Opportunities for Developers

Introduction

The IYONIX pc has breathed new life into the RISC OS market and it offers an excellent opportunity for developers. The superb performance, high resolution 24-bit colour graphics, USB ports, PCI slots, built-in networking and dual serial ports open up a whole new world of possibilities.

Most developers are now porting their software to the IYONIX pc and charging a small upgrade fee per product as well as considering new applications and some suggestions for USB, PCI and software products are shown below.

USB Devices

Having USB ports fitted as standard enables a wide range of low-cost USB devices to be connected, including:

Digital cameras
Flat-bed scanners
Slide scanners
Memory card readers (Compact Flash, Smart Media, Memory Stick etc)
Printers
Graphics tablets
PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants or palmtops)
Web cameras
External hard discs
External ZIP drives
External CD writers
MP3 players
Sony NetMD Minidisc players
ADSL broadband interfaces for fast Internet connectivity

Third parties are encouraged to write drivers for these devices and re-sell them as a bundle.

PCI Cards

The IYONIX pc's PCI slots allow standard, low-cost PCI cards to be fitted, including:

x86 PC Card
SCSI interfaces
TV Tuner/Teletext cards
Modems
ISDN interfaces
Firewire interfaces (eg for DV video applications)
Extra serial port cards
Ethernet cards (eg for 10Base2 compatibility)

Third parties are encouraged to develop drivers and applications to use PCI cards. In the past it was sometimes difficult to justify developing specialist expansion cards for a relatively small market, but the existence of a wide range of low-cost PCI cards provide a ready solution and the source code for many device drivers is already freely available thanks to Linux.

Other Opportunities

There are many other opportunities for enthusiastic developers. The sheer performance and capabilities of the IYONIX pc open up a world of possibilities, including:

Video editing via a Firewire PCI card
Audio editing via SP/DIF digital interface
High-end graphics applications
Network software to take advantage of the built-in Ethernet interface
Music software using MIDI
DVD drives with DVD playback and interactive features
DivX video compression
IrDA device (the IYONIX motherboard supplies IrDA header via 5-pin header - extra interface circuitry is needed)
MIDI interface and SP/DIF output (motherboard provides header for both but extra interface circuitry is needed)

Castle Support

Please contact Castle to discuss your product plans and options for re-selling via the IYONIX pc web site.