El Reg: RISC OS runs on fastest hardware ever
Nostalgic for the Acorn Archimedes? Help is at hand
RISC OS is alive and well and running on the fastest hardware it's ever been on – and the kit only costs £120. But "kit" is the operative word... The Beagleboard is a little different. Mainly this is due to its specification: an 720MHz ARM CPU, along with a DSP and PowerVR graphics, plus 256MB of RAM, a USB port, an HDMI port and SD/MMC slot. In other words, a capable little self-contained PC. The display needs to be powered-on before the board, or it won't be detected, and the OS displays an error about a missing keyboard every boot. (It's fair enough – there's no Acorn keyboard port anywhere near the thing and never will be.) A FAT-formatted SD card holds the ROM image, but the card slot can't be accessed by RISC OS just yet, so it also needs an Acorn ADFS-formatted USB key as a boot drive. Which pretty much mandates that you have to have a working Acorn box (with USB) to hand – or a free emulator – to bootstrap the system. But hardware-wise, you don't need much: a power supply, a couple of flash drives, a small SD card – the OS only takes 10MB – and USB keyboard, mouse and hub, plus an HDMI display or a convertor cable to hook the HDMI output into a D-SUB or DVI monitor. The ambitious might want to fit it into a case, or wait for UK availability of the slightly faster and better-specced Beagleboard-xM.