Coming in version 2

The Community Network: one wire, everybody on it

Tick a box and your machine joins a network shared with everyone else running RPCEmu Extended, with six discs already on it. Nothing to run, nothing to set up, no addresses to type. It is there so RISC OS machines can find each other again the way they used to on an office wire.

Not in a release yet. It is written and working in development, and is due in version 2, alongside MultiFS.

What you get

Other people's machines, on your icon bar

Acorn Access and ShareFS were built for a room full of machines that could see each other. Almost nobody has that room any more. This puts it back.

Discs that just appear

Somebody sharing a disc on the network shows up in your Filer like any other. Open it, read it, copy from it, exactly as you would from a machine down the corridor.

Printers too

Anything RISC OS shares over a local wire works here, so a printer somebody offers is a printer you can print to.

Nothing to configure

No server to run, no address to find out, no port to open. One tick in the machine editor and the machine joins when it next resets.

It finds its own address

Every machine works out an address of its own, so two people who have never met do not collide. If somebody else has copied a machine you published, the log says so.

What is already on it

Six discs, waiting when you arrive

An empty network would be no fun, so there are discs on it already. They mount the way any other shared disc does: join, look at the icon bar, and they are there.

Disc	What is on it
Apps	Popular applications, free to use
Games	Games, which rather says it
Utils	Useful utilities
Development	Source code, compilers, tools and documentation, for anyone writing RISC OS software
Mirrors	Mirrors of useful RISC OS websites, so what is on them is reachable from inside RISC OS
Public	An open area for people to share things with each other

Five of the six are curated and read only: nobody can write to them, so nothing on them can be tampered with or filled up, and what is there has been chosen rather than uploaded. Public is the exception, and it is the point of it: anybody can put something there for everybody else. Treat what you find on it accordingly.

Before you join

It is a public network, and it is not secure

That is not a footnote. It is the main thing to understand before you tick the box, and the emulator asks you to agree to it once before it will join.

Nothing is encrypted or authenticated

Every frame your machine sends can be read by everyone else on the network, and anyone can claim to be anyone.

RISC OS has no real security

ShareFS and Access were designed for a trusted office in the 1990s. A disc you share is shared with everybody, and file protection is a convention rather than a defence.

Use a machine you could lose

Anything the guest can write to, somebody else can ask it to write to. Keep personal data, credentials and work files off it, including other people's personal data, which is your responsibility under UK data protection law if you put it there.

Public is open to everybody

Anyone on the network can put files on the Public disc, and nobody checks what they are. Treat anything you find there the way you would treat a file from a stranger, because that is what it is.

Your address is visible

The server sees where you connect from, and whoever runs it may keep logs of connections.

The network is provided as it is, with no undertaking that it works, stays available, or is free of other people's mistakes or bad behaviour. So far as the law allows, the authors and contributors of RPCEmu Extended accept no liability for any loss, damage or disclosure arising from your use of it.

The other half of it

There are people behind the machines

A network of discs is only half of what makes a community. The rest of it is somewhere to ask a question, say what you are working on, or report that something is broken.

There is a Slack for anybody using RPCEmu Extended. It is the quickest way to get an answer out of somebody who has hit the same thing, and the quickest way to tell us when something is wrong. The invitation is in the header of every page on this site.

Alongside your own

You can be on both

If you already run a network of your own for your own machines, joining this one does not replace it. They are separate connections that know nothing about each other, so one being down does not affect the other.

The cost of being on both is that you hear things twice. Both are hubs that copy every frame to every machine, so two machines on both networks see each other from both directions and discovery gets noisier. If you do not need both, one is quieter.