On Tue, 28 Nov 2000, Reinoud Zandijk wrote:

> > Interestingly, the latest NCs I'm selling have the OS (potentially) in 8MB
> > flash, so we could wipe out RISCOS entirely and use an alternative
> > non-RISCOS bootloader. This might be easier than battling against how
> > RISCOS has left the memory map, etc.
> 
> Just a note .... and not just because i wrote it :) ....the new bootloader
> i'm working on for the RiscPC isnt that RiscOS specific... you could try
> this as a loader.... It currrently runs on a ARM7 so with a little hope
> why not on a ARM7500 :))

It doesn't work loading either the A7INST or A7000 kernels on either an
A7000 or NC. The A7000 kernel gets as far as reporting that using DRAM as
video RAM is not yet implemented (without this we're not going any
further!). The A7INST kernel is just too big, I guess. It gives an
abort on data transfer in the BASIC module at line 2180.

The hopeful sign is that it doesn't fail in new and interesting ways on
the NC compared to the A7000.

I'd argue against your assertion that the new bootloader isn't RISC OS
specific, though. It's written in BASIC for a start... I was referring to
the concept of a bootloader similar to the CATS one.

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