Dear All,

I have been working on the front end program to the original RISC OS
bootloader. It incorporates the following changes: 

 1) It can be compiled using the readily available DeskLib release 2.30
 2) There is a new interface.
 3) The screen mode held in the config file is validated on loading and if not
    available, the nearest possible mode is chosen.
 4) The screen mode selection is now via a 'Display Manager' style interface.
 5) If there is no VRAM present, the DRAM allocation is at least that which
    is required by the selected screen mode.
 6) If there is VRAM, the DRAM allocation is forced to be 0K.
 7) If there is no config file, the default screen resolution is 640 x 480
    256 colours and 60 Hz
 8) It is now called !BtNetBSD
 9) There are now low res graphics.
10) It uses a local sprite pool for the dialogue graphics.
11) The 256 colour sprites are now used in all modes at or higher than 256
    colours.

I have made the current version available for testing at:

   http://www.orac2.demon.co.uk/netbsd/archives/loader.zip

Could people try it out and let me know what they think?

What I would like to do next is to make it compatible with the new bootloader
by Reinoud Zandijk. I will be contacting him shortly as at the moment it
still uses the old bootloader applet. Perhaps someone could try replacing the
old bootloader applet with the new one and let me know what happens?

Andrew Sellors