Yes, I spent quite a lot of time playing Lemmings at school - until they banned it (but this didn't stop us, it just went "underground" and was only played while no teachers were around, with a finger wavering over the power button)
RISC OS is a lovely OS. Okay, version 2 was a bit dodgy, but 3.x is fantastic. The save requester involves dragging an icon into the filer window where you want to save it (why has nobody copied this? It's logical), and loading is done by dragging the file into the program window or double clicking. There are no "traditional" file requesters. All file associations are made with a (and I admit I had to look this up) Set Alias$@RunType_XXX . File typing is a bit Mac-style, using a three-digit hex number for each type, and associating this with a more readable name (with Set File$Type), consequently - like on the Mac - you lose the file types if you start playing with files on a different OS/FS. Applications are just ordinary directories with names beginning with an exclamation mark, the file within these called "!Boot" is run as soon as you open the dir containing the app. "!Run" is executed when you double-click on the application. This is very neat, as any files the application needs can be stored within the application directory, and referenced with "." (similar to Amiga's "PROGDIR:"). The icon is stored in !Sprites or !Sprites22 normally, but this can be changed with IconSprites in !Boot. IconSprites can also be used to replace any element of the GUI, you just need a sprite file containing sprites with the correct names.
The device (disk) naming always struck me as a bit longwinded, rather than on Windows and AmigaOS where you get a logical device name, RISC OS devices just join together the filesystem and unit, so you get something like ADFS::0.$ or CDFS::4.$. The other annoyance is that the requesters block the rest of the system, as do BASIC programs if they are not RISC OS centric, but other than that the multi-tasking is as good as Exec's (if not better). Oh, and the filesystem supports 880K disks (and 1.6MB, which it will happily format DD disks to), like the Amiga, but with 10 char filename limit. I'm not sure if Acorn used a standard FDC to achieve this, but they could certainly also read/write DOS disks.
The UI is also very good, with iconification of all windows (shift-click the close gadget), the menu (including multi-select) being on the middle button, no windows get focus unless there is a good reason for it (like a string gadget to fill in). If you want a backdrop picture, drag the picture in question out to the Pinboard (which works like Workbench's backdrop), middle-click to get the menu, and "set as backdrop", which is intuitive. Again, I'm surprised that feature hasn't been copied.
I think it is a model for good OS design in a lot of places. I would seriously consider moving over to it from AmigaOS if it was more active than the Amiga market. My investment (hardware and software) is with the Amiga though, and I have a lot to lose to consider moving to yet another "dead" platform.
Chris
