[Oberon] V4 versus S3 survey

[Skulski, Wojciech]

> You are talking about 'Oberon the operating system' rather than 'Oberon the
> language' - right? I just had a quick look at the list of Astrobe users that
> have registered for the RISC5 Embedded Project Oberon version and only about
> 5% appear on the ETH Oberon Mailing list.

Chris:

this is an interesting remark. I wonder what people are doing with the present RISC5 Embedded Project Oberon. This could be good to know. I am not going to start another survey because, first, it is your turf. And second, most of the target audience would not be reached on this list, as you said.

I am myself trying to understand this situation. I am a sworn user of BlackBox because of its robustness. But I can see the drawback because it only runs on Windows. Linz V4 seems a bit dead now, which is a pity. Graphics-wise V4 is not that great. It is a fantastic text-based environment, but a rather poor graphics environment. The biggest problem in this area is the tiled display. The viewer aspect ratio is constantly changing as you open or close new viewers. It is a big "no" for an oscilloscope-like application.

ETH Oberon looks visually enticing, and the gadget displays can keep their aspect ratio. It would be a good platform for an oscilloscope. But I was always perplexed with how Gadgets work. It is not just me. Andres Ramos released his newest video on Gadgets. Even he is confused. He composed a small panel with three or four Gadgets, tried linking them together, and the updating did not work, though it should. Such mysterious mishaps do not happen under BlackBox. Watch his confusion towards the end of his video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjxUp83BNd8

Since there seems to be no chance to see BlackBox running on the FPGA, the next candidate of graphically rich Oberon would be ETH Oberon with Gadgets. It is multi-platform, which is huge. On the downside, it always felt a bit flaky to me. The video is kind of showing the same. 

Wojtek