Historically, most RISC OS machines have at least one serial port, also known as the RS-232 port or the COM-port. Some machines even feature multiple serial ports. In addition, expansion cards with additional ports or modems were available from various parties. Each device generally has its own dedicated software interface (API), which is often not supported by the average application.


In an attempt to create a uniform interface for each available serial port, Hugo Fiennes created in the early 1990s the serial BlockDriver specification. Since then, most existing applications have been using this standard to allow flexible selection and configuration of any available serial port.

In 2004, we took over support for the BlockDrivers from Hugo Fiennes, and created this page to distribute all available drivers freely. Note that for the current RISC OS hardware, drivers have to 32-bit and ARMv7 compatible, which is not the case for all drivers. Please read the notes below.