Hi,

I’ve dusted off an old Acorn Netstation which I plan to use as a dedicated chat client. The idea is that I’ll save some electricity rather than having the PC on just for MSN (The PC uses 130 Watts, the NC just 10 Watts).

The problem is that Parmesan 1.20 seems to crash RISC OS 3 entirely: As soon as I try to connect it starts an endless chain of aborts that it can’t recover from. I don’t have any other RISC OS hardware running RISC OS 3 any more, but I tried it in Red Squirrel with RISC OS 3.7. There was no network support, but the same series of errors would start at some point soon after running Parmesan. If I try to run Paint when the unconnected Parmesan 1.20 is on the iconbar I get the same errors, both on Red Squirrel and the NC. It seems to be the “support” module inside Parmesan 1.20 that causes the problem. Loading just that is enough. I’m at the stage where I think it’s a bug as I’ve tried everything else (swapping hardware, softloading newer OS modules, cutting things out of !Boot etc).

For now I have solved the problem (yay!) by guessing the URL for Parmesan 1.10 and downloading that. 1.10 works on RISC OS 3 with no problems and I’m reasonably happy with that.

[Admin Nick – I edited this to stop the text formatting in fixed width type]

You’re quite right – there’s a stack imbalance in the service call handler (in the bit that RISC OS 4 skips). I’ve fixed this here; hopefully I’ll be making another release over the weekend with some new stuff too.

Incidentally, is the NC running RISC OS or NCOS? I’d be very pleased to discover that Parmesan works on an even more obscure platform :-)

Thanks for the comprehensive bug report.

Ah, good to know that it’s been fixed.

RISC OS or NC OS… hmm. NC OS 1.06 technically I suppose, but that’s essentially
RISC OS 3.6 anyway, and I’ve RMKilled everything weird that I don’t recognise.
All the interesting bits are soft-loaded, many of them taken from RISC OS 3.7
(taskmanager, filer, pinboard, display manager, icon sprites, taskwindow etc)
or elsewhere (nested wimp, 32-bit shared C library, V5 internet stack, toolbox
updates, etc).

I still can’t get it to access a Zip drive without data corruption, so it still
has no local storage (loading a new network stack and NFS client across the
network was a pain), and it’s slow, but it works well enough that I’m able to post
to this forum from Netsurf. Yay!

Presumably RO 3.5 is the minimum due to memory requirements? It would be quite amusing to be able to run it on an A3000.

mech: Is there a site with information about how to make a netstation work? (ie what’s need for a network boot) since I have several sitting in a pile in the corner.

I forget why I said 3.5 minimum, it might just be because I don’t have a 3.1 machine easily available to test on (I test it on RISC OS 5 and 3.7). Certainly Parmesan DOES take a lot of memory though – it needs the Internet stack, a substantial number of the Toolbox modules and the Nested Wimp, the application itself takes 800k minimum, and a further 1.5MB when authenticating. It also wants the Universal Boot and the Castle C library, either of which might not work on 3.1. Have a go though, I’d be interested if it does work (though I’m not going to guarantee future releases will!)

I think all you mention will work on 3.1, the only issue is whether there is enough RAM left on a 4MB machine.

I’ve just got it running on my 4MB A5000 with RISC OS 3.1. There are a few things that you do have to do though, namely:

- install the Universal Boot Sequence and install the !System modules required for Parmesan
- eliminate every single unnecessary RAM-loaded module you can think of
- *configure WimpFont <2-15>, I use a value of 7 for Homerton.Medium. You need this otherwise you will get an “Unknown Font Handle” error on the attempt to connect.
- convert any 16M and 32k colour sprites to 256 colour versions

So yeah, it works. Barely though. I had to switch to mode 1 (or 0, your choice), reduce the font cache to 32K and even then, you only have a couple of hundred K left. I could have switched back to mode 12 but then there wasn’t enough memory to open a chat window. I am guessing that the amount of RAM required increases with the number of online “friends”. At this point, I only had three online.

I almost managed to get it working on my old A440/1 but it has a SCSI hard drive and the SCSI modules use up too much precious RAM.

Conclusion? I would not want to use it on anything with less than 8MB of RAM.