Transcribed from a leaflet distributed by RISCOS Ltd. at the South East show 2005. It describes the features of future RISC OS Select releases. It's understood that most of these have been completed and finished, as opposed to being planned features. (Sun,23 Oct 2005.18:52:35) Portions Copyright RISCOS Ltd., 2005. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Kernel * All the source is now updated to be 32bit safe. Support for 32bit only processor modes is included. Assembler based components are now built using ObjAsm and a modern makeile. Kernel has lots of abstraction of its graphics API. It also now correctly supports LD/ST "T" and SWP in abort trap mode. Kernel now has no pointer support. Abstracted to OSPointer module. FPEmulator no longer explicity colludes with the kernel for errors flattening the SVC stack. FileSwitch no longer explicitly colludes with the kernel for file execution flattening of the SVC stack. Kernel has been updated substantially: Video hardware is now driven by an external module. The only significant change that has yet to be completed is the banking of screen modes. * BASIC * BASIC now properly assembles LD/ST "T". * Stubs G * New version of StubsG release, which will allow the development of applications that can run on RISC OS 3->5. * Fonts * In order to better integrate with Postscript printers a full set of standard postscript compatible fonts is to be included. The new fonts are: Clare (AvantGarde) Robinson (Bookman) New Hall (NewCenturySchoolbook) Pembroke (Palatino) Churchill (ZapfChancery) A collection of extra fonts will also be included. * ATA Hard Drives * Select 4 will include Enhanced ATA Hard disc drivers. These will only support ATA-4 and above compliant drives. This means drives that were manufactured some time after 1996/7. The reason is that the ATA committee currently only support these. Drives as small as 1GB will fall into this spec and of course, if your drive is 8 years old, you probably shouldn't be using it for data. Filecore and HForm have been totally overhauled to support the latest ATA standards and SMART features. * Graphics * Video hardware abstraction now provided to remove dependency on VIDC and IOMD architectures. VideoHWVIDC provides the entire hardware driver for video. VideoSW provides the software implementation for certain graphical operations. To work alongside this suitable graphics cards can now provide EDID monitor support. SpriteExtend is now capable of rendering CMYK and YCbCrK JPEGs. GIF Image file renderer now included as Unisys patent has expired. Further enhancement to Paint and Draw packages. Eg. Paint can now re-order sprite files. ConvertBMP can now take CMYK sprites and convert to BMPs. ConvertICO can now create ICOs from multi-sprite files and CMYK sprites; sprites created from 16 colour icons are now 16 colour. ConvertPNG can now convert CMYK sprites to PNGS. Image Viewer now has support for exporting the viewed file in whatever types are known to the converter. * Internet * The Internet stack and related components have undergone a number ofchanges in order to address problems and provide new features tp developers and ultimately users. The primary improvements have been the addition of new modules for particular Internet facilities - RouterDiscovery, InternetTime and ResolverMDNS. Resolver has been updated to address significant issues with its implementation of cache expiry (ie: it now has expiry), now provides DCI4 statistics and actually bothers to check that memory allocations succeed. Internet now supports multicast filtering for drivers. ResolverMDNS is present. Current thinking is that multicast DNS is the name to use in literature - the Apple name 'Rendezvous' is being phased out. * Appearance * The Window Manager has been updated significantly. From this work, it is now possible for button icons to be 'highlighted' when the mouse is over them. This is not used by the built in buttons. However, a number of new borders will be supplied which will use this feature. The FIlerSpeedBar application provides an additional toolbar on filer windows using the Pane interface. It's really just a test and isn't finished. It needs a bitof a redesign as it's only used to demo the functions that work. The FilerImageBar application provides an additional sidebar on filer windows using the Pane interface. It's not amazingly good but it appears to work for many images. It'll need a lot more work to be functional. * Filer * Easy system recognition of registered file types. Filer can extend panes in its windows. Filer uses File$Types to set the types that can be use (use hex values, comma separated, eg: 'fff,faf'). * Toolbox * All toolbox modules should now work correctly if ResourceFS is restarted. Window toolbox module now allows an expanded range of gadget operations in order to provide greater flexibility for the range of gadgets which can be provided - in particular gadget timers, gadget redraw events and the ability to add and remove icons from a gadget during its lifetime. New ColourSwitch gadget. Toolbox includes support for timers. Window provides vertical labels. Window has much improved support for Fonts in gadgets. ScrollList can move decode click and DataLoad positions. TextGadget has new features to support new text area background sprite handling. * Keyboard * International Keyboard now generates different codes for left and right meta keys. These are in order to fall in line with CTL's change to the design. Support for multimedia keyboards is also being developed. * Developer tools * ResEd has been updated to support plugins for its gadgets, allowing it to be extended to use other gadgets as they become available. This is very incomplete, but works well enough to replace earlier versions. This also includes the full support for the ColourSwatch gadget. * Further info * http://www.riscos.com/adjust/AdjustROMchanges.htm http://select.riscos.com/S3Features.html http://select.riscos.com/ and http://www.riscos.com/adjust/