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Acorn Arcade forums: General: NetStations, NCOS vs RISC OS
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NetStations, NCOS vs RISC OS |
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pwx (13:40 24/6/2012)
trevj (20:08 24/6/2012)
pwx (21:00 24/6/2012)
andypoole (13:14 25/6/2012)
pwx (14:22 25/6/2012)
andypoole (14:38 25/6/2012)
andypoole (16:46 25/6/2012)
flibble (10:58 26/6/2012)
pwx (20:17 25/6/2012)
richw (20:50 25/6/2012)
tribbles (21:32 25/6/2012)
richw (12:18 26/6/2012)
pwx (13:17 26/6/2012)
richw (20:24 26/6/2012)
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Philip Webster |
Message #120683, posted by pwx at 13:40, 24/6/2012 |
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Posts: 227
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Hi,
I'm thinking of setting up a NetStation at some point in the future, and although I've had a small collection of these for some time now, I don't really know much about them.
(aside from having some restoration work done on them, they haven't been used.)
I know they run 'NCOS' and that this is supposed to be a derivative of a RiscPC-era version of RISC OS. I don't know if it is possible for a NetStation to run RISC OS software.
Is it possible to get a standard RISC OS desktop and use network mounts to access and run RISC OS apps hosted on another Acorn machine?
Two of my NetStations have the Ethernet podule, and one (mint in box) has the modem. I also have an NC modem which I bought seperately, which is currently in my RiscPC.
Another question - the boxed NC has an IR keyboard/trackball included. Would I be able to use any other IR keyboard/mouse as a replacement (the non-boxed NCs have no peripherals included) or would I be forced to use the keyboard/mouse connectors on the back of the machine?
I have an 'Open....' IR keyboard that was originally used with Sky set-top boxes some years ago. Would that work?
Phil |
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Trevor Johnson |
Message #120685, posted by trevj at 20:08, 24/6/2012, in reply to message #120683 |
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How does it differ from the Bush Internet Surf Set? Maybe some of those instructions will be helpful. |
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Philip Webster |
Message #120687, posted by pwx at 21:00, 24/6/2012, in reply to message #120685 |
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Posts: 227
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How does it differ from the Bush Internet Surf Set? Maybe some of those instructions will be helpful. The NetStation motherboard is similar, but with more output options on the back. Fortunately I have a Zip drive, so I can use that to get the missing resources onto an NC if required. |
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Andrew Poole |
Message #120688, posted by andypoole at 13:14, 25/6/2012, in reply to message #120683 |
Posts: 5545
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Hi,
I'm thinking of setting up a NetStation at some point in the future, and although I've had a small collection of these for some time now, I don't really know much about them.
(aside from having some restoration work done on them, they haven't been used.)
I know they run 'NCOS' and that this is supposed to be a derivative of a RiscPC-era version of RISC OS. I don't know if it is possible for a NetStation to run RISC OS software. With a lot of fiddling, yes. NCOS isn't really usable on its own, since it needs to boot from a network server. I did once get one of mine to boot and browse the web, but it's pretty useless by today's standard. I have a stack of 7 of them in use as a bedside table 
Is it possible to get a standard RISC OS desktop and use network mounts to access and run RISC OS apps hosted on another Acorn machine? I believe you can boot from a Zip drive and do stuff, but I've not tried that myself. Even if you did get it working, they'd be much slower than a RiscPC or A7000, which are much easier to setup
Two of my NetStations have the Ethernet podule, and one (mint in box) has the modem. I also have an NC modem which I bought seperately, which is currently in my RiscPC. Lucky. Of the seven I've got, only one has a network card, the rest are modems.
Another question - the boxed NC has an IR keyboard/trackball included. Would I be able to use any other IR keyboard/mouse as a replacement (the non-boxed NCs have no peripherals included) or would I be forced to use the keyboard/mouse connectors on the back of the machine?
I have an 'Open....' IR keyboard that was originally used with Sky set-top boxes some years ago. Would that work?
No, the Sky one won't work. I have one of the NetStation IR keyboards at home. They use a separate receiver that plugs into the two PS/2 sockets on the back, the IR receiver for the keyboard is not the one that's built into the box. The IR receiver in the box is for the remote control (which I also have somewhere). On the plus side, a standard PS/2 keyboard/mouse should work fine.
It's a long time since I played with one of the netstations. I recall they were an utter pain in the arse to do anything with (I eventually got hold of the NC boot stuff, and fiddled around with it until I managed to get it working while bypassing the authentication stuff (which is based on the SmartCards - I've got a huge stack of NC smartcards, but haven't ventured into trying to read/write my own details on them). I recall spending a few evenings at university poking around all the scripts it boots from until it eventually worked. I never did work out why what I did worked from what I recall
By default, I think they try and get an IP address and locate the boot server using BootP and then try and mount a specific NFS share to boot from. As I said, it's a while since I did this (Although ISTR there's a key combination you can use to bring up a secret menu that lets you set a static IP and change the boot mount. Sadly, I'm not sure the hard disc in the box I used as the boot server works any more to check this). The boot stuff I got hold of is designed to be hosted on a BSD server IIRC (although I managed to get it working on Linux instead), I haven't seen anything to boot them from RISC OS server, although that doesn't mean that doesn't exist, of course. I've just never found it
Honestly, though, in this day and age the NC as it is isn't very useful. The built in browser (NSFresco) is hideously outdated, slow and won't render many pages designed in the last 15 years properly. They're slow, they rely on a boot sequence that I don't believe is generally available any more and it's just too much faff  |
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Philip Webster |
Message #120689, posted by pwx at 14:22, 25/6/2012, in reply to message #120688 |
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Posts: 227
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it's just too much faff Well, I was just hoping to be able to play Chocks Away from the sofa now that my 'personal computer museum' is getting turned into a child's bedroom. |
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Andrew Poole |
Message #120690, posted by andypoole at 14:38, 25/6/2012, in reply to message #120689 |
Posts: 5545
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it's just too much faff Well, I was just hoping to be able to play Chocks Away from the sofa now that my 'personal computer museum' is getting turned into a child's bedroom.
It'd be quicker and easier to plug an A7000 into your TV instead. Even if you did get an NC working with RISC OS and the desktop, the IR keyboards only have two mouse buttons, so you wouldn't get very far with it anyway 
(And, in fact, if you got hold of an NC IR keyboard, you can plug that into the A7000 anyway, since that uses PS/2 for keyboard and mouse, too)
Even better, you could just get a cheap PC in a small box and run RPCEmu. You'd have the added bonus that you could play media files properly on your TV too |
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Andrew Poole |
Message #120691, posted by andypoole at 16:46, 25/6/2012, in reply to message #120690 |
Posts: 5545
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it's just too much faff Well, I was just hoping to be able to play Chocks Away from the sofa now that my 'personal computer museum' is getting turned into a child's bedroom.
It'd be quicker and easier to plug an A7000 into your TV instead. Even if you did get an NC working with RISC OS and the desktop, the IR keyboards only have two mouse buttons, so you wouldn't get very far with it anyway
(And, in fact, if you got hold of an NC IR keyboard, you can plug that into the A7000 anyway, since that uses PS/2 for keyboard and mouse, too)
Even better, you could just get a cheap PC in a small box and run RPCEmu. You'd have the added bonus that you could play media files properly on your TV too
Thinking about it.. You could probably use a Raspberry Pi |
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Philip Webster |
Message #120694, posted by pwx at 20:17, 25/6/2012, in reply to message #120690 |
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Posts: 227
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it's just too much faff Well, I was just hoping to be able to play Chocks Away from the sofa now that my 'personal computer museum' is getting turned into a child's bedroom.
It'd be quicker and easier to plug an A7000 into your TV instead. Even if you did get an NC working with RISC OS and the desktop, the IR keyboards only have two mouse buttons, so you wouldn't get very far with it anyway
(And, in fact, if you got hold of an NC IR keyboard, you can plug that into the A7000 anyway, since that uses PS/2 for keyboard and mouse, too)
Even better, you could just get a cheap PC in a small box and run RPCEmu. You'd have the added bonus that you could play media files properly on your TV too
I don't have an A7000 - the only quiet fanless Acorn machine I own is the A3010 which has an SD card in it. The RiscPC has a noisy PSU, and the A410/1 has a very loud old hard disk in it. The NetStations are the most suitable hardware I have for sticking under the TV, and I don't think I could justify getting yet another computer.
The young 'un is far too small to be allowed near the Pi, so that's out of the running - and anyway, he has an A3010 sat in its box ready for when he's old enough.
I'll probably not be considering using the IR keyboard or remote - I think I have a RF-based wireless keyboard/mouse that I could use.
As far as getting a usable desktop on an NC goes, I do have one of those old Zip drives - but is there a way to netboot the missing RISC OS modules rather than taking them from Zip disk? I presume NCOS has drivers for mounting Acorn Access shares, or at least some sort of Unix-hosted file store.
I also have a spare set of RISC OS ROMS - 3.71 I think. Can these be transplanted in? |
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Richard Walker |
Message #120695, posted by richw at 20:50, 25/6/2012, in reply to message #120694 |
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As far as I remember, your NC OS image has to be recent enough to contain the Zip drive drivers for the (parallel port) Zip drive to be useful. It can boot from one, but you'll have to muck about with a !Boot folder and Opt 4,2 etc.
If you have Ethernet, then the NC will look for a bootp server (many DHCP servers will also support bootp) to find the basic network config and the IP address of an NFS server. The NFS server must have a user account called 'public' with certain file permissions (can anyone remember?). If you have a folder called !NFSBoot, it will run that.
I would advise going to a RISC OS 3.6 or 3.7 machine and grabbing most of the desktop-related modules (e.g. Filer). If you RMLoad those pre-desktop, then *desktop should give you something functional. You won't get FilerAction working, so you'll get RISC OS 2 style single-tasking. There is a hacked (soft-loadable) version of FilerAction floating around somewhere.
I agree with the above comments that it's all a bit pointless - but a fun bit of geekery for the sake of it! I did once start making a menu system in NCFresco which could be used to launch Archimedes-era games on my NC (the idea being the same as yours - to play Chocks Away etc. on the TV). But in the end, you can't beat an actual ARM2/3 Archimedes for the ultimate in compatibility.
You cannot put different ROMs into an NC. The OS is soldered to the board, and it's roughly a derivative of RISC OS 3.6.
I have the SmartCard programming software somewhere. It can be used to set up the dial-up ISP details (phone number, username, password, modem init), so if you have a dial-up modem you can get on-line. Back in the day, I programmed myself a few for Freeserve. If the ISP supported it (and none did!) you could also point it at an NFS server and run a basic !NFSBoot. Obviously, it would be painfully slow on a 33k6 modem! |
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Jason Tribbeck |
Message #120696, posted by tribbles at 21:32, 25/6/2012, in reply to message #120695 |
 Captain Helix
Posts: 919
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...If the ISP supported it (and none did!) you could also point it at an NFS server and run a basic !NFSBoot. Obviously, it would be painfully slow on a 33k6 modem! ArgoNet did.
I wrote a replacement filing system called NCFS which was based on TCP rather than UDP, and geared towards RISC OS. When you connected to an ArgoNet account, it downloaded the NCFS FS, and then loaded everything from NCFS. NCFS ran about twice as fast as NFS.
We also did a project where we made our own dual serial port, and large (at the time) EPROM for a custom service (one of the things it had in it was an IRC client). It had an EEPROM, and a smart card simulator so we didn't need any smart cards. That was quite fun...
I still have the prototype card which used flash instead of EPROMs for creating the EPROM images (I also wrote a filing system specifically for flash memory, and it could also double up as a ROM filing system). |
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Peter Howkins |
Message #120699, posted by flibble at 10:58, 26/6/2012, in reply to message #120691 |
Posts: 809
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Thinking about it.. You could probably use a Raspberry Pi Not for using RPCEmu at a usable speed, about 1/4 ARM2 performance on the Pi. |
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Richard Walker |
Message #120702, posted by richw at 12:18, 26/6/2012, in reply to message #120696 |
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...If the ISP supported it (and none did!) you could also point it at an NFS server ArgoNet did.
Ah, of course. Sorry!
I wrote a replacement filing system called NCFS which was based on TCP rather than UDP, and geared towards RISC OS. When you connected to an ArgoNet account, it downloaded the NCFS FS, and then loaded everything from NCFS. NCFS ran about twice as fast as NFS.
We also did a project where we made our own dual serial port, and large (at the time) EPROM for a custom service (one of the things it had in it was an IRC client). It had an EEPROM, and a smart card simulator so we didn't need any smart cards. That was quite fun...
I still have the prototype card which used flash instead of EPROMs for creating the EPROM images (I also wrote a filing system specifically for flash memory, and it could also double up as a ROM filing system).
Hmm... that all sounds like good stuff. I fancied having some sort of gaming 'web portal', which people could visit with their NC and play all the old games (and some more via 8-bit emulators). Definitely a pipedream! |
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Philip Webster |
Message #120704, posted by pwx at 13:17, 26/6/2012, in reply to message #120695 |
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I would advise going to a RISC OS 3.6 or 3.7 machine and grabbing most of the desktop-related modules (e.g. Filer). If you RMLoad those pre-desktop, then *desktop should give you something functional. You won't get FilerAction working, so you'll get RISC OS 2 style single-tasking. There is a hacked (soft-loadable) version of FilerAction floating around somewhere.
Would I be able to get away with not having a desktop, and just start up RISC OS games (which are generally single-tasking anyway) from the command line? |
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Richard Walker |
Message #120707, posted by richw at 20:24, 26/6/2012, in reply to message #120704 |
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Would I be able to get away with not having a desktop, and just start up RISC OS games (which are generally single-tasking anyway) from the command line?
Yeah, sure. The difficult bit is hacking the games about so they run from any filing system and actually work on RISC OS 3.5 and above! (not a problem exclusive to NC OS, by any means) Just try running a few and see if any moan about certain modules being missing - if they do, try nicking the modules from a convenient RISC OS 3.6 machine.
I had the perfect boot application somewhere, but I wouldn't have a clue where to start looking now. It was probably well-over ten years ago. Oops.
You don't have to stick with the command line. I think NCFresco could support launching of applications directly (with some proprietary URL scheme) so you can make yourself an HTML-based launcher. The clever bit is that NCFresco works nicely with the remote control, so it's quite a TV-friendly setup. |
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Acorn Arcade forums: General: NetStations, NCOS vs RISC OS | |
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