProtect A virus protection module which will detect and report attempted infections >from all currently known viruses. The standard RISC OS applications such as Edit, Paint, Draw and Alarm remain essentially the same. Draw Now supports screen modes with 16 million colour. It is also possible to export Draw files as Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) files. This will allow them to be easily imported by most PC based object oriented drawing programs e.g. Corel Draw. Paint Paint is now capable of displaying, but not editing, 16 million colour pictures but in all other respects, remains the same. Alarm Some minor changes have been made to the Alarm application to improve usability. In all other respects, Alarm remains the same. Edit No change. Printers The printer manager, Printers version 1.22 now has been greatly improved and supports the following features;  Background printing (For applications which use the RISC OS printer drivers as specified)  Improved colour printing  New and improved printer definition files  Improved default options  PostScript printing improvements  Support for Acorn Access (Acorn's peer-to-peer networking system)  New file output option  Paper size editing  Simpler definition file installation AUN Support is now provided in ROM for AUN (Acorn Universal Networking). The System Watchdog A new application which is included as part of the new Operating System is Watchdog. This application will allow the user to 'kill' programs which have not returned control to the WIMP and are preventing normal operation. FSLock - CMOS and Hard Disk Protection FSLock is a hard disk and CMOS RAM locking utility which, when active, will prevent unwanted changes being made to either the software configuration, stored in CMOS RAM, or hard disk contents. Any machine can be in one of three states;  No password set  Password set, computer unlocked  Password set, computer locked It is very important to remember that the only way to bypass the password protection used by FSLock is to change a link on the computer's PCB. It is not possible to do so without disassembling the computer. For this reason one must be quite careful when setting the password on the machine. Please remember that if the password is removed from the system, anybody can quite easily set their own password without your permission. For this reason, it may be necessary to have a password set but keep the machine unlocked. If a user then wishes to change the password, they will need to know the password which is currently set. Dynamic Areas New memory management In RISC OS 3.5 the new SWI OS_DynamicArea is provided for you to create dynamic areas, get information about them, and delete them. This allows you to claim and release your own area(s) of memory that are managed by the kernel. This is far preferable to illicitly using (say) a part of the RMA or sprite area, as has been common practice in the past. As all operations on dynamic areas work in physical page numbers, you cannot map anything other than RAM pages (DRAM and VRAM) into a dynamic area. In particular you cannot map in the extension to the existing expansion card bus space, known as the EASI space. New Hardware Support PC Style keyboard The Acorn Risc PC now uses an industry standard PS2 PC style keyboard. Because of the new modular design of the keyboard handler, it is now possible to write an alternative to the standard driver which is supplied as a module with the operating system. This opens up the possibility of developing drivers for custom/special needs input devices. Mouse types supported Three mouse types are now supported as standard;  The standard RISC OS (quadrature) mouse  Microsoft Serial mouse  Mouse Systems serial mouse The quadrature mouse driver has been removed from the kernel and placed in its own module. A serial mouse driver for a PC-type mouse is available as an alternative. Serial Port The serial port device driver has been changed in version 3.5 to optimise its performance with the new hardware. It is now possible to transfer data through the serial port at speeds of up to 115K baud, even in the desktop. Parallel Port The parallel port now supports the 'fast parallel' protocol which will, if the printer supports it, increase the speed of transfers from the machine to the printer Memory RISC OS 3 Version 3.5 can support up to 256Mb of DRAM in addition to 2Mb of VRAM (for high resolution graphics). The maximum amount of memory supported by previous versions of RISC OS was 16Mb. The page size has been reduced to 4K this will help to minimise memory used by RISC OS applications. Support has been added for a second processor or bus-master to cooperatively access system memory. Please see the appendix for more information on the memory management system. DMA Software interface An API (applications programmer interface) to the DMA system has been added to help developers take advantage of this new hardware feature. Details on how to use this new interface can be found in the supplement to the Programmer's Reference manual. Please see the appendix for more information on the DMA system. New expansion slots The new architecture expansion card interface has been enhanced in several ways. It now supports (in addition to the existing facilities):  32bit wide data paths  A new 16MB address space for each card  A dedicated Network card interface  Direct Memory Access Appendices Memory Management Memory management now incorporates the following  Up to 256MB DRAM and 2MB VRAM memory allowed.  Direct memory access (DMA) control.  Any second processor card can claim a chunk of memory.  The physical RAM allocation does not have to be contiguous.  The ARM600 MMU page table allocation.  Expansion of the logical memory map to a full 32 bit address space.  Page size of 4K. DMA There are four DMA (Direct Memory Access) channels, these service a potentially large number of devices. The DMA module:  Performs the arbitration and switching between devices (with help from the device drivers).  Provides a general purpose software interface to the DMA channel hardware.  Isolates hardware from software so that changes to the hardware only affect the DMA manager and not DMA clients.  Handles memory mapping and memory management so that DMA clients are not concerned with logical to physical address translation or page address mappings during a DMA operation. A DMA client registers itself with the DMA manager as the owner of a logical device. It then requests DMA transfers as and when necessary. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- From mhardy@acorn.co.uk Thu Apr 21 10:28:14 1994 Path: doc.ic.ac.uk!lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk!pipex!uknet!acorn!not-for-mail From: mhardy@acorn.co.uk (Michael Hardy) Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn Subject: Re: New PRM? Date: 20 Apr 1994 15:44:41 +0100 Organization: Acorn Computers Ltd, Cambridge, England Lines: 32 Message-ID: <2p3f4p$cv6@acorn.acorn.co.uk> References: <1994Apr17.172458.1@vxdesy.desy.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: acorn.acorn.co.uk In article <1994Apr17.172458.1@vxdesy.desy.de> burke@vxdesy.desy.de (Stephen Burke) writes: >Does anyone know if there'll be a new version of the PRM for the new >machines? There is. It is a supplement to the existing PRM, detailing the changes between RISC OS 3.1 and RISC OS 3.5. It also has indexes to all five volumes (ie the existing PRM, plus the supplement). It has been finished, but is not yet printed. It should be available for purchase within the next three months; an announcement will be made to comp.sys.acorn.announce when this happens. A Technical Reference Manual will follow shortly thereafter. To assist you in ordering the PRM supplement, you might wish to know that its Acorn product code is ACJ 05, and its ISBN number is 1 85250 147 2. Its price has yet to be decided. I hope this helps. - Michael J Hardy --------------------------+------------------------------------------------- Technical Publications | Email: mhardy@acorn.co.uk Acorn Computers Ltd |------------------------------------------------- Acorn House | Telephone: +44 223 254352 Vision Park | Fax: +44 223 254262 Histon | Telex: 329118 EXECOM G Cambridge CB4 4AE |------------------------------------------------- England | Disclaimer: All opinions are my own, not Acorn's --------------------------+-------------------------------------------------