This repository holds prototype code suitable for use in building a RISC OS Portable module. The Portable module provides control for the power management and system control functions on portable devices, together with monitoring of the charging and battery management functions.
During the Select development one of the longer term goals was to allow for portable devices to be used once the hardware became available and viable for general use. The failed Netbook project had shown that not only was RISC OS not ready to be ported to such devices, but much of the functionality within the OS for portable systems had not aged well.
Improvements were made within the OS for some of the areas that would matter. The most obvious of these were improved network address management for roaming, improved performance when idling or performing common operations, interfaces for improved interactive system notifications, and input improvements such as touch screen and hot key support.
As part of the power management work, it was recognised that whilst there was documentation of how the Portable module worked, it had not been updated to reflect the more modern versions of the RISC OS Portable module, as had been used on the Stork. Additionally, the only implementation of the Portable module was written in assembler, and tightly coupled to the hardware.
Documentation was created from the Portable module chapter in the PRM and updated with the new details.
A new prototype or skeleton module was created which could be delivered to developer when they needed to create such a module, which had been written in C with the intention that it be easy to customise to the developer's hardware.
No new assembler modules were being written for RISC OS at this time, and providing a C prototype meant that the development time for a given project would be greatly reduced.
These components would make up a small Software Development Kit (SDK) for anyone needing it. As the uptake of the prior PNG SDK had been low, the SDK was not completed to the point of release, and the module was left in a state that it could be completed relatively easily should the need arise. The SDK, like the PNG SDK, would have been released under a permissive license, much as Acorns example and base code had been.
This repository contains some of what that SDK would have contained. It comprises:
- Documentation for the Portable module, within the
prminxml/portable.xmlandprminxml/portable.htmlfiles. - Source code suitable for building a prototype module which can be modified by developers.
It is released under the permissive MIT license here to make its reuse easier, as was the original intent.
The C source is supplied in two parts - a general part (c/portable),
and an implementation-specific part (c/impl). The intent is that the
general part not need to be updated much for any given hardware
implementation. The implementation-specific part, however, contains
stub implementations of the interfaces which have been abstracted from
the RISC OS interfacing.
Each function within the implementation-specific code contains a comment describing what operations the function should perform, and some dummy return values which allow the module to report values similar to the RiscPC hardware. The implementation of these functions should be replaced by suitable code which communicates with the hardware on the device that the module is intended for.
It is expected that developers be familiar with the Portable chapter from the PRM, which is supplied within this repository.
This module uses the RISC OS build system to build the module on each commit of the code.
As the SDK was not complete there are still some failings...
- Testing: The build of the module does not contain any specific test code, other than to build and load the module to check that it does not crash on initialisation. Test code would be required for given hardware, but this is obviously also not required.
- MessageTrans: The module does not perform MessageTrans translations of the error messages.
- Updated interfaces: The documentation and the module have not been updated to reflect the developments that have happened since 2003. As 19 years have elapsed, the current implementation of the Portable module will have expanded as such devices are now more accessible.
These failings may be addressed in the future. Pull requests are gratefully received.