FinalLook - a RISC OS 3.1 hack

FinalLook was a 1995 hack for the Acorn A3010 that backported visual enhancements from RISC OS 3.5 (textured window backgrounds, anti-aliased font menus, and custom directory icons) to older RISC OS 3.1 machines. Since the Window Manager lived in ROM with no official extension hooks, FinalLook worked by installing a global SWI handler that intercepted Wimp calls, verified they originated from ROM code, and substituted custom functionality.

See this blog post for the full story.

Files

• FinalLook/ - the raw unpacked application directory.
• FinalLook.b21 - the original TBAFS archive, unpackable with tbafs.

The BBC BASIC V source files have been detokenised using BBCBasicToText.py:

• PatchAll.bas - the main module (v1.41, 03 Jun 1995). Assembles a relocatable module that hooks the SWI vector to patch the Window Manager and Filer, adding textured backgrounds, anti-aliased font rendering in menus, and custom directory viewer icons.
• PatchAll2.bas - an earlier version (v1.40, 26 Mar 1995).
• RedrawAll.bas - a small utility that forces a full screen redraw via Wimp_ForceRedraw.