Acorn Archimedes A3010: Was It Better Than The Amiga?
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- Опубліковано 12 тра 2024
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The Acorn Archimedes was a staple in the classroom in the early 90s in British schools, but was this original ARM based machine an underrated gaming platform that can outperform the Commodore Amiga?
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Sources used in this video (under fair use or with permission):
BBC Micro Live S01E01 (5th October 1984): • BBC Micro Live S01E01 ...
Micro Men: • Micro Men - 720p (2009)
Acorn Computer Advert from 1991: • Acorn Computer Advert ...
Welcome to the Learning Curve - Acorn BBC Archimedes Computer 1990: • Welcome to the Learnin...
The Home Computer Minefield : • The Home Computer Mine...
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1:26 The Valiant Turtle!!
Can you compare it to the RaspberryPI-400. There is a Risc-OS port for PI's. I mean. Can one get a modern Archimedes this way?
@@brostenen yes, if a little short on !Apps - though the software there is is generally awesome and scary-fast even on a base Pi model B. Search #RiscOS Direct xx
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this is interesting too >> www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/5/topics/2092 (porting RiscOS to linux)
watching as i type so apples if you've mentioned 1t :)
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anyway yes.. kinda. A3010 (A3000 3020 etc.) came along well after Amiga and ST had already cornered the home-gaming market. So technically much better, especially the much more expandable A3000. But their cut-down attempts didn't have enough non serious software for a young market, or enough power for serious use. However.
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The ARM250 chip used in the 3010 was the first System on Chip #SOC in any desktop computer. ARM core, VIDC, memc and iomd were all in one chip at 12mhz utterly destroying ST/Ami performance even without arm3 - so it's got some pretty impressive heritage (oh god yes and Zool ;o) RiscOS 3.11, on a chip upgrade? has config settings for a serial mouse. No need for a support !App ... ah there we are 10:13 'single package design' was the birth of ARM soc's, now used in everything - literally everything. xx #Pear
@@pearcomputers Basically... The RaspberryPI-400 is sonewhat the modern Archimedes then? Hmmm.... Perhaps I will get an PI-400 in 2021.
My dad made me learn BASIC and tested me before I was allowed a ZX Spectrum in 1982. After gaining O and A Levels in Computer Science I was sponsored by GEC-Avionics to do a 3-year HND course (on the premise that if I passed I would be immediately employed by them) which involved writing an in-house tool for them. At the end of the course, I had to do a presentation detailing the tool and having just got an Amiga 500 I decided to do all the slides in Deluxe Paint III and Sculpt 3D, with animation and some flash logos and whatnot that I mixed in audio and recorded to VCR. Having seen all the other students stumble thru their presentations using a whiteboard, the GEC staff and lecturers were totally gobsmacked with my video presentation, showing off graphics and animation they'd only ever seen on TV. Within 6 months the Amiga 500 had gone, replaced by an A2000 I still have, sitting a few feet away from me. As for the presentation... yep, I've still got that original VCR tape from 1991 ;-)
I love these stories. 😍. A fellow on Fb the other day showed off a drawing he made in the mid eighties on a BBC Micro or Master Compact. It's a wonderful feeling you get of a sort of time capsule from when computers and the culture around them were magic.
Maybe if you've the time, you could upload your presentation somewhere for people to see 😊
Upload it then.
@@seamusoblainn4603 Uploading it is not possible - the presentation is on a 1980s VHS tape for which I no longer have a VCR player to even watch it myself (that went over 10 years ago), let alone convert it from VHS to a digital format for uploading.
@@TheOneTrueSpLiT I understand. Don't know how much services are to do that for you. Probably cheaper to buy an old unit and do it yourself now that I think of it lol
@@TheOneTrueSpLiT Which format is it in (NTSC or PAL) and where are you?
I'm guessing U.K. and PAL. It shouldn't be hard to find someone to do it for you cheap or even free. I would do it for you but I'm in Bosnia.
Funny that this video comes out just when Acorn Archimedes' great-great-great-great-grandson, the Raspberry Pi 400 arrives on the market for under $100.
Yup, basically its a modern iteration of this computer - with a few caveats BUT you can run Riscos AND the original games on Riscos NATIVELY on a Pi400. It's a little convoluted but entirely possible JASPP has ben doing it for years on all Raspberry pis!!
@@ojbeez5260 Seems like it would be a lot easier to run Linux on a Pi400 and just fire up a simulator for the Archimedes. You may object to doing a full ARM simulation on an ARM based machine, but come on, you're only using 10 watts anyhow and I would bet it's got far better compatibility.
@@richardwicks4190 Actually !ADFSS is as easy to use as WHDLOAD on the Amiga. Aemulator (£18) (Coverts 26bit to 32bit) , for 'serious' programs that are not 32 bit compatible will make them run just fine. A lot of the Software written back in the day for Riscos 3.5 and above is 32 bit compliant although really a 26 bit O/S it is 32 bit compatible. Castle and the Omega and other Riscos computers were 32 bit only running Riscos 5 like the Pi. USB support soon for other USB devices for RiscOS 5 and the ease of use with USB FAT32 Drives make this easier overall. Also RiscOS 5 for Pi comes with all the FTP and online store where you can purchase the 32 bit latest versions of things like Ovation and Art Works etc and Download DOOM etc and use all SDL compliant games downladed over FTP natively not to mention !PiStore. Better to run ArchEm under RiscOS 5 for anything that is not compatible - plus MUCH faster boot times than Linux and out of box network support and Web Browsing.
@@richardwicks4190 nothing weird with that, anyone running DOSBox on PC is emulating x86 on x86 for better compatibility ;)
I had an Archimedes A410, and I fully credit it for teaching me how to think like a developer. I used it to write games, do a 3D animation project (in 1995!) and learn BBC BASIC. Now I have a multi decade career in software dev. Thanks, Acorn... 😅
Ok, it's been a few years since this was posted, but it took until '98 for my A3010 to feel underspecced. And for a machine released in the early '90, that's impressive!
It's nice to see people rediscover that ARM processors aren't just power efficient, but fast too!
I used an Amiga 4000 with 68060 and Picasso IV gfx card as my main machine until almost 2012(later expanded with mediator PCI and a gfx card that allows 1920x1200x32 gfx),only the web browser fell behind on SSL. She has USB,16bit sound and the world. Quite expanded. I did banking and such even up till then.
We still use our BBC Micro to run our family business. My dad says it's "unhackable". A couple of the customers like to play Repton and Wizadore on it. We used to charge 10p a go back in the day but now it's free with a purchase
Every time our IT "teacher" left the room for a cigarette break we'd put sensi soccer on one of the arch's in our lab. It even ran decent PC emulation, any A level student of the time will have wrestled with PC DOS and Turbo Pascal on a 3020.
Always wanted one of these beasts back when I was 14 years old. The Amiga and ST were the big boys in the playground, whilst the Arch was like the geeky kid sat in the corner doing 'important things'.
And just look how important those things were to our modern world. No one should ever underestimate just how crucial these computers were to our present day technology. If you sit and think about it, it actually hurts your brain lol XD
Archimedes was much more expensive than the Atari or Amiga though. I had both the Amiga and Atari....Made a lot of money out of the Atari....Upgrading them to run Cubase. And making adaptors for them to use multisync VGA monitors in monochrome mode....Happy days !
I'm from South Africa, my dad got us the Archimedes A3000 if I remember correctly, which was a step up from our previous Acorn we got in the early 80's. I can remember Archimedes, already having it in 1987, it had fully functional 'windows' on it too. At our primary school we didn't even have computers at the time. And in high school everyone was still using DOS. Though I didn't have much of computer teacher. All we were taught was how to pull up a directory horizontally or vertically. The rest of the time we played games. But working with that after the Archimedes at home, it was pure torture.
Later was highly disgusted when told the Archimedes were no longer been made and we had to swap it out for windows 95 machine, when my dad got our next pc. That was like having your sports car taken from you and given a skate board. Not fun :-(
Heck I think the last feature that Windows eventually got, that I can remember about anyway, the Archimedes already had back in the 80's were 'apps' You didn't have to go digging for and execution file to have your program run. If you wanted to see what the program consisted of then all you needed to do was click with the middle button on the icon to see the files inside. Windows 8 was when they finally started introducing apps to windows for the desktop, though not for every program used, even now and then you can't look inside them.
As for the games, I played almost all of those. That brings back so many good memories :-)
The Arch was replaced with the RiscPC, which was just a successor, so it was essentially not discontinued in the Win95 days.
There's also many OS's that had features long before Windows did, even for PC.... OS/2 WARP 4 still has some I think, not to mention DOS time and multitasking or multiuser DOS variants. I was just thinking of some other stuff, but forgot..... Damn. And Linux of course - it has plenty, but one most obvious to regular users was Windows Aero - we had Compiz, with way more and impressive 3D accelerated desktop features years before Aero was a glint in Ballmers eye (don't know really which was the CEO at the time they first had the idea.
And then of course there is the fact that many "features" are not features. Like why did they remove the ability to add more than one network interface for one ethernet card? I've always configured, with switch connecting to ADSL (now VDSL, before ADSL a cable modem) to provide public IP address for each machine via DHCP and manually a 2nd interface for LAN traffic. Luckily I had no Windows machines (and when I 1st setup it that way, it was my boyfriends laptop that had Windows) when that release (don't remember if it was 7 or 8, pretty sure not 10, but not certain). I was baffled, this was a standard functionality.
But I think it was a moneygrab. I think the Pro version actually still allowed this, but not certain. They do a lot of these unnecessary downgrades, and they ship computers with Basic or Home versions with limitations - especially Basic version, really only that people would upgrade.
Not Windows, 'WIMP'
Windows Icons Mouse and Pointer
Hey Dan, I worked at Krisalis back in the early 90's, it was my first job out of Uni (actually started while at Uni). We did loads of ports, I think the hardest one was SimCity2000 because it was't straight 68000 assembler. Porting asm was easy but this was mostly C and the Acorn compiler was crap (at best). That game was weird because it was originally wrote on the Mac, it got ported to DOS which butchered a lot of the code, then we ported the butchered DOS version.
When you say porting asm was easy, did you have a cross compiler that actually worked well?? I ask as I did some coding myself and was learning RISC but found it tedious. I did look at C and quickly came to the same conclusion.
SimCity 2000 on the Amiga should have been an easy port what with it sharing the same CPU as the Mac, but it was terribly slow. And it's easy to say that it was the port that was the problem, because if you emulated a Mac on the Amiga and played the Mac version of SC2K it actually ran better. The Amiga was multi-tasking two OS's emulating multiple parts (Sound and all the I/O) of the Mac and converting the graphics from chunky to bitplane and it still ran better.
@@daishi5571 We ported 68000 to arm by hand, once you got good at it quite a quick process. You didn't port it instruction by instruction, you'd take a block of code, figure out what it did and rewrite it, sometimes 2 or 3 68000 instructions would become 1 or 2 arm instructions, sometimes the other way around - rewriting ensured in stayed optimized, converting instruction by instruction would never be efficient. All the sprites and the copper/blit lists were replaced by heavily optimized drawing functions. Understanding the drawing was essential to getting it to work, none of this code was ported otherwise you'd be writing an emulator.
As for SC2000 I don't really know anything about the Mac version or even the Amiga version. The DOS version had implemented a lot of the low level Mac functions, had its own window system, isometric drawing code in 32bit x86 (dos4gw). We just took that DOS version ported it, all the hardwork of figuring out what to port had already been done. The overall structure of the Acorn version was identical to the DOS version, the x86 asm drawing routines were rewrote in ARM and the rest of the game was C and it more or less worked as is, Dos4GW is a flat memory model which is the same as ARM so we didn't have to deal with the typical segment memory issues when porting real mode DOS code.
@@robwyatt Thanks for the info. I was doing the block by block approach, as doing it by instruction was vastly more tedious (I did try that at the very beginning and I think it took me a couple of hours before I went to the pub for a life re-evaluation). Maybe I just needed to stick it out for the RISC instruction set to become second nature after years of CISC.
I take it from what you said that you use the Amiga code and assets as the basis for the conversions, did you use the ST code at all. I ask as I would have thought that using the ST code would have make the conversion simpler.
I started with BASIC in 1981 Forth in 82 and 6809 Machine Code in 83 (couldn't afford an assembler) by 85 I had learned Z80, 6502. I got an Amiga in 88 and started learning C, hated it and learned 68000 instead. I didn't get an Arc until 92 when I started working with them. I could have probably coded a game for it (never got close to finishing one) but at that time that wasn't my focus as I was writing some educational software. What I found was that the BBC BASIC ran very quickly on it. So much so that what I wrote on the BBC in hybrid BASIC (for quick development) and Assembly (speed up the slow stuff) I could just write in BASIC on the Arc and it was good enough.
@@daishi5571 When I was at Krisalis, I lived in Rotherham above a pub and wrote lots of code after a few pints, I think I questioned my life choices everyday!
We used the amiga version mostly because the ST version was subpar, not always but usually. The Acorn machines with optimized asm could keep pace with the Amiga even though there was no hardware acceleration. It became a personal challenge to get the same game as the Amiga.
I had a similar start, I had BBC Model B in about 1984, I started using them before that at school and once I got my own I quickly learned 6502 assembly. School got an Archimedes in about 1987, I got my own when the A3000 came out, which I think was 1989 and I was about to leave school. I learned ARM assembly right away and started tooling around making games. The first thing I wrote was an amiga sound tracker/mod player that was used by a lot of commercial games on the Acorn machines, it was entirely interrupt driven and mixed directly to the hardware DMA buffers so it was really fast. It was about this time that I got an Amiga and it was a programmers dream machine but I hated 68000, especially because Motorola asm syntax is backwards to Intel and Arm (true to this day). Many years later, when doing the ports the register flip was the source of a lot of bugs. I had learned C at Uni in the early 90's but hadn't really used it, SC2000 was the first project I had done in C but I wasn't writing much C, I defaulted to asm for anything new - it was just easier.
As far as PCs go,I had one at work but I didn't get my own until the mid 90's when I had moved to the US, it was the end of the 3D software rendering days and the end of writing x86 assembler, that is really when I started using C/C++. In the early 2000's I was working on PS2 in straight asm again! My asm days finally ended at the end of the PS3 days, I wrote a lot of SPU assembler for the ICE team which was ultimately used by lots and lots of PS3 games. I don't write much asm these days, I can still read it like a champ.
I still have my original 1989 A3000, I hooked it up the other day and it still works. I don't have a mouse so I can't really use the desktop.
@@robwyatt Lol there is a lot of similarity, including the moving to the US. I'm looking at dusting off the o'l brain and making a game on the Amiga I never did finish one for it. Thanks for the chat.
I was taught A level computing on acorn machines, the A5000 mostly. My gran bought me an a3010 so I could "study at home" although I usually just played speedball 2, lemmings and Zool. What I loved about the system was the modules, you could rip out game music or sprite routines and program them through basic very easily. The tracker modules that played amiga like music were often in the !pling directory of the game and easy to use for yourself. The basic onboard was so much fun to play around with, a great open machine indeed. I have an A3010, A7000 and a Risc PC sat here now, all great machines. BTW my A3010 has 4mb of ram not the 2mb you said as max ;)
Wow, I was thinking the green buttons reminded me of the one we had in primary school, but maybe not as I have a vivid memory of seeing "32-BIT" emblazoned across it and thinking how advanced it must be... but then you showed the stickers 😁 Thanks for confirming that hazy memory for me! Pretty sure we got it from the Tesco "Computers for schools" scheme and it was shared between all the classrooms.
This brought back a lot of memories. You described perfectly my history of school computers from LOGO to Lander - we were probably doing the same lessons at the same time. Can't wait to get my BBC Micro up and running.
I got to borrow an Archimedes from my secondary school for the entire summer. It was a fantastic machine.
Same, my mum was a teacher. Wrote a 4 channel drumtracker using sampled drum sounds nicked from games - in BASIC. Try that on the ST or Amiga.
@@alanbourke4069 try affording an Archimedes though 😂
@@mattgrice7228 The price was a good indicator of the power of the machines. The ST was £400, the Amiga was £500 and the Arch was £800.
Is that Christmas 1991 @ 0:28?
The same time I got mine. Same pack too. Best Christmas ever!
It was, I did a video all about the cartoon classics pack: ua-cam.com/video/bJ7ZmUnl-ls/v-deo.html
Same here! I really got into flight sims thanks to the Amiga, F-19, F-117, B-17, F-22, Gunship, Birds of Prey. Many late school nights playing Championship Manager too! Great memories!
I still have fond memories of sitting in the classroom at lunchtime playing Lemmings, it just blew me away at the time!
most of them were ports to the Amiga.... and we blew our minds playing it on that machine thinking we got something great..
@10.00, the ARM processor is marked GPS 9241. This is a truly British machine, GPS is GEC Plessey Semiconductors, who were the 2nd licensee of ARM after VLSI. I worked in their Swindon site in 1992. The ARM devices were fabbed on the 6" CMOS line at their Roborough (near Plymouth) wafer fab. 9241 is the date code of chip testing - 1992, week 41 (second week in October). I wasn't directly on the ARM project at GPS, but I shared an office with a couple of guys who were. I remember the buzz when the license was signed. Sadly, it wasn't enough to keep GPS going, although it has recently been revived as a new company with same name. Now, simply Plessey Semiconductors.
Never even heard of this platform, and I am just floored by how great the GUI and gaming experience is. I mean, are those legit particle effects? In 1987?
The first archimedes appeared in my school near the end of my 5th form. I had written a 3D cad program for my BBC B that involved a lot of dynamic code loading from floppy disc as required, so when I got onto the archi I quickly copied to a ram drive and was impressed. I didn't own one until about 20 years later when I picked up a few machines dead cheap on ebay, before the rush on them!
I have always been interested in the Acorn machines - here across the pond in the states there was barely a mention of these machines at all, and certainly nobody was importing them. The 1991 gaming scene here was either consoles, or on the computer side the Amiga, the PC, and to a much lessor extent the Atari ST (I never saw one in the wild). I had an expanded A500 by that time, with an 80MB HD, 16MB of RAM, and an 030 accelerator card.
Hey Dan, it's been a while! And this was a welcome break video from the current affairs. The BBC micro was my first computer experience in primary school, and when I went on to secondary we had acorns, it was a mixture of 3 and 4000s and was also my first introduction to email as our teacher was an actual computer scientist so he got the best out of the machines, we had an early 10baseT network that linked all the classrooms together with a link to the acorn in the library, it was quite ahead of its time to be fair. We were also lucky enough to have 1 pc that was hooked up to dialup which was where I first came I to contact with usenet as well, we used to pester the teacher to find pictures of Cindy Crawford or Pamela Anderson for us 😂 this was a great blast from the past. Thank you.
The port of Elite to Elite Gold found that Brabem & Bell's 6502 assembler to generate the galaxies were so tied to the 6502 in the Beeb that it was impossible to recreate in ARM Assembler.
So, Elite Gold contains the 6502 emulator _just to get the star systems identical to Beeb Elite_
5:50 i think the sticker quite nice actually...
Yeah, the stickers are part of the history of the machine. Too bad he removed them.
Micro Men was an interesting docu drama, I really enjoyed it. I remember first setting eyes on the Acorn BBC micro in the corner of the class room and then having my first experience on the machine at 5 years old. At Secondary school we had 3 computer rooms. 1) BBC micro 2) Amiga 500 3) Amiga 1200. I remember staying behind aster school and using the video camera with video digitiser and 3d rendering software such as Imagine & Real 3d. We also had some Acorn Archimedes and A3010s spread over a couple of Tech class rooms. It was great that the OS was built into Rom and boots up straight away. The RISC processor was very advanced and ARMs chip designs are now used in smart phones & tablets etc. They definitely knew how to make computers. If they sold the lower end machine with game pack ins like the Amiga did with Batman, Cartoon Classics, Wild Weird Wicked pack etc then it would have sold better to the home market. Then again the price point was a lot higher than the Amiga machines if I remember correctly. Great video Dan. Your videos always spark memories. Cheers.
Oh... Dan!!! ... I had an electron and upgraded to the Arch ... I loved both computers... Ravi opened my eyes 👀 at the Amiga... I must say that I love your podcasts and videos!! Epic work, keep up that fantastic sounding DJ voice and electric enthusiasm!! That’s what keeps me coming back!! ... and the old school computers!!!
Great video, I had used an A3000 in primary school but couldn't remember how it all worked. Enjoyed the walk through.
Also, remember those little rubber tabs you used to put into VHS tapes? Much like the floppy "tape mod"
I loved Commodore as well. Started with a VIC-20, moved up to a C= 128 and finally an Amiga 2000HD in 1990. Those were the days!
Interesting video, thank you.
I had an Amiga 1200 in 1993, and although I loved the gaming capabilities (Syndicate Wars was my favourite game), I used the Computer to make music.
I had a plug-in sampler cartridge and used ProTracker, Octamed, & Bars & Pipes.
I think the most surprising music package, was the PS1 'music' game, which made sampling and arranging tracks so easy.
The A3010 and 3020 were SO well designed, I loved the keyboard action on them too. I was lucky enough to own a RiscPC as a teenager (which I still have to this day) and the modular design was groundbreaking. Those machines never got the recognition they deserved outside of the education market.
Your school computing experience is identical to mine. Took me to Manchester University in 2000 (where I was taught processor design by Steve Furber). These days I’m head of Computer Science at a secondary school and sixth form. Good to hear your experience, too.
Dan thanks for the video, just one correction: The Acorn A30x0 can be upgraded up to 4MB (not 2), basically same as the Atari STE. The limitation wasn't in the OS or the CPU, it was in the memory controller (called MEMC) which in order to support Virtual memory pages had a CAM table and an architecture that limited the amount of RAM to 4MB per controller (yes per controller, in reality the "big box" Archimedes could have multiple MEMC chips and so have more than 4MB of RAM). Some of the game ports as you mentioned relied on the Amiga HW acceleration for the scrolling, this doesn't means that Archimedes was slower at doing scrolling, in reality the memory bandwidth the Archimedes could handle was higher than the Amiga. All the Amiga models had the bottleneck of chipRAM architecture as a matter of fact just by adding CPU RAM (the so called FastRAM) could double the performance of every amiga. We finally have a good Amiga architecture in 2020 thanks to the Vampire V4 :)
Yes, the programmer of Pacmania confirmed that the Acorns could shift massive amounts of screen data in a single frame with no slowdown at all. But on the Amiga it was not possible so he had to make the sprites smaller (more elongated) to help save on screen memory / space for the Amiga to be able to scroll at a decent frame rate. MEMC can make it expandable to 16Mb but there is only space enough in an acorn A5000 (running RO 3.11) case for this. Theoretically possible on an A3010 - but is there any point? The A3010 is blisteringly fast compared to an Amiga or an ST also there is nothing to take advantage of the extra memory.
@@ojbeez5260 To your point, yes no Amiga I have here are faster than any of my RISC OS systems, even when programmed well the Amiga Chip Memory is a bottleneck on the Amiga (this is also one of the technical reasons why Commodore couldn't not deliver the AAA chipset btw). About the MEMC, a little correction the only model who had 4 MEMC is the A540 (not the A5000), so the only Archimedes that can reach 16MB is the A540. Every Archimedes could potentially have 4 or more MEMC, but the real problem there was powering them up (all the dual MEMC memory expansions take signals from a single MEMC slot), so to the A3010 (or 3020 or even the A3000) there were space problems (not enough space in the case) and obviously a 4 MEMC expansion needed some extra juice. But then again all the series Archimedes 3x0 , 4x0 and 5000 have expansions with 2 MEMC for a total of 8MB RAM as well as supporting the so called ROM/RAM podule card on which you can store all your Modules and so use the 8MB RAM just for program code and data, which makes 8MB RAM A lot on an Archie ;)
@@PaoloFabioZaino Indeed. Theoretically possible on an A3000 to have 16Mb RAM, one could make a board for it. One exists for the A5000 with 8Mb but is extremely pricey.
@Apple Yeah pretty much 4MB was the max for all the home computers back then for one reason or another. The CAM Table (Content Addressable Memory) on the MEMC Controller was used to cache the "TLB" (note I put TLB between double quotes as it wasn't a TLB as we know it nowadays!), to basically resolve a Virtual Memory Address into a physical one (yes Archimedes had "MMU" support while Amiga and Atari did not). However, to be precise, the cam was used to resolve virtual pages into physical pages. The cam memory had 128 entries and so it could only cache max 128 pages hence with 4MB RAM Archie had 32K page size, while with 2MB it had 16K page size and with 1MB it had 8K Page size. now 32K Page was a huge page and so addressing even bigger pages made no sense. Anyway MEMC was designed to give the early ARM CPU max bandwidth with the memory of the time and so the total amount of memory bandwidth Archie had was way superior to the Amiga. Also because the Amiga's chipRAM had the bandwidth shared among all the chips that were accessing it unfortunately...
My A3000 has the 2mb upgrade so I could play Lemmings 2.
11:47 Fun fact: the Blender 3D software used right-click for select in its default configuration right from the beginning over 20 years ago, until the release of version 2.80 last year, where by popular demand it changed to left-click select.
Super video! This brings back great memories of school days in the computer lab. I also remember a game where you fired a cannon at incoming sailing ships and had to guess the trajectory. No idea what the game was called now though!
My older brother had one. I loved it, when he got a risk pc, he gave this to me and my twin. One of the best gifts I've ever received. Star fighter and stunt racer are amazing games. Birds of war was also awesome. I spent so many hours playing games on it. Thank you for this video.
I briefly remember, late in my career at junior school, an Acorn Archimedes appearing.. the green keys are the giveaway. However, it was so quickly usurped by the RM Nimbus and later PC models that we hardly spent any time on it. I'd stay behind alone to play on the computers, and I still have fond memories of it,,, because it had battle chess !
The RM Nimbus was not as powerful as the 386 emulator on the Acorn. Lots of schools did not know this and got rid of of their Acorns by an aggressive marketing ploy by RM Nimbus to schools claiming they were better when in fact the A3010 / A3020 / A300 could easily outperform an RM Nimbus in 386 software emulation alone. Also it had a 386 Hardware expansion card so it could be even faster for less than the cost of an RM Nimbus but schools were not as tech savvy back in the day. Shameful.
@@ojbeez5260 My school and one A3000 and a bunch of RM Numbus's, that was a joke, we'd wait ike 10 minutes for Windows 3.0 to start up on those machines.
@@ojbeez5260 There was no software 386 emulator on ARM in the early 1990s. You are delusional.
@@kyle8952 Please read carefully, the A300 had a 386 card which could emulate a 386 with up to 8Mb Ram, I believe, on a 72 pin SIMM slot and use ALL the other resources of the A3000. Neither the A500 or A1200 could do this. Even bigger box Amigas could not do this, they required the entire computer on the card not just the processor and additional RAM, if necessary. This Card was cheaper and better than an RM Nimbus...that's the point! i.e. All schools need to do is spend £199 per computer instead of replace them with inferior NIMBUS computers at much higher cost!!!
Thanks for this review, Dan. I owned an A3000 back in the day, and absolutely loved it. There were a few bedroom developers who wrote some decent original Acorn games, most of which got published by a company called the 4th Dimension. One of my favourites was E-Type (inspired by Lotus Turbo Challenge). There was also a rip-off of side scrolling shooter R-type called Nevryon, and a game called Enter the Realm which seemed inspired by Shadow of the Beast. As well as StarFighter 3000, the 3D games Chocks Away (biplane dogfights) and Saloon Cars were the games I had that Amiga owners were secretly jealous of. Try to get your hands on a REALLY under-rated puzzle game called Cataclysm. The premise is that you have to drain water out of your crash-landed space ship, and the way the various fluids in the game move is really hypnotic.
Chocks away was great! We played that at school. Ahead of its time for sure.
I lived in Scotland in the late 80's and early 90's. I remember seeing the Archimedes in a shop and man I wanted one but it was sooo expensive. I had long been an Atari fan (had an 800 and then 800XL) and ended up with a 520STFM. But the Archimedes remains one of my top 10 dream machines.
Ahh, I remember the upgrade from the BBC machines to these Acorns at school. From Granny's Garden to Lander was a big jump in fidelity!
You've wetted my Commodore appetite. I can feel my yearly pilgrimage to watch Dave Haynie's Death Bed Vigil coming on.
The Achimedes was the first machine I played Lemmings on. We even had a teacher who gave lessons on how to do the tricky levels! 😂 Seriously though I used these up to the middle of high school until eventually they were replaced by 286 PCs. Loved them and loved BASIC coding on them as it was similar to ZX Spectrum BASIC. Great video Dan 👏
Same here, although I played it at a family friend's house, they had a 3010!
We never had DOS machines at the schools around here, jumped straight from RiscOS to Win95
They replaced Archs with 286s? Goodness! Talk about a downgrade! Are you sure they weren't at least 386s (which are still a lot slower)?
I did the Lemmings conversion at Krisalis software . That, and Oh No More Lemmings and the Tribes, amongst a lot of other games, including Pacmania which was the best version by in many respects. People should remember that it just had a bitmap screen - and all pixel scrolling (like that in Archimedes Pacmania) was done in software. Fortunately the clever people at Acorn put in the barrel shifter in the CPU, so you should shift any number of bits in no clock cycles at all. The shift came for free with the instruction you were using.
The Amiga was undoubtedly a fantastic games machine, but as an "all rounder" for applications which required raw CPU power, the 68000 was far, far slower than the ARM chip. A better comparison would be between the Atari ST, which also had a simple static bitmap screen with no other hardware support.
The Acorn did have one hardware sprite - used for the mouse cursor. We used that for the Lemmings control icon. I remember trying to get it to run on interrupts, and it kept locking up. I rang Acorn (via Sue Wall, who was the liaison officer for all the developers) to ask them if they might know why, and the SAME afternoon I got the answer, and how to fix it. Fabulous company, with fabulous people - creating a world beating CPU which (in more modern versions) is used by billions of devices. The best, and happiest years of my working life were spent working on Acorn Archimedes games software.
PS: As a desktop machine there wasn't really anything to touch it. MS Windows 3 was a pile of sluggish junk in comparison. Just my opinion.
PPS: Just for extra info - I wrote my first two Acorn games (Terramex, and Pacmania) with nothing other than the BBC basic interpreter using its on board assembler under Arthur 1.2 (Pre RiscOS - (A)lmost (R)eady (Thurs)day.) When in development it could be started up using the basic "Run" command. Try doing that on the Amiga! (Even though I loved the Amiga too!).
@@shaunhw You absolute legend :) one thing I've been curious about, since discovering the Acorn port of Lemmings doesn't just have an identical copy of the music from the Amiga version: was the Acorn soundtrack taken from some other home release, or was it actually remade ("remastered" with higher-quality instrument samples?) specifically for the Acorn version?
@@mangobrainify
Hi Philip - We rebuilt it all from scratch, for the Archimedes but some samples were used from the Amiga. Looking back if I remember rightly I think one of the reasons was that the Amiga sound driver code wasn't in a common format, and rather than convert it we decided just to redo it, in a sound-tracker format, with a fourth channel for sound effects.
Had an A3000 which my parents decided on over an Amiga. The Krysalis games were good, but some of my favourites were specifically made for the Acorn by The Fourth Dimension (4D). Chocks Away and Saloon Cars Deluxe were beautiful 3D games and very playable. I regretted not having the larger catalogue of Amiga games to choose from, but as you imply at the end, the 3D polygon capabilities were probably a bit more advanced.
ah Chocks Away, i loved this game. Also Freddys Folly and Lander were my other go to games
In the States, Acorn was barely a blip on the radar screen back then. I vaguely remember some ads for it in Byte and Compute magazines and there they were touted as "business" machines, alternatives for IBM clones.
Great video! I was one of those kids in the 80's who got the A3000 as our first home computer at launch! It was sold as "the next big thing" - how wrong they were! I have not to date met anybody else who owned or used one though we had a single battered A310 in the music room in secondary school.
A criminally underrated and little known platform that handled tasks better then that 90% of the junk we have today. But, a platform is only as good as its software and I think you nailed it in your video - there just wasn't enough made, particularly by third paties to harness it. Things looked up end of the 90s when we were finally getting ports of aging blockbusters but it was short lived.
I still confuse work colleagues by saying "pin board" or "parent folder" when discussing stuff on our shared drive!
Our A3000 is still stored in my parents house, all intact and immaculate. I had an A3010 that got chucked due to never ending faults. Still got the A3020 somewhere with PC card and full Win95 set up! A4000 is about too but is dead, even with replaced powerpack it won't go. Also got my Strongarm RiscPC upstairs and a Pheobe shell I never got around to doing anything with!
I am still programming on ARM - - - Cortex-M4 microcontrollers ;-)
Raspberry Pi.
getting into M4 right now... C/ASM, STM32 range, gcc toolchain in Eclipse, seggar probe, etc... prototyping for a battery operated consumer device and already wondering if the M4 has too much going on and whether M0 will make more sense...
First time doing this stuff so will find out sooner or later what is what - evaluating NuttX and micrium’s uC stuff for rtos and may strip them down for use instead of wasting valuable time trying to reinvent low level wheels 😏
On this video:
Only ever saw Acorns in shops or the odd library back in the day... went from CPC464 to Megadrive to SNES to 386PC and beyond...
By the time my brother got the Amiga I was already a heavy PC head playing the odd SNES game for laughs...
How did I not know about this machine? It looks amazing. The world of 1991 computing was far more diverse than I knew. Thank you for this video. Fascinating.
We had an A3010 in the early 90s! I have very fond memories of it, and all those sights and sounds this video evokes. We had to go to a specialist shop “Beebug” in St Albans to get anything for it… which seemed like miles away!
I think the games library was decent. In addition to the Krystalis (spelling!?) games, we had a bunch from the “4th Dimension” and some complications or compendia.
Highlights for me include: Sensible soccer, Cannon Fodder, Chuck Rock, James Pond, E-Type, Holed Out (golf), Drop Ship, The Olympics, Populous, Inertia, Pandora’s Box, break 147, Apocalypse, Mad Professor Moriarty and Zool.
I still use my A1200 w/030 occasionally to show my friends on how powerful it was at the time and can still be used today. Don't forget a few Techno-Rock groups used Amiga as their primary instruments, Information Society has a picture of it on one of their album covers.
As an Amiga kid I was really jealous of Lander. A few years later I was quite pleased with Zeewolf. The frame rate even on the 1200 wasn't quite as good as the Acorn, but on the other hand the Amiga title more action on screen.
Aah, that would be Virus on Atari! I spent quite a few hours on that.
The Amiga was designed to be a railgun for 2D assets. It was never particularly startling with 3D, because those were all CPU-bound, and its CPU wasn't all that fast.
Zarch on the Archmedes is the best version. Virus is still good but the flying has been dumbed down and it's less smooth and colorful
I remember this well. My primary school in Dublin, Ireland had a room full of A3010s from around 1993 or so. I seem to recall that the computer teacher went over to the UK to get them. Plenty of memories of playing Lemmings and a few other games! To this day that's the version of Lemmings that I turn to. I even found a few years back that a later version of RISC OS was ported to the Raspberry Pi and I got it working on an original Model B.
Used to have a few of these back in the day at school, and they had quite a number of games loaded onto it too (James Pond, Zool and Lemmings 2 were a few off the top of my head). Great memories of playing on one of these at break times in school back in the day.
Star Fighter 3000 looks very impressive for its time, would love to see Starglider 2 in this platform
@@soundbelch1600 SF 3000 Looked fantastic but comparing it to Frontier is comparing a shoot em up to a strategic game. There is a lot more going on in Frontier in the background. SF 3000 couldn't have been done on a low end Amiga (well it could but the frame rate would have chugged so bad) I think even an unexpanded A1200 would have struggled. Starglider 2 would have been glorious on the Arc.
This title came up in my feed, and “triggered” me 😛 I nearly bought an A3010.... it was hugely impressive machine... but so glad I went with the A1200 👍 still annoyed about what happened to Commodore... still foolishly hoping for the Amiga to return...
Hoping for it to return in what way? Newly manufactured retro systems, or a completely new, up-to-date version of the Amiga? The first one, I think could potentially happen, but the second one? Meh. There's no way to make a modern system that would be compatible on a hardware level, other than including an "Amiga-on-a-chip" module, and that's unlikely. And as for a system with an Amiga-like OS running on modern hardware and emulation to provide backwards compatibility? Well, that's doable today.
same here. I wanted both. I could only afford a second hand beat up Amiga A500 but that was bliss for me and got me hooked on computers for life. The A3010 was just so expensive and I don't think i ever saw one second hand. Quite rarely seen in the wild outside of schools.
@@ClayMann So expensive ? GBP499.
@@Archimedes75009 That's a LOT of money for a teenager even today. But back then it was unobtainium. I paid £150 for my first Amiga that was so busted the case didn't even stay closed. But it worked and I loved it.
@@ClayMann Who cares about how much you paid for a second hand amiga, really ?
I also bought my Archie second hand, but again : who cares about the price I paid ?
If you want to compare prices, then a ZX Spectrum 128K was much cheaper than an amiga.
The Atari ST was the best value for money you could get, for a 68000 based system, not the amiga.
An amiga was cheaper than an Archimedes, yes, of course, being so much inferior : how much did the expansions ( if they ever existed back in the days ) cost to bring your amiga to the level of processing power the Archie had ? To bring flicker free 640x512 in 256 colours or 800x600 in 16 or 256 colours ? To bring 8 hardware channels ? How much did you have to pay for a BASIC as brilliant as the BBC BASIC, which everybody used as an assembler too ? And so on and so forth. Compare what can be compared, please. Remember too that the launch price of the Archimedes with 512 kbytes of RAM was inferior to the launch price of the amiga1000 with only 256 kbytes of RAM. These are facts.
The A500 was an unusable POS : you had to buy a very expensive external diskette drive, and /or some extra RAM, again very expensive. None of these was needed on the Archie, because the OS is ROM based, includes BASIC and several apps, and Acorn stopped the production of 512 kbytes machines after 6 months, so that Archies have at least 1 Mbyte ( the other models had 2 or 4 ).
Whether you like it or not, the Archimedes is much more similar to a modern, powerful computer, than the amiga, a crippled games console with a decorative keyboard, unless you spend hundreds if not thousands of GBP to upgrade this POS farce machine.
The school I went to at the time, acquired these through the Tesco computers for schools voucher scheme. Over the years, they built up quite a collection of these Acorn machines. Happy memories! 😍
I was lucky enough that in our school we had the BBC Domesday project Archimedes with a laser disc player. Was google street view in the 80's, spent hours on that machine.
Oh, an Acorn Archimedes A3010 !!! I'm an AMIGA fan, but my friend had an A3010.
A crazy machine! I was so jealous then! Back then I had the feeling that the Archimedes was much faster than the AMIGA. RISC CPU = Power :-)
I loved that the operating system was on the ROM !!!
My friend was something special to us, with his 3010th here in Austria.
It was a great time, thanks for video!
I envied Amiga users because they had so many games available, it's a shame the major publishers just ignored the Acorn.
@@dcikaruga I have to say that I used the A500 less to play. But it's true, if the A3010 had more application programs, it would be the better AMIGA for me.
@@dabug9984 One thing that held the Acorn back was the colour modes, it could do 256 colour but with set palette, or 16 colour with a 4096 palette, sound was just about on par with the Amiga though, but many ports looked like the ST version, well they usually took the graphics from there.
@@dcikaruga The Archie has 8 hardware channels with 7 indepêndent stero positions .... and an A3010 can output sound up to 61 kHz whatever the screen mode.
Fun fact: RISC OS is actually still alive and kicking as an open source project (mostly for the Raspberry Pi)
Another one of those OSes that tied the GUI tightly into the kernel. A museum piece for that reason, if for no other ...
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Tight vertical integration was crucial to squeezing performance from much slower CPUs.
It was also instrumental in reducing their portability.
@@vapourmile That was true in the 1990s, when kernel-integrated GUIs offered lower overhead than X11 on Unix systems. But today they just get in the way of flexibility. Thus, on Linux, the GUI is a completely modular, replaceable layer, giving more choice of appearance, behaviour, themeability -- you name it -- than all other platforms put together.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104
I know. I'm not saying otherwise.
X was of course designed for client-server architectures and so could be part of a fully remotely networked GUI user experience, not something which could be said of most window managers of its day.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Yes, but today Linux is a monstrous mess of distributions, desktops and repositries that really aren't that user friendly. Yes, they have improved over the years, but most still **require** you to use arcane terminal commands to do things. The whole Linux ecosystem is patchy and confusing. And even the lightest of modern desktops requires far more resources than any '90s home computer could provide to be useful. Sometimes less is more.
My secondary school had a couple of these in the arts department. I remember using a program like an early D paint. We also had loads of BBCs + the black a white old Macs for desktop publishing. When I was young I had a C64 and later an Amiga 1200. Good work dude.
I remember playing Lander on an Archimedes at school on a library computer.
After 30 years I've finally learnt its name.
I liked the stickers!
Prior to RISC OS, the OS was called Arthur. I remember it having really garish colours. 😁
I think I still have the PC World article about the Archimedes launch filed away somewhere... and yeah, Arthur was *really* colourful. I wanted one very much but couldn't afford it until when the A5000 came out a couple of years later., By then Arthur had long since become Risc OS and rather more "businesslike".
Yes, Arthur was pretty dreadful. But, despite cooperative multi-tasking, which meant one crashed programme brought down the whole system, RISC OS was pretty good and I still think had better user interface conventions than Mac OS. However, the Archimedes also ran BSD Unix, and, with 8Mb of RAM and 80Mb of disc, ran it extremely well.
@@stillyet yes, I remember there was a "workstation" version of the A440(R440?), though I never got to see it. The BSD kernel doesn't need much ram etc. - it's mainly the desktop environment and associated frameworks and services that add bloat in modern UNIX/Linux systems.
@@koma-k R480, I think. I still have one in the barn. The 4Mb RAM version (R440?) struggled to run X11, and was really only useful for non graphical applications, but the 8Mb version ran X11 and OSF/Motif really well, and was my main development machine for about five years until I switched to Linux.
@@stillyet That makes sense. Having never used or even seen one I wasn't quite sure about there being an R480 - but when you mentioned it it triggered faint memories of reading about multiple MEMC chips as they could only address 4MB each...
Incredible video - thanks!
I got Sinclair and Commodore stuff, completely missed on this piece of gem... (being from Eastern Europe)
After C64 (ZX Spectrum) parents insisted going for IBM compatibles ...
This RISC OS impressive even today ...
I remember “virus” on the PC it captured my imagination back then. I had no idea it came of the Acorn. Thanks!
Interesting video :) I think the 3d graphics are still a bit to primitive on this computer for it to be able to take over for the 2d games. So I would rather have the A1200 for smoother scrolling. But it really is an interesting machine. I would like to get one of them.
I had a 3010.
Games i remember were:
Gods
Paradroid
An Outrun-ish game
And some tank based 3d game that looked a bit like Lander (Zarch)
E-Type is the 'out run' game. Conqurer is the Tank game programmed by my electronics classmate in Cambridge - he sat right next to me in class until last year when courses ended due to lockdown. He has released the source code to it. He now works programming interfaces energy saving and smart home devices for a company. He also programmed Snapper on the BBC.
I loved Snapper on my Electron, great Pac-Man clone.
@@danwood_uk another Snapper fan over here. My dad loved it even more than the 'real' pacman.
@@ojbeez5260 Conqueror was really good! Well done him!
@@danwood_uk I made a BBC digital Joystick adapter (Atari style) for my class project and used Snapper in class to demonstrate it worked. :)) Snapper was one of his first games.
I loved and had an Acorn RISC PC. You bring me back to my youth. Happy days. 😁
Our senior school had an after hours computer club and that was all Archimedes 3000s. We had a few games we could play, there was a flight sim called Interdictor, a platformer called Mad Professor Moriati which was awesome, and a couple others I can't remember.
Great video again Dan! These machines really were ahead of their time and very underrated. As many things Acorn, they did a poor job of marketing their products to both software vendors and the home market, which stifled what could have become superior to the Amiga. Shame!
This was next to Windows 3 machines!
ahead of their time and very underrated? The ARM is only, for mobile!
@@lucasrem1870 RISC-V, Apple M2
I dont know this computer, but interesting, thanks. And no, nothing could be better than my amiga 1200 :)
Igy igaz 😀
My feeling exactly. Nothing beats a 1200
Agree 100% Even the A500 was better. But it's still good to look at the competition that was out against the Amiga n beside PC nothing was better. I think this computer is also featured in CU Amiga May 1993 as in which computer to buy back then.
Depends, if you were a gamer then no but if you were running a business then the Archimedes was way better try doing cad or circuit design on an Amiga, The arc was amazing for its time at those tasks including word processing, both killed by the PC though.
@@arashikage878 the a500 was better 🙈 you clearly never used an Arc.
Way back when I was in school, there was one of these in the library with an external hard drive keeping track of the books. There were 4 others in the DT wing that were loaded with a CAD software I can't remember the name of.
My dad got a ZX81 when they were released, he built a keyboard for it (with a nice pine case :)) and got into machine code. He spent his spare time writing Z80 assembly programs to solve chess problems. I got a ZX Spectrum 48K , and in November 1988 I bought an Atari STFM (I still have it and it still runs, although I managed to break the mouse, upgraded to 1Mb of internal memory Marpeth Xtra RAM). My only hands on experience with the BBC was when My computer studies teacher brought his in to school and ran Elite as a demonstration.
the clips of WH Smiths take me back :) I brought the ATARI STFM in the Hull branch of WH Smiths
Imagine the Archimedes RISC main processor with Amiga-like custom chips
That was actually what the Hombre chipset was meant to do. Sadly Commodore went bust then.
@Apple I think it was something they were working on with HP. Not sure though.
@@leerudd1294 Yeah, they were working together with HP on an RISC CPU.
I have wondered this also, but JM said that the chipset was designed to offset the shortcomings of the 68000. So I think the Amiga would have been an entirely different system, had it been based on the ARM. Maybe even like the Arc.
@@daishi5571 yeah, an Amiga-like Arc, and vise-versa. So many possibilities were available in those days to smaller companies, of you reran the past, you'd see more interesting ideas, I'd imagine
The Amiga was a games computer the Acorn was more suited to business, my mates had them and did PCB design, amazing software that would auto route the circuit board layouts, they did proper CAD drawings, all things that were just not possible on an Amiga, it was so fast as well, I love the Amiga and have still got my original 1200 but the Archimedes range of machines was way way way ahead of its time compared to anything around it however when the PC got going in 1992 nothing could stop it.
I wouldnt say it was for "business", it was very much a educational computer system from the mould of the BBC micro that was imagined in the home and school/university. It was more revolutionary than the BBC micro as the ARM RISC Processor was designed for it. The Raspberry Pi is like a distant cousin.
@@suburbia2050 Small businesses bought the Archies for killer apps like Artworks or Impression, or Sibelius.
@@Archimedes75009 Interesting thanks, more strings to its bow then!
@@suburbia2050 Yes. Artworks is now Xara Extreme on our modern computers : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xara
@@suburbia2050 I still service Acorns that are used in Audio Production Small Business Environment to this very day because Macs and PCs still have issues. Because these are important documents recorded to audio they must be secure and well edited. Too many problems with Macs and PCs Viruses , slowdowns OS is always doing something in background etc. OS is in ROM so no problems like Mac or PCs. Everything is hardware based i16 card and even the OS on ROM. Perfect for voice recording studio.
Brings back SOOO many memories, i get that warm fuzzy feeling, it was like a gateway into another world at the time
Excellent article. My early computer experience practically mirrors yours, up to and including the Amiga, apart from my first was a second hand Vic 20! The Archimedes however completely passed me by for whatever reason. Never realised it was such a good piece of kit for the day.
We can all shed 40 billion tears for Acorn for the failure of the Archimedes to take over the home computer market.
In a way, two parts of Acorn have survived - ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machines (but when incorporated with the help of Apple and VLSI, they changed their name to Advanced RISC Machines before settling on ARM Ltd - they've since been sold to Softbank and, subject to regulatory approval, are now being sold again to NVidia, although their HQ remains in Cambridge, UK), while RISC OS is now open source and there's a version which can run on a Pi...
@@mittfh Yes the Rpi 400 is the modern iteration of this computer.
The particle effects of Lander are better than most modern games.They even bounce on surfaces in real time.
I was born in 81, and grew up outside of Providence Rhode Island. I remember watching a PBS show when I was very young, maybe five or six, about computers. The documentary had children who were using computers, and learning to program on them. I remember a little girl talking about a turtle, and how she could move the turtle around on the screen. That always stuck in my memory, and I was always curious about what kind of computer that was. Being in the US, the likelihood of me running into a BBC Micro in the wild was very slim. It wasn't until years later while watching videos on UA-cam, I a BBC micro video that featured a clip from that documentary. There was the little girl talking about the turtle.
Enjoyed good to see you back on ytube again
I do like RiscOS more than AmigaOS personally. While not certainly better than the amiga, the archimedes put up a good fight against it.
15:15 reminds me of how I used to drill through the read only tab on commercial floppies. I also used to convert read only 5.25" floppies by cutting the tab on the right side. Ah, the good old days...
Still got my A3010 we had from the '90s. Its one of the early models that had the mezzanine ARM2 board which I recently upgraded to a 45mhz ARM3 with 20mhz 4MB of RAM, its quite a machine and plays Star Fighter 3000 beautifully on the max graphics settings!
Nice stuff Dan! I've always been fascinated by the Archimedes and this was a great showcase for it. One does indeed wonder what could have been!
G5 iMacs, RISC-V, Apple M1
We had an A440 (I think) which was the full system. Did some kind of chip update on it as well from Watford electronics. Was a great machine, can't believe how much my dad must have spent on it.
Played a lot of polygon style games line saloon cars and chocks away (flying game), and some of the scrollers like lemmings, twin world etc.
Great times!
Wow - This takes me back in time...
I already was "into" Acorn computers after I stepped from my Cosmac Super Elf single board computer onto the Acorn Atom computer. The next in the acorn range was the Acorn BBC-B, that was expanded with a second processor and the (in)famus AMX mouse. I wrote a lot of programs and util-ROM's (in assembly) for that computer.
I got one of the early Archimedes computers, namely the Archimedes A300. When I got the machine it had the early operating system on it, called Arthur. It really was a stopgap of an operating system, although it has it's strengths. Later on I upgraded it to RISCOS and That was a big improvement. I later made some huge changes on the motherboard to expand the available memory (a risky undertaking, because it involved removing the old RAM chips and soldering in the new chips and additional cutting traces and rewiring address buses).
The last machine I had was the Acorn RiscPC. Sadly Acorn went under, and I had to make the step to the standard PC design to keep up with the times. I still have good memory's of my time with these computers. I have learned a lot of programming on these machines - Assembly at first, but also the great BBC-Basic (that was miles ahead of the more traditional BASIC versions with it's procedure and function implementation that almost entirely did away with GOTO and GOSUB spaghetti structures). Other languages like BCPL, Pascal, C/C+, LISP, Forth and Prolog (to name a few) where also available for that computer, and of course I learned and played around with all of them.
I was amazed when my parents gave me a BBC Micro Model B on my 18th birthday. I learned to code on it, so a later college course in 6502 assembly language was a piece of cake. I later graduated to an Amiga 500 and then an Amiga 1200, which ended up in a PC case, upgraded to the hilt. But my best friend at the time had an Archimedes. I thought it looked amazing.
Wow this video brings me back. My family used to have a A5000 which I though was amazing back in the day. I used to help out at my old secondary school when I was in college. Got to upgrade the OS from 2.0 to 3.1 by just replacing 4 chips 😁. When the Risc PC and the newer A series came out they seems very powerful at the time. But that’s when the secondary schools started to switch to the PCs
Grew up with Beeb and RiscOS at school too, remember the first time our primary school got an A3000, funnily enough we had CM8833 mk2 monitor like yours on it. I remember being totally mesmerised by how the mouse worked after only ever using a BBC micro prior 😆. Lander seemed such an epic game back then.
It has taken decades for this story to actually be told in full. I was there from day - (minus) 20 ... I bet you read my articles :-)
I grew up with both the BBC Model B and Archimedes A3000 in the Tasmanian State Education system, apparently one of Acorn’s biggest strongholds outside of the UK. I recall using the ‘Beeb’ as early as 1986 (when I was 6) though the earliest recollection of attempting programming would have been a couple of years later. We just couldn’t afford one as a family, but as Dad was a teacher he could bring one home for school holidays and I sure as hell got plenty of use out of it over those two week blocks. I distinctly remember the day the Archimedes A3000s arrived in 1990. No one was talking about RISC architecture or 32 bits to a bunch of 10-11 year olds but the high (!) resolution display, small 3.5” disks, this thing called a ‘mouse’ you had to use it with got us all pretty excited. Lander of course blew us away. As did the HP Inkjet 500 printer attached, the first non dot matrix printer I’d ever seen (oh so quiet in comparison).
It was amazing how long lived these systems were, though perhaps as much a sign of how government schools don’t turn over technology fast enough too. But they were still perfectly useful into my high school years. We were still learning BASIC in 1993 on Model Bs and Master Compacts - wouldn’t be until my final year of Computer Technology that we’d cross over onto 386 systems running MS BASIC. I did almost all of my Technical Drawing classes in Year 10 (1995) using an A410 running AutoSketch driving an A3 Roland Pen Plotter. Really wish I could have that same setup sitting next to my dual-Xeon AutoCAD/Revit workstation for some old-skool cool ;-)
The stickers came with the machine. This was my second computer after my beloved speccy, I upgraded it to 4Mb and used the ram disc to load games blisteringly fast. I still play Starfighter 3000 through emulation sometimes.
You can play starfighter under RiscOS on the Raspberry pi natively.
My first Saturday job was servicing and upgrading Archimedes computers although they’d really moved into the Risc PC series by then. Did have to do a few podule upgrades for hard disks and econet connectors if memory serves me. But very quickly the market evolved into IBM compatibles so that was where it took me.
Glad to find something that has settled that discussion at last!
Oh yes I remember one of these when I was in primary school in 1994! Thanks for video!
Didn’t know it was this good.
I’ve seen it mentioned once in a computer game magazine in the 90s, as the platform for Somer Assault, I think.
My school had the goal of putting a computer in every classroom in 1992 to compliment the two or so machines they already had (one being a Beeb with Granny's Garden and word processing software), so they bought a batch of A3020s. In my class, PacMania was the game to play (probably because everyone was rubbish at Lander and our classroom did not have a copy of Lemmings initially - I believe someone brought in the totally-not-pirated copy from home later). Whenever I played PacMania, I had the keys redefined to use the arrow keys and had them changed back to the weird defaults when I was done because that's what the other kids used. Many memories of mucking about in the draw and paint programs, making tunes in Maestro, the PenDown word processor and watching the teacher try and get the printer driver to work.
At home was a different story - we had two PC's, including an Amstrad PC1512
Wonderful video. As a life-long Amiga fanboy, I'm now scouring eBay for an Archimedes - they got so much right with this. Apart from the battery :D
I had an Acorn Archimedes 3000 at home as my mum was a teacher. There were some excellent games that, to the best of my knowledge, weren't ports. Cataclysm, Apocalypse, Saloon Cars, Stunt Racer 2000. Of course, many other of our favourites were - especially Twinworld and Lemmings.
I vividly remember the first time I wrote an ARM assembly mandelbrot program on the archey at school. That was a fine introduction to the power of RISC.
Lemmings used 3 channel MOD files for the music, I remember ripping them years ago. Seems like a lot of RISC OS games used this format. The Archimedes platform was far ahead of its time.
Had an A5000 at home growing up, was pretty much welded to that thing. Wrote all my homework in Pendown, and later the Fireworkz suite. Favourite games were Saloon Cars Deluxe, Phaethon, and Asylum. Not sure what happened to that machine in the end but really wish I still had it.
Great video! Loved the A3010, it's the machine that made me fall in love with IT, and I've made a living out of IT for the past twenty odd years! My day job is all Windows based, but I still have an A7000 sat here and use it regularly. Oh and of course then there's RISC OS on the Pi, can't wait for a compatible version of RISC OS to come out for the Pi 400 - that will almost be like a modern dat A3010!
Funnily enough ARM is back in the desktop, but now Apple is using it. It is so powerful it’s scary.
I had an Amiga A500 but later on bought an Archimedes A310M - the M suffix just meant it came with a software based PC emulator, still impressive though - before moving on to the A5000 and finally a RiscPC before getting a PC (after Acorn folded.) Pacmania was fantastic on the Arc, definitely one of my favourites but Chocks Away was probably my all time favourite game. What I really liked about the Arc was the built in BBC BASIC and the ability to use it as a productivity machine. The Amiga for me was only ever for gaming but the Arc served more functions for me. I thought your assessment was quite generous to the venerable Acorn machine. I'd still say the Amiga would be my 'desert island' retro computer if I wanted to game. I could live without Chocks Away but I'd have to have Turrican.