I was doing 3d graphics contract work for Acorn in the mid nineties, for their RiscPC. I was given an early version of Taos to try - it was so early in development as to be essentially unusable, but it definitely existed!
Steve Turnbull, then-editor of The Micro User gave it an interesting and enthusiastic write-up. Beautiful though the RISC OS Desktop was, the underlying technology didn't really hold up in the long run.
I still use my RiscPC on a weekly (and sometimes daily) basis. It would have been fun to have a Risc iX or Galileo core (or some other technology not bound to the BBC Micro way of doing things) that retained the usability and snappiness of the Desktop.
What kind of 3D work were you doing?
Edit: It was Acorn User (not The Micro User) which featured the write-up on Taos, in 1995. A link to the article can be found on the Wikipedia page for 'Virtual Processor'.
I am legitimately pleasantly surprised Taos actually existed, contrary to my earlier comment.
But can you say what 3D work you were doing with a Risc PC? I remember Top Model and so on, but not having floating point was bad enough when others had graphics accelerators.
Yeah, I wrote a set of 3D demos for Acorn, to showcase the new RiscPC at Acorn World '94. There was a landscape flyover and a virtual textured talking head. All rendering was done entirely in software of course, using integer maths. I developed a type of Bresenham's Algorithm to trace the hyperbolic curves in texture UV space that translate to scanlines, when one is doing perspective correct texture mapping.
Subsequently I wrote a sample implementation of the Xerox Rooms paradigm for Acorn. It was a 3D office environment, with clickable destinations that would "teleport you" into new spaces. I'm not sure what became of this though tbh.
Next they wanted me to write a version of SGI's GL API for RiscOS, however - for whatever reason that project never really got started, so I had to go and get a proper job! :-(
I gave your site a mention/link on my Galileo/Turbo Nutter thread yesterday - I still visit your site occasionally, so I'd just like to thank you for all the work you did on that. It really was a very useful and pioneering resource (and remains so to this day, for people with an interest in Acorn history).
A GL implementation for RiscOS in 1995 (presumably as a RM?) would have been curious. My recollection of the Acorn Worlds was that a huge proportion of Acorn staff seemed more interested in running NetBSD than RiscOS itself, and I couldn't help thinking they knew something we didn't.
Yeah, the whole idea was a bit nebulous tbh. I remember the main guy I was speaking to at Acorn talking about creating an ASIC. I believe it was aimed at being some sort of early GPU. But the project never really went anywhere, anyway.
