Acorn Users Waikato

Chios

For further details, see the Chios web site - http://www.chios.org.uk/

Since Acorn has announced that it no longer wishes to develop desktop machines (including the RiscPC 2), the existing machines which they have will eventually become so technologically inferior, it would be difficult to support them. As the RiscPC 2 was meant to address this, an alternative needs to be developed. Because the development of a brand new machine takes a great deal of time, effort and (most importantly) money, this alternative must use as many standard components as possible.

ChiBER is a plug-in card for a standard PC, which has the core components which enables the existing RISC OS software to run at a reasonable speed. It has four main elements on it - the processor, the memory/PCI interface, the RAM and the ROM.

As RISC OS is dependant on the VIDC and IOMD (the video and input/output controllers for the RiscPC), it would not be possible to run RISC OS on this card. However, the core of the OS performs most of the functions which relate to these devices. This core could be rewritten, which is where ChiOS comes in. It is the rewrite of the RISC OS core, with the removal of the VIDC and IOMD dependant code to separate relocatable modules.

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Other information :
Some technical information...You can use Chios without a PC!