Acorn Archimedes

[ninelivecat]

I had forgotten about this late 80's British machine.Did it really have a faster processor than the Commodore Amiga ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-gZsa7D ... re=related

[Novaload]

I believe the ARM CPU in the Archimedes was significantly faster than the MC68000 (and maybe even 68020) but I think that the custom hardware of the Amiga still made it a more powerful package overall. Still, the Archimedes was a cool machine for the time.

[ninelivecat]

I believe the ARM CPU in the Archimedes was significantly faster than the MC68000 (and maybe even 68020) but I think that the custom hardware of the Amiga still made it a more powerful package overall. Still, the Archimedes was a cool machine for the time.

Plus it had more limited software support than the Amiga which would have mean't less games and prob more expensive.

[DanSolo]

The only way to play Elite apparently, but I never got ArcEm to run it.

[thecellartroll]

I had this very model of Acorn. They dropped the Archimedes name when they released the A5000, A4000, A3020 and A3010 (the one pictured). These days I have a RiscPC but the original Archimedes machines were the jewel in Acorn's crown.

That was when Acorn were innovators. By the time the RPC came into being their insistance on only using hardware that they had invented themselves meant they were playing a (losing) game of catchup.

Acorn got tied to education very early on and reliance on that market lead to their doom. Towards the end schools realised that no-one in business was using machines like the ones they had and started to buy Macs and PCs. Around the same time computing studies in the UK (Acorn's main market) was moving more and more towards tuition in Microsoft Office. Because they had their toes in no other market the end was guaranteed.

The A3010 pictures was a direct competitior to the Amiga 1200, but it failed pretty badly. I believe it was originally priced at £400 and I bought mine brand new shortly after release for £199. It was never going to make it into the home market with crappy advertising aimed at education obsessed parents instead of at kids themselves. There were very few available games and most were direct Amiga conversions.

Those who didn't get an Acorn are missing out on the proper version of Starfighter 3000 and the most awesome version of Elite.

Risc OS is a much nicer operating system than Workbench but without the software that home users are interested in (read: Games) the A3010 was bound to fail.

Still, I wouldn't mind having my one back again!

[Macc]

I'd have one for Elite alone!

[ninelivecat]

I like the Acorn family of computers.Nice looking machines too.

[ninelivecat]

The only way to play Elite apparently, but I never got ArcEm to run it.

Do you remember Murphy's Micro Quiz-m ? I remember they used BBC Micro computers on that well loved TV show. It was on Sunday night and I used to be cramming my homework for Monday morning .

[DanSolo]

Do you remember Murphy's Micro Quiz-m ? I remember they used BBC Micro computers on that well loved TV show. It was on Sunday night and I used to be cramming my homework for Monday morning .

I sure do. I was always like WOW!!! What AMAZING GRAPHICS!!!
Then they'd win 50 quid or something. And a tenner for some random TV license owner. As usual with RTE 99% of the budget went to the massively overpaid presenter.

[vimfuego]

They seemed like a great computer, a couple of these sold on Ebay Aus recently for about $200, they seem much cheaper in the UK though.

[Rekrul]

The only way to play Elite apparently, but I never got ArcEm to run it.

If I remember correctly, I think I got it running on Red Squirrel, but had control issues. Probably due more to my being unfamiliar with the machine and the emulator than an actual problem though. I think I couldn't figure out how to turn "damping" on, so when turning, you had to manually center the controls or it just kept going. I was bouncing all over the place.

[NorthWay]

IIRC it was clocked at 8MHz with a rather expressive(read: compact) RISC instruction set. RAM access was the biggest drag for it I believe. Really needed a cache.
The 68000 OTOH was made around accessing RAM every 4th(?) cycle. Even the 68020 was too fast for the RAM of its day and relied on caching.

[sack]

Sorry for the thread necromancy - I only just noticed this

the ARM 250 in the A3010 was clocked at 12MHz, same as the 68020 in the A1200 but being ARM i think it performed better on a per-clockcycle basis and features such as conditional execution of all instructions meant that you could keep the code density up and didn't lose time branching over 1 or 2 instructions you wanted to execute conditionally.

It had 8 channel stereo sound with software configurable positioning but there was no hardware assistance, so although you didn't have to manually mix the channels you did need to fill samplebuffers manually which was a little slow. This combined with the fact a lot of music was ported from the Amiga meant that usually only 4 channels were used anyway.

The graphics also had their pros and cons compared to an Amiga - the chunky modes meant that 3D rendering was faster, but in 2D you still had to do the work that would be delegated to the blitter, and it had no fine scrolling, which would be a hassle in a 16 colour mode (although it was fine in 256 colours).

It did have a decent enough memory controller though, so theoretically could do proper preemptive multitasking, although RISC OS was only cooperative. In that respect the Acorn had the hardware, but workarounds not withstanding the Amiga exec did a nicer job. It was a shock moving to Amiga coding and seeing how much work was involved in playign nice with the OS though - with RISC OS you just forget the OS and it just works.

I liked the A3010, but my bro had an A1200, so there wasn't really much need for jealousy