I grew up with BBC Micros in primary school and I was instantly hooked to computers. Later in high school we had Archimedes. My mother also worked in the education system and became very fond of the systems too. I remember going to the Wakefield Acorn shows annually back in the 90s and became a huge fanboy of Acorn. I had an A4000 and a flatbed scanner that I used to create artwork for my Punk band back in the late 90s. The machines were incredible! I have such fond memories of those times. Ended up with an Atari ST and then PCs after that, but was always saddened by the demise of Acorn. I remember witnessing the unveiling of the RiscPC2 (Pheobe) which was incredible for the time. Still want one!
I had a A3010 as a kid and loved it. I got a paper round so i could get Zip Drive for the parallel port. I redesigned every sprite and texture of the UI by hand in paint to try and match the marble effect of the Risc PC's. On boot I had to load the driver for the ZIP drive and all the UI retextures. 1 disk was enough for me. 100mb held every bit of software i could muster with space left over. I upgraded it to 2mb.
Being an American, it's endlessly fascinating to learn about the microcomputer boom in the UK, since I didn't get to experience it myself. Especially so when one of those computers I never even heard of growing up turns out to have had such a tremendous impact on all the tech we use today. Thank you for all the great videos!
Still my favourite computer and operating system. There was a desktop environment on Linux called ROX-desktop that was heavily based on RiscOS. But sadly not supported anymore. And Mad Professor Mariarty deserves a remaster!
I had an A3010, I paid for it with a tax rebate I got from my first real job. I eventually upgraded it with 4MB of RAM (Yes there was a third party option for that), a 30MB internal HDD that cost a load of money and an official Acorn monitor. My Amiga owning friends were rather jealous of how fast it ran, but I never admitted that they would have had more games for their machine. 4th Dimension software wrote some amazing games for it, I loved Chocks away. I also had Arc Elite, it took me about 3 years to get the Elite rating. Fantastic and affordable machine. I have a Risc PC (With a StrongARM CPU and Pentium 133) that still works and a Pi running the modern ROL RISC OS.
I miss chunky keyboards in general but the Acorn Archimedes is a joy of design. So big and smooth; green eye-catching keys. I've been looking forward to learning more about this range of British computers as they are often overlooked, despite their persistence on the market. 1:39 - Was Learning Curve an official name or just using a term here? As a follow-up to BBC Micro, Learning Curve works pretty well as a name for a computer (sounds cool whilst still having that educational ring to it). 3:01 - The ARM chip being around since 1986/7 and still being utilised today is insane to think about. 5:38 - I believe I'd heard of the crossover between Sinclair and the Jaguar but never knew there was experience from the Acorn Archimedes there as well. Also, liking the vary on-screen; colourful and smooth visuals delight. 9:03 - Do enjoy the emphasis on a British company with this approach. 10:52 - Cool to hear about the branding and backwards compatibility of the BBC. Gosh though, is it normal to have five different models of the same system at launch though? 13:37 - Again, love the A3000 design. I see the prior point about the other models looking PC like; I've likely confused them with DOS PCs myself before. The A3000 though is unmistakable though. 16:13 - There's certainly a distinctive look to the old laptops of the day. 21:28 - Compared to Sinclair or Commodore, Acorn managed to last a heck of a time competing in the computer market. Strange then that the Acorn series of computers, be it the Electron or Archimedies, tend to get discussed so little compared to them then. A lot of the games shown off in this video were ones I never knew had Archimedies versions.
Yes, The Learning Curve was a name that Acorn used for bundles that included the computer and some third party software. Regarding games: it’s worth noting that where titles were ported to the Archimedes from the Amiga etc., the Archimedes invariably ended up having the best implementation because it was just a better, more powerful and capable computer than its rivals. Plus, it had some great original titles that other systems of the day weren’t powerful enough to run. Zarch and Conqueror (shown at the start - tank on 3D landscape) spring to mind, but there were many others. The Archimedes version of Elite is also widely considered the best ever.
I remember the Archimedes very well. It always felt like the "dream computer" to me - but at a closer look there was always a deal breaker for me (being still in school then). The A310 was much too expensive as a home computer. Then the A3000 appeared and first I thought "that's it" but then it could only be upgraded to 2MB (officially), had no joystick ports and required a pretty expensive monitor (at least that was what I was told), so in the end it was still much too expensive - and too rare. I finally went for the Atari STe which I could upgrade to 4MB easily. The A3010 in 1992 seemed also interesting - but again a limitation of 2MB for RAM. 2MB in 1992. That was a surprise. I was already slightly limited by the 4MB of the ST - so it was a no go for me and anything bigger was again much too expensive. (I know that later there were upgrades to at least 4MB but that was not known to me while I was interested in the A3000 or A3010) Not sure about the other countries in Europe but at least in Germany an even bigger problem was the availability of hard and software - and information. Even in the Munich area there was only a single dealer who offered the Archimedes 310 and A3000. And I am not sure they really had a lot of knowledge. You had to go to their basement to get a look at it. When the A3010 came out I tried to find it but I couldn't find it anywhere. Anyway - I still love to read about the Archimedes or watch a video - and it probably was the dream computer I always imagined - at least if you lived in the UK.
I remember seeing decommissioned RiscPC’s at a Television network I worked for. Years later, I got one myself. Interesting machines I must say. I really like the PC-compatibility compared to other platforms like Amiga.
You mean the ability to add an Intel processor based card/podule to run PC software? You could so that with big box Amigas, too. Software PC emulators also existed for both platforms, albeit limited in what kind of software they could run and how well.
@@little_fluffy_cloudsyes, on an affordable way. 386 or 486SLC cards for Amiga are unobtainable these days. I have a 286 in my big box 2500 and a 386 in my A500. Both were really expensive. I also like the ease of use of DOS partitions on RiscPC’s and of course the faster processor. Mine has a 5x86 which runs pretty well.
We had some of these at school and used to play Xenon 2, Cannon Fodder and Sensible Soccer on them. The Amiga and ST ports were really good, but never played any original games on it.
As an italian, I've never heard of these machines back in the day. Here it was all about C64 and A500 home computers. Very interesting video for my taste, the Archimedes has a very nice design. I really like the notebook especially.
As a teen loosing his pocket money in the 80s, unable to afford an Amiga, knowing the BBC micro, then hearing about the Archimedes, wow, look at the price, "it's bound to be amazing!", 30+ years later due to various factors the cheque book is connected to the reality 😅
I love the scene in that film, we’re sir Clive get offered a threesome by a group of girls and the girl played by the actress from the bbc show doctors! He gets all flustered 😩 😂
Archimedes is a real mixed bag. On the one hand its CPU design was in a lot of ways phenomenal for 1987. On the other hand its video capabilities were pretty meh.
We had an IT teacher who had stacks of clearly copied pirated games for the Acorn Archimedes for when we finished all our work for the lesson. He would also let a certain select group of us come in the classroom on breaks because he would talk to us about gaming stuff and other stuff around computers and consoles. He sadly left in my final year and when they replaced the computers with windows 95 ones. Me and my friends always have such good memories of that time because of him though.
It's a common mistake but the A3000 was not the same as the A3010/A3020. The A3000 was far closer to the earlier machines including the ARM 2 processor (which was upgradable to the ARM 3 but could be a pain due to the processor mount method) while the A3010 and A3020 shared a similar motherboard with the A4000 but were equipped with different peripherals and were the earliest versions of the SoC in the ARM range, namely the ARM 250 which combined all the discrete support chips and the processor on a single piece of silicon, a process that is still very much in use to this day. The A3010 was a games centred machine with the green keys and other decorative bits and pieces while the A3020 was fitted with networking and so forth, had red keys like the A3000 and was marketed for schools. The A4000 used the same motherboard but was a three box solution in the same way as the earlier A300/A400 Archimedes though the box resembled a half height version of the later A5000 which was based around the same motherboard as the sole Acorn RISC OS laptop, the A4 (therefore not quite as rare as you might think!)
I had an Archimedes A3000 in boarding school in fact for the first year they paid me to have it in one of the offices I could go in and use it whenever I want. I managed to convince my parents to get a hard drive for it. Semi external HS 45Mb SCSI hard drive I think it was £350 Which was a bargain half price. As the shop had bought it for another customer that hadn’t turned up to collect it. I did a lot of programming in basic on it and even have an unreleased game I made for my sister. It was a fish game called Fred the fish. Think of a Tamagotchi and you’re part of the way there lots of sampled effects. You even had a submarine to play with him. It had some basic AI. I was very much into neural networks at the time.
When I was 21, I managed to upgrade to a Risc PC. I had wanted one ever since they came out in 1994. The one I got had a 610 arm processor. And a 586 133 MHz cop processor. I wasn’t so bothered about that and managed to convince liquid silicon. (And Acorn shop.) to swap it for strong arm 233 MHz. Had to wait just a little bit to get the extra 33 MHz. It was quite a machine for its time. SimCity 2000 was probably the best game I had for it. But I continued playing round with Acorn basic creating image recognition algorithms flying rockets that used neural networks to control them. No back propagation just genetic algorithms. I also attempted a 3-D game but what really bit me in the ass was how to rotate something in three dimensions. At that stage in my life, I haven’t come across. Dot Product and Matrixes. So as soon as I tried to rotate in more than one direction, things kind of went wrong.
i remember running a network of computer clubs in the 1880s, 1990s etc, so we had amiga, atari st, and the Archimedes. i remember having a discussion about these, and outside of a handful of schools, that even in the early 1990s many still had bbc bs, it was pretty good, compared to the amiga it was competitive, however , there was no real support, and no one knew about it. the price, it was just too expensive. there were only a handful of games, and there wasn't really software. the amiga and st had public domain software, more hackers that did demo music cd discs on floppy and then later in pdcd cds, then dvds. there was some demos etc im not saying there wasnt. the editing was good by what i remember. however by the time rgw risc pc came out it was to late.. there was just not support or games.. i did try and compare it to better british version of a amiga, but no one knew of it, and when try and talking about, even now, 99.9 pc of people think im on about the bbc micro b.. some schools oddly upgrades to the bbc 128, which i thought was odd. shame.. i often more talk about the st and the amiga. maybe i should mention these more often...
I've still got a Acorn A3010 but its one of the rare early models that doesn't have a Arm250 its got all the chips on a daughterboard but because of this I upgraded it to a Arm3 25mhz so its about twice as fast as a normal A3010 and it also has the full 4MB memory upgrade. I was so pleased with it at the time I felt I had the best computer in the world. However its been idle for many years and maybe the motherboard is damaged now by battery leakage. The video seems to confuse the A3000 and A3010 which are different generations of Acorn computers. The A3010 with the green keys is in the same series as the A3020 and A4000 which is basically same performance but slightly different configurations. The A4000 is a pc type configuration with separate keyboard. The A3000 is a 8mhz ARM 2 and the A3010 etc is 12MHZ so a 50% boost plus a slightly better graphics chip I believe.
The A4 was so named, apparently, because its footprint was the same size as a sheet of A4 paper. I can’t verify that as I never owned one myself but I certainly read it.
Being in America, I've never seen an Archimedes in person. I've only ever experienced it through emulation. And unfortunately, the Archimedes doesn't have the best emulators available for it. What I saw looked nice, but then again, my only real interest in emulating it (or really any older system) is running games on it. I had kind of limited success in that department. Everything ran, but I couldn't figure out how to get a joystick to work, and playing with the keyboard wasn't great.
Acorns were overpriced toys. No detachable keyboard, no proper video adapter (they couldn't move past something like original 256k VGA from 1987, by 1991!), no proper OS (they couldn't do POSIX or preemptive multitasking), no 1.44MB floppies, the lack of proper shielded and armored case, no expansibility. Those were hit for couple of years around late '80s, but by 1990 they were profoundly obsolete.
You seem to be misinformed. The A305, A310, A410 and A440 had a separate keyboard and a metal case in 1987, those could take two or four "podules" for expansion. Only the 3000 series had the everything-in-the-keyboard wedge shape, later RISC PC's also had a separate keyboard. Pre-emptive multitasking was rare on home computers from 1987 until 1992: only AmigaOS, OS/2 and BSD had that until Linux and Windows NT entered the scene. Most home computers at the time had no multitasking at all. The R140 in 1989 and R200 in 1990 ran RISC iX (4.3BSD) and was POSIX compliant with pre-emptive multitasking. VGA did 320 × 200 in 256 colours and 640 × 480 in 16 colours or monochrome. Archimedes did 1152 x 896 monochrome and 640 x 512 in 256 colours from the very start in 1987, and had higher colour resolutions in later models.
You've obviously only ever seen the entry-level A3xxx range aimed at the home/school market and (as the fine video says) partly pitched against systems like the Amiga and Atari which had built-in keyboards. There were always higher-end "3 box" solutions with separate keyboards. mostly metal cases and internal expansion slots: A440 (1987) -> A540 (1990) -> A5000 (1991) etc. - the latter having SVGA graphics and 1.44MB floppies (if that's your measure of sophistication). The only "mainstream" personal/home computer system from that period with a "proper" multitasking OS was the Amiga (which *was* an incredible system - but the ARM ran rings around an 68000) - Atari TOS/GEM, MacOS (before MacOS X) and Windows 3/95/98/ME (WIndows NT was an optional, expensive "pro" PC OS until Windows XP took over) were all "collaborative" multi tasking like RiscOS. Archimedes ARM 3 and onwards were quite capable of running a "proper" OS - Acorn actually sold the R260 workstation (an Archimedes A540 running BSD Unix - I was using one to run a web server in the early 90s) - and there was a free NetBSD port (and, later, Linux) for ARM3. Yes, as the 90s set in, *all* the remaining non-PC systems lost out to PCs made from cheap, commodity parts - esp. as GPUs with 3D accelerations and x86 chips with built in FPUs became common. It's a fact of life that the PC killed off every other personal computing platform except Mac (and that only *just* survived the 90s).
Overpriced toys? Reality says otherwise, as it also does about 1.44MB floppies (later models supported 1.6MB), "something like original 256k VGA" (when the actual VIDC limit was double that), and "no expansibility" (expandability might be the word you wanted). Sure, there were deficiencies in the hardware and software architectures which meant that, for instance, Acorn couldn't enter the workstation market with an Archimedes-based system and shift large numbers of units. Don't worry, Apple, Commodore and Atari also failed there. And despite having a chipset capable running a more sophisticated operating system - demonstrated by their own RISC iX - the company relied too heavily on the usability of the RISC OS GUI instead of migrating it to a better underlying platform. But given that the usability was generally superior to any of the Windows product family prior to Windows 95, it was actually a sensible choice for many buyers, undermining the argument that the best preparation for "school leavers" in the early 1990s was to run DOS or Windows 3.x. And to claim that these machines were "profoundly obsolete" by 1990 is just nonsense.
@@koenlefever Of course Unix was a multitasking POSIX system. We are not talking workstations here. 640x480 resolution was not in the earlier machines and had been added in 1990.
I remember how they thought the original ARM CPU was broken because it was measuring that it was using no power at all.
Yeah, I love that story!
I grew up with BBC Micros in primary school and I was instantly hooked to computers. Later in high school we had Archimedes. My mother also worked in the education system and became very fond of the systems too. I remember going to the Wakefield Acorn shows annually back in the 90s and became a huge fanboy of Acorn. I had an A4000 and a flatbed scanner that I used to create artwork for my Punk band back in the late 90s.
The machines were incredible! I have such fond memories of those times. Ended up with an Atari ST and then PCs after that, but was always saddened by the demise of Acorn. I remember witnessing the unveiling of the RiscPC2 (Pheobe) which was incredible for the time. Still want one!
I had a A3010 as a kid and loved it. I got a paper round so i could get Zip Drive for the parallel port.
I redesigned every sprite and texture of the UI by hand in paint to try and match the marble effect of the Risc PC's.
On boot I had to load the driver for the ZIP drive and all the UI retextures. 1 disk was enough for me. 100mb held every bit of software i could muster with space left over.
I upgraded it to 2mb.
Being an American, it's endlessly fascinating to learn about the microcomputer boom in the UK, since I didn't get to experience it myself. Especially so when one of those computers I never even heard of growing up turns out to have had such a tremendous impact on all the tech we use today. Thank you for all the great videos!
Basically: American dominated the media (magazines) ans payed a lot of ads to make people forget non US brands and products.
I live in Brazil and we didn't have access to this computer. I thought it was incredible! Great video!
Well done. Good overview of the computer.
Still my favourite computer and operating system. There was a desktop environment on Linux called ROX-desktop that was heavily based on RiscOS. But sadly not supported anymore.
And Mad Professor Mariarty deserves a remaster!
Puppy linux still uses a ROX -desktop.
Discos existe natively on raspberry pi!
We had one Archimedes in our high school. It was in the Technical Drawing class. On the last day of term we would all play E-Type on it.
I had an A3010, I paid for it with a tax rebate I got from my first real job. I eventually upgraded it with 4MB of RAM (Yes there was a third party option for that), a 30MB internal HDD that cost a load of money and an official Acorn monitor. My Amiga owning friends were rather jealous of how fast it ran, but I never admitted that they would have had more games for their machine.
4th Dimension software wrote some amazing games for it, I loved Chocks away. I also had Arc Elite, it took me about 3 years to get the Elite rating.
Fantastic and affordable machine.
I have a Risc PC (With a StrongARM CPU and Pentium 133) that still works and a Pi running the modern ROL RISC OS.
I bagged an Archimedes A1200 from a car boot sale a while back for £10. It came bundled with a monitor amongst other things. Works absolutely great!
There’s no such thing as an Archimedes A1200. Did you mean Amiga 1200?
There was an Amiga A1200..
The Acorn machines with similar model numbers and all in one wedge shape were A3000, A3010 and A3020.
No such thing! I assume you mean an A3000. If it’s an A1200, it’s an Amiga!
I miss chunky keyboards in general but the Acorn Archimedes is a joy of design. So big and smooth; green eye-catching keys. I've been looking forward to learning more about this range of British computers as they are often overlooked, despite their persistence on the market.
1:39 - Was Learning Curve an official name or just using a term here? As a follow-up to BBC Micro, Learning Curve works pretty well as a name for a computer (sounds cool whilst still having that educational ring to it).
3:01 - The ARM chip being around since 1986/7 and still being utilised today is insane to think about.
5:38 - I believe I'd heard of the crossover between Sinclair and the Jaguar but never knew there was experience from the Acorn Archimedes there as well. Also, liking the vary on-screen; colourful and smooth visuals delight.
9:03 - Do enjoy the emphasis on a British company with this approach.
10:52 - Cool to hear about the branding and backwards compatibility of the BBC. Gosh though, is it normal to have five different models of the same system at launch though?
13:37 - Again, love the A3000 design. I see the prior point about the other models looking PC like; I've likely confused them with DOS PCs myself before. The A3000 though is unmistakable though.
16:13 - There's certainly a distinctive look to the old laptops of the day.
21:28 - Compared to Sinclair or Commodore, Acorn managed to last a heck of a time competing in the computer market. Strange then that the Acorn series of computers, be it the Electron or Archimedies, tend to get discussed so little compared to them then. A lot of the games shown off in this video were ones I never knew had Archimedies versions.
Yes, The Learning Curve was a name that Acorn used for bundles that included the computer and some third party software. Regarding games: it’s worth noting that where titles were ported to the Archimedes from the Amiga etc., the Archimedes invariably ended up having the best implementation because it was just a better, more powerful and capable computer than its rivals. Plus, it had some great original titles that other systems of the day weren’t powerful enough to run. Zarch and Conqueror (shown at the start - tank on 3D landscape) spring to mind, but there were many others. The Archimedes version of Elite is also widely considered the best ever.
I remember the Archimedes very well. It always felt like the "dream computer" to me - but at a closer look there was always a deal breaker for me (being still in school then).
The A310 was much too expensive as a home computer. Then the A3000 appeared and first I thought "that's it" but then it could only be upgraded to 2MB (officially), had no joystick ports and required a pretty expensive monitor (at least that was what I was told), so in the end it was still much too expensive - and too rare. I finally went for the Atari STe which I could upgrade to 4MB easily.
The A3010 in 1992 seemed also interesting - but again a limitation of 2MB for RAM. 2MB in 1992. That was a surprise. I was already slightly limited by the 4MB of the ST - so it was a no go for me and anything bigger was again much too expensive. (I know that later there were upgrades to at least 4MB but that was not known to me while I was interested in the A3000 or A3010)
Not sure about the other countries in Europe but at least in Germany an even bigger problem was the availability of hard and software - and information. Even in the Munich area there was only a single dealer who offered the Archimedes 310 and A3000. And I am not sure they really had a lot of knowledge. You had to go to their basement to get a look at it. When the A3010 came out I tried to find it but I couldn't find it anywhere.
Anyway - I still love to read about the Archimedes or watch a video - and it probably was the dream computer I always imagined - at least if you lived in the UK.
I remember seeing decommissioned RiscPC’s at a Television network I worked for. Years later, I got one myself. Interesting machines I must say. I really like the PC-compatibility compared to other platforms like Amiga.
You mean the ability to add an Intel processor based card/podule to run PC software? You could so that with big box Amigas, too. Software PC emulators also existed for both platforms, albeit limited in what kind of software they could run and how well.
@@little_fluffy_cloudsyes, on an affordable way. 386 or 486SLC cards for Amiga are unobtainable these days. I have a 286 in my big box 2500 and a 386 in my A500. Both were really expensive. I also like the ease of use of DOS partitions on RiscPC’s and of course the faster processor. Mine has a 5x86 which runs pretty well.
Great video as always TLL!
We had some of these at school and used to play Xenon 2, Cannon Fodder and Sensible Soccer on them. The Amiga and ST ports were really good, but never played any original games on it.
As an italian, I've never heard of these machines back in the day. Here it was all about C64 and A500 home computers. Very interesting video for my taste, the Archimedes has a very nice design. I really like the notebook especially.
As a teen loosing his pocket money in the 80s, unable to afford an Amiga, knowing the BBC micro, then hearing about the Archimedes, wow, look at the price, "it's bound to be amazing!", 30+ years later due to various factors the cheque book is connected to the reality 😅
Seems like a very capable system throughout it's lifespan.
Time to rewatch Micro Men.
Such an awesome film!
I love the scene in that film, we’re sir Clive get offered a threesome by a group of girls and the girl played by the actress from the bbc show doctors! He gets all flustered 😩 😂
Archimedes is a real mixed bag. On the one hand its CPU design was in a lot of ways phenomenal for 1987. On the other hand its video capabilities were pretty meh.
We had an IT teacher who had stacks of clearly copied pirated games for the Acorn Archimedes for when we finished all our work for the lesson. He would also let a certain select group of us come in the classroom on breaks because he would talk to us about gaming stuff and other stuff around computers and consoles. He sadly left in my final year and when they replaced the computers with windows 95 ones. Me and my friends always have such good memories of that time because of him though.
What school?
It's a common mistake but the A3000 was not the same as the A3010/A3020. The A3000 was far closer to the earlier machines including the ARM 2 processor (which was upgradable to the ARM 3 but could be a pain due to the processor mount method) while the A3010 and A3020 shared a similar motherboard with the A4000 but were equipped with different peripherals and were the earliest versions of the SoC in the ARM range, namely the ARM 250 which combined all the discrete support chips and the processor on a single piece of silicon, a process that is still very much in use to this day.
The A3010 was a games centred machine with the green keys and other decorative bits and pieces while the A3020 was fitted with networking and so forth, had red keys like the A3000 and was marketed for schools. The A4000 used the same motherboard but was a three box solution in the same way as the earlier A300/A400 Archimedes though the box resembled a half height version of the later A5000 which was based around the same motherboard as the sole Acorn RISC OS laptop, the A4 (therefore not quite as rare as you might think!)
Thanks for clarifying those points!
I had an Archimedes A3000 in boarding school in fact for the first year they paid me to have it in one of the offices I could go in and use it whenever I want. I managed to convince my parents to get a hard drive for it. Semi external HS 45Mb SCSI hard drive I think it was £350 Which was a bargain half price. As the shop had bought it for another customer that hadn’t turned up to collect it. I did a lot of programming in basic on it and even have an unreleased game I made for my sister. It was a fish game called Fred the fish. Think of a Tamagotchi and you’re part of the way there lots of sampled effects. You even had a submarine to play with him. It had some basic AI. I was very much into neural networks at the time.
When I was 21, I managed to upgrade to a Risc PC. I had wanted one ever since they came out in 1994. The one I got had a 610 arm processor. And a 586 133 MHz cop processor. I wasn’t so bothered about that and managed to convince liquid silicon. (And Acorn shop.) to swap it for strong arm 233 MHz. Had to wait just a little bit to get the extra 33 MHz. It was quite a machine for its time. SimCity 2000 was probably the best game I had for it. But I continued playing round with Acorn basic creating image recognition algorithms flying rockets that used neural networks to control them. No back propagation just genetic algorithms. I also attempted a 3-D game but what really bit me in the ass was how to rotate something in three dimensions. At that stage in my life, I haven’t come across. Dot Product and Matrixes. So as soon as I tried to rotate in more than one direction, things kind of went wrong.
We never saw the Archimedes here in Canada that I'm aware of. Interesting.
Apparently it did get some very limited distribution across North America, including Canada, but never took off.
i remember running a network of computer clubs in the 1880s, 1990s etc, so we had amiga, atari st, and the Archimedes.
i remember having a discussion about these, and outside of a handful of schools, that even in the early 1990s many still had bbc bs, it was pretty good, compared to the amiga it was competitive, however , there was no real support, and no one knew about it.
the price, it was just too expensive. there were only a handful of games, and there wasn't really software.
the amiga and st had public domain software, more hackers that did demo music cd discs on floppy and then later in pdcd cds, then dvds. there was some demos etc im not saying there wasnt. the editing was good by what i remember.
however by the time rgw risc pc came out it was to late.. there was just not support or games..
i did try and compare it to better british version of a amiga, but no one knew of it, and when try and talking about, even now, 99.9 pc of people think im on about the bbc micro b.. some schools oddly upgrades to the bbc 128, which i thought was odd.
shame.. i often more talk about the st and the amiga. maybe i should mention these more often...
I didn't think the Acorn version of Wolfenstein 3D had music during the levels.
I've still got a Acorn A3010 but its one of the rare early models that doesn't have a Arm250 its got all the chips on a daughterboard but because of this I upgraded it to a Arm3 25mhz so its about twice as fast as a normal A3010 and it also has the full 4MB memory upgrade. I was so pleased with it at the time I felt I had the best computer in the world. However its been idle for many years and maybe the motherboard is damaged now by battery leakage. The video seems to confuse the A3000 and A3010 which are different generations of Acorn computers. The A3010 with the green keys is in the same series as the A3020 and A4000 which is basically same performance but slightly different configurations. The A4000 is a pc type configuration with separate keyboard. The A3000 is a 8mhz ARM 2 and the A3010 etc is 12MHZ so a 50% boost plus a slightly better graphics chip I believe.
The one thing I will remember from this video...
...THE LEARNING CURVE (DUH DUH DUH).
The A4 was so named, apparently, because its footprint was the same size as a sheet of A4 paper. I can’t verify that as I never owned one myself but I certainly read it.
Ah, that's interesting!
@18:55 Am I crazy or does that sound like the theme for Assault on Precinct 13 but sped up?
It's a sample of 1988's Bomb the Bass track: Megablast (Hip Hop on Precinct 13)
Being in America, I've never seen an Archimedes in person. I've only ever experienced it through emulation. And unfortunately, the Archimedes doesn't have the best emulators available for it.
What I saw looked nice, but then again, my only real interest in emulating it (or really any older system) is running games on it. I had kind of limited success in that department. Everything ran, but I couldn't figure out how to get a joystick to work, and playing with the keyboard wasn't great.
What does it say after "Welcome" in the intro before the music in all your videos? Welcome downloader?
"Welcome STUN Runner" taken from the Atari Lynx port of the famous arcade game.
What song play's at 21.50?
Hopefully Retro Games UK will have something brewing.......
Acorns were overpriced toys. No detachable keyboard, no proper video adapter (they couldn't move past something like original 256k VGA from 1987, by 1991!), no proper OS (they couldn't do POSIX or preemptive multitasking), no 1.44MB floppies, the lack of proper shielded and armored case, no expansibility. Those were hit for couple of years around late '80s, but by 1990 they were profoundly obsolete.
You seem to be misinformed.
The A305, A310, A410 and A440 had a separate keyboard and a metal case in 1987, those could take two or four "podules" for expansion. Only the 3000 series had the everything-in-the-keyboard wedge shape, later RISC PC's also had a separate keyboard.
Pre-emptive multitasking was rare on home computers from 1987 until 1992: only AmigaOS, OS/2 and BSD had that until Linux and Windows NT entered the scene. Most home computers at the time had no multitasking at all. The R140 in 1989 and R200 in 1990 ran RISC iX (4.3BSD) and was POSIX compliant with pre-emptive multitasking.
VGA did 320 × 200 in 256 colours and 640 × 480 in 16 colours or monochrome. Archimedes did 1152 x 896 monochrome and 640 x 512 in 256 colours from the very start in 1987, and had higher colour resolutions in later models.
You've obviously only ever seen the entry-level A3xxx range aimed at the home/school market and (as the fine video says) partly pitched against systems like the Amiga and Atari which had built-in keyboards. There were always higher-end "3 box" solutions with separate keyboards. mostly metal cases and internal expansion slots: A440 (1987) -> A540 (1990) -> A5000 (1991) etc. - the latter having SVGA graphics and 1.44MB floppies (if that's your measure of sophistication).
The only "mainstream" personal/home computer system from that period with a "proper" multitasking OS was the Amiga (which *was* an incredible system - but the ARM ran rings around an 68000) - Atari TOS/GEM, MacOS (before MacOS X) and Windows 3/95/98/ME (WIndows NT was an optional, expensive "pro" PC OS until Windows XP took over) were all "collaborative" multi tasking like RiscOS. Archimedes ARM 3 and onwards were quite capable of running a "proper" OS - Acorn actually sold the R260 workstation (an Archimedes A540 running BSD Unix - I was using one to run a web server in the early 90s) - and there was a free NetBSD port (and, later, Linux) for ARM3.
Yes, as the 90s set in, *all* the remaining non-PC systems lost out to PCs made from cheap, commodity parts - esp. as GPUs with 3D accelerations and x86 chips with built in FPUs became common. It's a fact of life that the PC killed off every other personal computing platform except Mac (and that only *just* survived the 90s).
Overpriced toys? Reality says otherwise, as it also does about 1.44MB floppies (later models supported 1.6MB), "something like original 256k VGA" (when the actual VIDC limit was double that), and "no expansibility" (expandability might be the word you wanted).
Sure, there were deficiencies in the hardware and software architectures which meant that, for instance, Acorn couldn't enter the workstation market with an Archimedes-based system and shift large numbers of units. Don't worry, Apple, Commodore and Atari also failed there. And despite having a chipset capable running a more sophisticated operating system - demonstrated by their own RISC iX - the company relied too heavily on the usability of the RISC OS GUI instead of migrating it to a better underlying platform.
But given that the usability was generally superior to any of the Windows product family prior to Windows 95, it was actually a sensible choice for many buyers, undermining the argument that the best preparation for "school leavers" in the early 1990s was to run DOS or Windows 3.x. And to claim that these machines were "profoundly obsolete" by 1990 is just nonsense.
I literally show the PC like Archimedes computers in the video too and talk about how they went from them to the slimline A3000!
@@koenlefever Of course Unix was a multitasking POSIX system. We are not talking workstations here.
640x480 resolution was not in the earlier machines and had been added in 1990.