Guildford, 18th October 2008

RISC OS Open Ltd (ROOL) are pleased to release Batch Five of the RISC OS source code on CD at the Wakefield RISC OS show. Batch 5 includes a greater number of low level components, audio components, a RiscPC hardware abstraction layer, an Ethernet driver and the nVidia graphics driver. Batch 5 will be released on the RISC OS Open Limited web site soon.

The release follows on from the four previous batches:

• Batch 1
• Batch 2
• Batch 3
• Batch 4

The Batch 5 CD release consists of a self-contained source archive which can be used to build a very nearly complete RISC OS 5 (Iyonix) ROM image entirely from shared source. Due to some missing components such as the FPEmulator or complete Risc PC HAL the ROM has limited practical use, but is a further proof of concept achievement. It illustrates that ROOL are getting increasingly close to the point where a full, free RISC OS ROM image will be distributed with an emulator (also free) so that Windows, Mac and Linux users can give RISC OS a try.

In addition, in order to make the results of the shared source project more accessible to end users, ROOL has updated the downloads pages to include categorised ZIP files holding individual applications, modules or other such discrete components. ROOL is consulting with the RISC OS Packaging Project to find other ways of making binary components more accessible to end users, particularly when complex external dependencies are involved. More information will be released on the ROOL web site in due course.