RISCOS Ltd have announced their pricing scheme for the new ROM edition of Select, RISC OS 4.39. The 6MB of RISC OS Select, until now only resident on disc, has been crammed into the 4MB physical ROM. This will allow faster boot times as there is no softloading process, a common criticsm of the disc-bound distribution.

RISC OS 4.39 will be compatible with the Risc PC, Kinetic, and the A7000+, and an image for Virtual RPC users will also be released. Paul Middleton explained that the low level changes to their RISC OS 4 source tree have not been made to the RISC OS 5 kernel and modules, making it difficult to transfer the higher level features of Select to the Iyonix. However, "RISCOS Ltd is committed to making the new features of Select available to all RISC OS users but it requires the co-operation and support of the hardware manufacturers."

We expect more details of RISC OS 4.39 to appear on RISCOS Ltd's web site soon. In the meantime, here's the damage report for your wallet:

Upgrade from RISC OS 3 to 4.39 ROM - £140
Upgrade from RISC OS 4 to 4.39 ROM - £125
Upgrade to 4.39 ROM after 1 year's Select subscription: £105
...after 2 years: £95
...after 3 years: £85

The initial production run will be limited to 150 ROM sets, so don't delay in filling in the order form.

Update: You can now read RISCOS Ltd's press release and FAQ.