RISC OS has already been emulated - see Virtual Acorn. It runs at a reasonable speed on most modern PC hardware, but lacks some important functionality, so I'll be sticking to my Risc PC for now.
Well, as one of the nostalgics I have to admit there is a fairly resounding ring of truth to your question of whether we are just trying to revive old memories. Having said that, I use RISC OS every day , for web development and DTP/design tasks. Maybe I can explain why.
I have a fairly new (800Mhz Duron) Win2k/Linux machine and a rather elderly (40Mhz[!] ARM710) Risc PC. There is nothing I can do on the Risc PC that I cannot to on the other (the reverse, I'm afraid, is by no means true). However, there is very little that I would not rather do on the Risc PC. This is mostly learned behaviour of course, but I still insist that RISC OS is very pleasant to use. Its a remarkably efficient GUI which, despite running on a chip that is 20 times slower (in MHz) than my Linux box, feels only slightly less responsive. High-quality software (e.g. Cerilica's Vantage, one of the flagship apps) tends to be somewhat cheaper than 'equivalent' software elsewhere. The GUI is consistent across almost all applications. It doesn't try to hide the system file structure, but instead uses a structure that is fairly simple to understand. Since around 1990 it has had a better anti-aliased font renderer that I have seem on any other platform (does any other system use hinting?). Just lots of little things really.
There are of course lots of downsides, and we have only survived at all because Pace have taken advantage of RISC OS's stability and used it to run
TV set-top boxes. The number of users probably barely crests 10,000 and so the hardware is expensive. There are big gaps concerning e.g. Linux software compatability and Java. Nevertheless, I will buy one.
Slashdot Mirror
A basic * wildcard is supported. Try searching for something like "I * slashdot".
RISC OS has already been emulated - see Virtual Acorn. It runs at a reasonable speed on most modern PC hardware, but lacks some important functionality, so I'll be sticking to my Risc PC for now.
Well, as one of the nostalgics I have to admit there is a fairly resounding ring of truth to your question of whether we are just trying to revive old memories. Having said that, I use RISC OS every day , for web development and DTP/design tasks. Maybe I can explain why. I have a fairly new (800Mhz Duron) Win2k/Linux machine and a rather elderly (40Mhz[!] ARM710) Risc PC. There is nothing I can do on the Risc PC that I cannot to on the other (the reverse, I'm afraid, is by no means true). However, there is very little that I would not rather do on the Risc PC. This is mostly learned behaviour of course, but I still insist that RISC OS is very pleasant to use. Its a remarkably efficient GUI which, despite running on a chip that is 20 times slower (in MHz) than my Linux box, feels only slightly less responsive. High-quality software (e.g. Cerilica's Vantage, one of the flagship apps) tends to be somewhat cheaper than 'equivalent' software elsewhere. The GUI is consistent across almost all applications. It doesn't try to hide the system file structure, but instead uses a structure that is fairly simple to understand. Since around 1990 it has had a better anti-aliased font renderer that I have seem on any other platform (does any other system use hinting?). Just lots of little things really. There are of course lots of downsides, and we have only survived at all because Pace have taken advantage of RISC OS's stability and used it to run TV set-top boxes. The number of users probably barely crests 10,000 and so the hardware is expensive. There are big gaps concerning e.g. Linux software compatability and Java. Nevertheless, I will buy one.