Application development on RISC OS

Having grown up using the Acorn A3010, I have quite a bit of a nostalgia for those days, which of course came rushing back when the Raspberry Pi came out, and RISC OS has been ported to it.

This was the model up from what was in the schools!
Schools only had A3000, with the red function key and only 800KB floppy disc drive, where I had 1.6 MB, twice as much storage (alas no hard disc drives)!

I have fond memories of much educational software (some of this is much viewed through rose tinted glasses) and even had my very favorite that I still play to this day, !TwinWorld

Around about the ripe age of 14 I wrote a save game hacker for this in BASIC, and now I would love to re-write this in C/C++ for modern RISC Machines.

These posts will be my progress through setting up a development environment on real RISC OS(ARM) hardware, to writing the entire application using free and open source software.

So what’s stopping me starting now? I’m waiting on one of these:

So that I can provide nice, crisp, clear screenshots and video (if I go that route) for those who may follow behind me. I’ve found a few resources scattered all over the internet, I hope to combine them all here.

Don’t have a Raspberry Pi or RISC OS hardware? Fear not, there are some wonderful emulation options for Windows/Mac/Linux that I’ll try my best to stay compatible with.