Email from Andy Hodgson to Jason Togneri, 15 March 2010, 18:27 (GMT+2)

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Hi Jason,

The Castle/ROL situation is slowly killing any commercial value in RISC OS. All
that's going to be left is the enthusiast market, which is a real shame.

> > first, I'm very curious about this mention
> > of "prototypes", what were these based around? Were they off-the-shelf
> > ARM boards waiting for a version of RO ported across to them, or custom
> > hardware?

The 3 we were looking at to start with were based around the IGEPv2 board and an
Intel Atom ITX board.

The main one I was doing was a Acorn Mini (Working name). It was a IGEP board
with custom black gloss case. It would have full size ports (so everything could
plug straight in) and 4 powered USB ports. We wanted to make it bigger than the
begalboard as it was going to have VESA mounts, to hang on the monitor so as to
keep the desk clear or look stylish enough to sit on the desk.

We had a softload computer, which was based around a Dualcore Intel Atom chip
and board. This was running a custom Linux distro with the RPCEmu running on
top. You would need to speak the Andrew Timmins about this. He had got the
bootup to within about 30 seconds (Virtual) and running RISC OS 4. He was
confident that he could get RO5 running in the short term.

The last one was a RISC OS tablet computer. It was still at the concept stage
but looked amazing. The only downfall to it was the reactive screen, but we were
working on getting that changed for version 2.

We were looking at 5 year plans, which would have seen hardware manufacture
brought in house by year 3, support in the first year and software development
from the start.

We were looking at targeting the Education sector with a kids software portal.

I was interested in getting some very high end systems for render nodes and
audio visual by year 5.

> > Secondly, I'd be willing to see what I can do with the material you had
> > on your domain - or at least to pass it along to others who may be able
> > to make use of it - if you're willing to upload it to one of my
> > servers... it would be a shame to see *anything* going to waste in this
> > niche, as I'm sure you're already aware.

Your more than welcome to have the lot. I had got agreements from ADPL (8bit 4th
dimension games), ARM Club for all the software and Qercus for all Past, present
and future software. I was also in touch with Steve (ROOL/7th software) and
Steve Hanson (Superior Software) Also Martian (Blue Ribbon/CDS).
I was also waiting on an answer for the BBCMOS/Basic rights from MSDW.

The other software was supposed to be being put up after SWShow, but hadn't
shown up. There is 23.07GB worth of files.

I was also in the process of converting all my software to put on the site,
along with videos etc, but after a so called friend accused my of stealing his
software (Which I hadn't and find mildly amusing considering none of the
software on his site has permission to be downloaded) I got to the stage of
fuck it.

If you want it or know of someone you can have the domain name and all the
files.

> > I wish you all the best with whatever you've moved on to, and once again
> > I'm sad that it's ended up this way. 

Thanks, I am much happier now. I am writing a game for a publisher, which should
be out at the end of the year. I am also doing a novel of the game and several
others. The publisher is very happy with what they have seen so far and is
talking of letting me do 2 more follow on games in the franchise. 

I completely understand that I brought some of the issues on myself and accept
that, however there are some people that do not want anything to happen with
Acorn/RISC OS and that is a shame.

I'm sad it ended this way, but it's what you get for putting your head over the
battlements and trying to help people.

Still to quote Linkin Park, "In the end, it doesn't really matter"

I wish you all the best in everything you do, and thank you.

Best Wishes
Andy