30th January, 1999
The plan to rescue the Phoebe RiscPC 2 hardware has been abandoned, in favour of concentrating on RISC OS 4.
The Steering Group has announced the formation of a new company, RISC OS Ltd, which intends to licence the operating system from Acorn. Whether the deal has been signed or negotiations are still in progress is unknown. Element 14, the former Acorn Computers Ltd, are unlikely to give away the rights to RISC OS, as it still the forms the basis of their set-top box products.
To be useful, the licence must allow fundamental alterations to the software. It may be possible to fit RISC OS 4 to existing RiscPCs without modification, and the reported replacement motherboard could be designed to be compatible. However, for the future development of the platform, dependence on Acorn's custom chipset must be removed. This is a pre-requisite of the ChiOS project.
Without a rejuvenated Phoebe, there are now three potential platforms: Chaltech's CATS motherboard, Chaltech's PCI card, and the ChiOS project's ChiBER.
The CATS has been available for some time as a RiscBSD platform, and an ARMLinux port is in progress. This would, potentially, be able to run Forbidden Technologies' RISC OS-like window manager under Linux, and may also be an option for ChiOS.
Chaltech's PCI card is a relatively new product, although pictures of the hardware are shown on the company's website. The ultimate aim of this project is to produce a PCI card capable of carrying a number of StrongARM or ARM10 processor daughter-boards. Forbidden Technologies are believed to be studying this design - whether they consider it a potential platform for their software, or a proof of concept, is not known.
The ChiOS project's hardware is somewhat similar to the new Chaltech design. It will be a PCI card carrying a single StrongARM and local memory, designed to reside in a PC host. Operation will be much like the RiscPC's PC Card, with the ChiBER having access to the PC's hard disc, memory and other PCI devices. The ChiOS website reports that there were problems with the initial prototypes; a second turn of the board was expected during January.