Comment by nickcw
9 hours ago
I used and developed software for RISC OS for many years and it was there I cut my teeth as an open source developer.
I wrote the very popular !Director application which let you customize your Desktop and add lots of nifty shortcuts. It could be expanded with BASIC plugins to do just about anything! It was distributed by the Arcade BBS to start with then Acorn User magazine put it on the floppy disk that came with the magazine.
Amazingly Director was written entirely in ARM assembler (with the help of lots of macros). I used to really enjoy writing ARM assembler and used to grit my teeth whenever I had to read the assembly output of the C compiler! I remember writing quicksort in ARM assembler as part of this (to sort menu entries) which was a lot of fun.
I still have a RiscPC under my desk, but I don't think I've turned it on for nearly 15 years :-(
I have a RiscPC in the shed and a half-repaired A3000. I don't fire them up them often, but both have !Director launching on boot; it is a wonderful program. Thanks!
I have a feeling I used that, either on my A3010 or my Risc PC. Thank you!
I went down a rabbit hole a few summers ago and I ended up writing a calculator from scratch in assembly for RISC OS. Interesting experience having GUI routines at the syscall level
32bit ARM remains my absolute favorite instruction set. And yeah, C compiler output was criminal! I wrote products entirely in the BASIC assembler. What a time to grow up!