Last evening, on 30th April, RISCOS Ltd released RISC OS SIX [3], confirming that CDs were in the post to subscribers. Available only as part of the Select scheme, RISC OS [4] 6.06 is also badged as Select 4i2, following the previous Preview release in November 2006.

RISC OS SIX represents a huge achievement, one of the major milestones since the initial release of RISC OS [5] 4 after the demise of Acorn Computers Ltd. Built with 26/32 bit neutral source code and with updates both deep in the internals of the operating system as well as to the the RISC OS application suite, RISC OS SIX [6] has taken a massive amount of work.

Changes to applications supplied with the operating system include applications which have been brought up to date to allow them to work with the modern systems such as the Video acceleration now within RISC OS SIX, amongst them is Meteors, originally written by the late Neil Raine, now updated to work with the latest operating system and also with a rather nice full screen mode. Also in the Diversions we get updated Blocks, Clock, MemNow, Patience and Puzzle, whilst in Apps we have an Updated ChangeFSI, Chars, CloseUp, Draw, Maestro, Paint, SciCalc and Squash. In the main operating system, we now have full printing support and viewfinder support which were documented restrictions of the preview. Configure has had a good deal of attention to detail, with updates to icons as well as enhanced features such as:

• Improved Pinboard configuration,


• New Fonts added to the standard set that came with RISC OS 4


• Major changes to monitor configuration, some of the underlying features were first seen on the A9Home [7] but have been expanded further to the support for viewfinder.


• Compatibility Plugin, first seen on the A9Home


• Adjust clicking on the Switcher Icon opens up Configure


• Diagnostic Dumps, also seen on the A9Home

Time will be needed to investigate the full range of features provided with this release of RISC OS, but one other headline feature is that the Display Manager now allows users to "Try" out a screen mode before finding themselves working blind if their monitor doesn't like the mode. We can finally avoid the F12, *Wimpmode 28 sequence when trying out new monitors. Importantly, RISC OS SIX is supplied with updated, user guide / tutorials, including lots of screen shots and descriptions of features. RISC OS SIX is available for the following machines / virtual machines:

• A7000


• A7000+


• RiscPC


• StrongArm RiscPC


• Turbo RiscPC


• Kinetic RiscPC


• MicroDigital Alpha


• VirtualRPC-SE


• VirtualRPC-SA


• VirtualRPC-Adjust


• VirtualRPC-AdjustSA

For the original press release see RISCOS Ltd's news page [8]