When (not if) you pop along to the London Show on Saturday, you’ll very definitely want to visit Paolo Zaino’s table, where he will have quite a few exciting developments (and works in progress) to show you.
One of his projects is UltimaVM, a virtual machine that will run on RISC OS, Linux, Windows, macOS, and BSD – write a piece of software for UltimaVM, and it can be used on any platform on which the virtual machine itself runs. Paolo will have early versions of a couple of new high level languages for the system – a BCPL compiler, and one for ANSI/ISO Forth 2012.
The presence of these languages means people can develop software in either of them, and their software will run, under UltimaVM, on RISC OS and the other platforms.
Paolo will also be showing off his latest progress on Merlin – an operating system in its own right that will have a “RISC OS personality” – which for you and I means we can use it as though it is RISC OS because it will run RISC OS applications, and behave just as RISC OS does. Amongst other things Merlin now capably handles PCI and PCIe busses, and for PCIe it also handles PCIe-to-PCIe bridge, which means it can also see modern GPU cards from NVIDIA, and all modern PCIe expansions on external expansion boxes – so in effect it will bring eGPU to RISC OS.
All this, while it’s capable of initialising original RISC OS 3, 4 and 5 ROM Modules even when Merlin itself is running on x86 and x86_64. It now boots on UEFI on both Intel/AMD and ARM64 (which means it can boot on large ARM Servers, with up two 256 cores).
Merlin also boots on VirtualBox and VMware for both x86 and ARM, and it has seen a lot of progress on safe module initialisation and safe tear down of resources allocated by drivers. These are key steps towards reaching system safety and resilience in case of driver and module failures, which will result in an unprecedentedly stable and robust RISC OS.
The latest ExtTheme build will also be on display and, provided Paolo can find the time in the run up to the show, there will be more themes ready to download from the RISC OS Community website on the day.
You’ll also be able to see the latest Update for ShareFSServer, a robust and reliable native file sharing for all RISC OS versions, allowing all modern operating systems to appear as RISC OS workstations in a RISC OS network. It also allow audio and video streaming from network storage, and even routers, as well as Android devices to RISC OS. ShareFSServer runs on macOS, Linux, Windows, and all BSD UNIX flavors – and there is even an ongoing effort to port it to Haiku too.
