I did the fun part of a RISC OS emulator 20 years ago - http://riscose.sourceforge.net/ http://riscose.sourceforge.net/ - i.e. WINE but for RISC OS applications

I did the fun part of a RISC OS emulator 20 years ago - http://riscose.sourceforge.net/ http://riscose.sourceforge.net/ - i.e. WINE but for RISC OS applications. It got as far as being able to run the RISC OS C compiler, compile and run its own output for a few command line applications. But then we got to the stage of needing a test suite. Then my friend & collaborator on the project (Chris Rutter) died at the age of 19, then I finished college, had to find work and lost most of my RISC OS connections & nostalgia. There was definitely a rich seam of RISC OS software in 2000 that Linux desktop could have used - great text editors and word processors and Sibelius. But Linux got most of that pretty fast. Also I don't think RISC OS would have escaped the trap of most desktop OSes - that a desktop OS with native applications became a niche, expensive taste. By 2010 most desktop computer users were looking for a host for a web browser, and RISC OS itself is still spectaularly unsuited to that - hostile code, multithreading, support for proprietary blobs (at least in 2000) etc. etc. That doesn't stop me missing it though!