There's an interesting article up here with Steve Furber, one of the designers of the BBC Micro and ARM processor. It's been linked to from Slashdot, which is where we came across it.
 
There's some background in there on the development of the original ARM designs, as well as the StrongARM and the current SpiNNaker project, an attempt to come up with a more biologically based style of computation.
 
All fascinating stuff, and especially so at the moment with the explosion of ARM-based computers out there.
 

Last week saw this year's annual Consumer Electronics Show go down in Las Vegas. The world's largest consumer technology tradeshow, it's traditionally a source for many product announcements from the major manufacturers. This year there was a lot of focus on 3D TVs, e-readers, and, most importantly for us, next-generation ARM-powered goodies.

 
 

Last week saw this year's annual Computex Taipei computer trade show go down in Taiwan. The second largest computer trade show in the world, it's traditionally a source for many product announcements from the major manufacturers. Most of the time these announcements are of x86-based products, but this year it was ARM's turn to take center stage, delivering on last year's announcement that ARM were to make a big push into the netbook market. Although none of the products listed here are in stores at the moment, all announcements point towards a good number of them being made available before the year is out.

 
 

As most of you probably know by now, a few months ago I started work on porting RISC OS Open's RISC OS kernel to TI's OMAP3 platform - a group of SoC's (Systems on a Chip) which use ARM Cortex-A8 cores. To date, OMAP3 SoC's have been confirmed as being used in various products, including the Pandora handheld gaming console, the Touch Book convertible netbook/tablet, and the BeagleBoard development board. For years RISC OS users have been asking for a new portable RISC OS machine, and soon they may find that they have several available.
 
 

Scottish companies Nallatech and Alpha Data have revealed "Maxwell", an FGPA-based supercomputer that is 10 times more energy efficient and up to 300 times faster than traditional equivalents. By reprogramming the FPGA chips at runtime, the machine is able to perform some calculations much more efficiently than a traditional computer, in a way somewhat reminiscent of the ill-fated Omega from MicroDigital. The design also requires less space and cooling than traditional supercomputers. Although the technology behind the machine is sound, there are still some implementation issues to resolve, such as determining the best way of programming the FPGAs for a given problem.
 
It's reported that other companies are also looking at using FPGAs in large numbers to produce similar supercomputers.
 
Knews knicked from CNET
 

RCI Easter offer (30/3/99)

R-Comp Interactive have announced a special offer that will run for the Easter period where you can buy either Ankh or Exodus for the reduced price of £19.00, or both for £35.00.
 

Interested in Emulators? (21/3/99)

David McEwen has made an appeal in the comp.sys.acorn.games newsgroup for anyone who would be willing to have some part in a new Emulator website to come forward. If you would be willing to write articles for or maintain a section covering:

• Arcade emulation (MAME etc.)
  
• Console emulation (NES, Sega Master System, Megadrive, SNES, Atari 2600 etc.)
  
• Handheld (Gameboy, Game Gear, PC Engine GT, Lynx)
  
• Computer (Ataris, BBC, MSX, Adam, C64, Vic 20, Spectrum...)
  
• Emulator news

Or perhaps something else, please get in touch with David. Acorn Arcade and Acorn Gaming have both offered their support, so all we need now is a few volunteers!
 

ChiOS and ChiBER project put on hold (20/3/99)

Due to the withdrawal of a major sponsor, the project to bring RISC OS and an ARM processor card to PCI architecture has been halted. Jason Tribbeck is looking for new funding, but until he finds it no more work can be done. More information about the project is available at the website.
 

RISCOS Ltd secure license to develop and release RISC OS 4 (8/3/99)

RISCOS Ltd have announced that they have finally finished negotiations with Acorn Computers Ltd(/Element 14 Ltd), and have secured a license to complete development of RISC OS 4. The upgrade (for RiscPC/A7000(+) owners only) will be released at this year's Wakefield show.
 

The upgrade is likely to bring various speed increases as well as OS enhancements such as longfilenames, new icons, and other goodies.
 

For more information see the RISCOS Ltd press release.
 

ChiBER is a new PC-hardware based StrongARM computer system which is currently in development by Jason Tribbeck. The idea is simple; put a StrongARM processor and RISC OS onto a PCI card, slot it into the back of a standard Windows PC and you have yourself a super charged StrongARM machine running current RISC OS applications at speeds possibly higher than those which a RiscPC 2 could achieve. This is because the PC's own Pentium chip could be used to perform FPE, sound or graphics tasks whilst the StrongARM handles the main jobs. Further, the PC's existing sound card and graphics accelerators (3DFX cards for example) would become instantly available to the StrongARM processor!
 
This development is by all means quite revolutionary to say the least. Just think about it; people who have off the shelf PCs could go out and buy this reasonably priced card and 'upgrade' their PC to a fully functional RISC OS machine. The software interface will probably work in a similar way to the PC card software on an existing RiscPC in that the RISC OS side of things would share hard disc, memory and all other hardware add-ons with the PC.
 
If the project goes to plan, RISC OS could well have a very secure future even if it is nested within the enemy camp!

When can I buy one?

Well, Jason needs assistance to get his idea from the drawing board into reality. Check out the ChiOS WWW site at: http://www.chios.org.uk/ for technical details.
 
Announcing this project at such an early stage is primarily to see how many people will be interested in this device. If you would be interested in buying the device, please email Jason at interest@chios.org.uk. If you are interested in helping develop the product, please email develop@chios.org.uk.

But what's all this got to do with games?

The simple answer is: a lot!
 
For starters, faster, more graphically intensive games can be developed to take advantage of the speed of ChiBER. Also, if the low cost of ChiBER leads to more people turning to RISC OS, there will clearly be a much larger audience to sell to in the future. That means more sales, more profits and then more development and in the long run, more games for me and you!