Acorn Archimedes A3010 System Review & RISC Explained | Nostalgia Nerd

From the BBC Micro to the Acorn Archimedes. This is a full system review of the Acorn A3010, from the Archimedes range. Including a history of the Archimedes computers, an explanation of RISC, a look at RISC OS, some discussion on the ARM chip and of course, some classic Gameplay action on the machine Acorn penned specifically for the home computing & gaming market. Enjoy! Find the Blog post version of this review @ www.nostalgiane...
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[@ScoopDogg]

So lucky to have grown up in the 80's and lucky enough to have a BBC B bought to help me get over my dads death (im sure that's the reason as we were poor) aint joking very poor (could never afford an Archimedes, but my god did I want one badly) Its not till years later I truly appreciate what my mum did that day, love n miss you mum RIP both of you GREAT VIDEO Nostalgia Nerd thankyou

[@valerfor8361]

A fantastic computer that never got the recognition it deserved.

[@rogerwinter1563]

bit overpriced

[@Art-is-craft]

@@rogerwinter1563 Nothing to do with being overpriced. They just did not have a model early enough or at the right price to compete with the other computers. If they had something in about 1988 that was on par with the other budget systems they would have sold. Acorns 3010 was far more powerful that the other competitors but far too late to market.

[@_Stin_]

This was the first computer I bought for myself. I loved it. I still have a Risc PC 600 and an A7000 somewhere :) Good times :D

[@RalphBromleyMadmanRB]

Its really funny how much the world owes these computers right now especially thanks to ARM. its also really funny how influential RISC OS was as well, perhaps even despite its failure Acorn is more influential to our modern world than IBM was.

[@pdjames1729]

This synopsis is phenomenal. I'm a total ass about these things and often very critical - this is world class work. Not joking xx The best ARM pocket history on the internet. Full Stop :D - Thank You > #Pear

[@pdjames1729]

check out Lukes comment too

[@guywilkinson]

I'll never forget how awesome my A305 was. I later upgraded it to 4MB and used it to run my business. I wrote most of the applications for it too. Easy to program and blindingly quick.....oh the joy of computing at that time....🤩

[@SelfIndulgentGamer]

I've never been lucky enough to have seen or used one of these. I do remember being impressed by the adverts at the time, even as an amiga owner, I still wanted one :)

[@MrChiel78]

Remember I was reading the acorn magazines back in the 90s, it looked even more awesome than my Amiga. I was jealous looking at the graphics it could produce and wished it became widely available in the Netherlands .

[@MajesticWhitetiger]

I had and still have a A3010 with the Red Keys .... I still love it too ... awesome games and so easy to use!!! I will never forget it

[@nuttyjawa]

My cousins had one and it got me into computing when I was very young, found memories of the paint program and being blown away as a kid at the starfighter game. Have been working in IT for 15 years because of it :)

[@markhayleybeadon]

Never new about it. I was an amiga head. Glad to meet u acorn/risc you are awesome! Hello from Australia

[@petertr2000]

I spent almost my entire last year in primary school (uk - up to age 11 ish) in 1992 teaching the rest of the school how to use computers on an A3000. Happy times.

[@Polysixchick]

we had 3 of these at middle school, loved playing Lemmings on them at lunchtime, we got them around 1992 ish with Tesco Computers for Schools vouchers

[@DailyCorvid]

I saw one of these when I was wee, in school and was like WOWOOW when I played lander! Jesus God I would have LOVED to own one of these.

[@liamoconnor7423]

I've been watching a load of these lately, I have a CPC464 in my room and used to own an Atari ST as a child which got lost when my dad was moving, I got a few Spectrums lying around but unfortunately they were damaged by damp along the lines. It's pretty interesting to see where computing started, and how things developed over the years though, thanks for these videos, they're an absolute gem!

[@outtheredude]

The A3010 was the first computer I ever brought after leaving home, back in 2002 off eBay. Loved fiddling around with BBC BASIC on it.

[@danwood_uk]

Fantastic video mate, and drool-worthy machine! Always liked the Archie and RiscOS, the 3010 was my favourite model too. Had a couple at school, they seem hard to find these days though.

[@Nostalgianerd]

+Dan Wood - kookytech.net Thanks! Yeah, it's a beast. I think you should take a look at one in a similar vein to your Atari ST vid

[@bobl.1044]

I still have mine! Upgraded the CPU to an ARM 3 setup - twice as fast with an internal cache and more RAM. Took a guy with surface mount skills to do it. One problem with the A3010 was that ArcElite had a tendency to freeze up when a certain kind of ship was in your vicinity. Read that fitting a HD would fix that, but in those days hard drives were ridiculously expensive, so never got one. Maybe one of these days I'll dig her out, fire her up and play. She's a lovely machine.

[@Zerbey]

They pop up on eBay very occasionally, but they are expensive and usually not in working order. Get yourself a Pi and run open RISC OS.

[@GRBtutorials]

And nowadays, 21 years after Acorn disappeared, ARM CPUs are finally coming back to the desktop... at least in Macs, but I'd expect other manufacturers to follow suit promptly.

[@TonkarzOfSolSystem]

Recent strides towards x64 compatibility are making this more likely every day.

[@Claro1993]

Also, the world's fastest supercomputer yet (as of 2020) is ARM-based.

[@TonkarzOfSolSystem]

@@Claro1993 Not a desktop though.

[@ChilliJonCarne]

Canon Fodder is one of my all time fav games. Love it

[@Ingens_Scherz]

My school bought one of the first RISC Archimedes back in the day. We were in total awe of it, but the thought never entered our heads to buy one for home computing. By 1988, all any of us wanted was to upgrade to our CPC 6128s and the like to an Amiga.

[@glitchwalker5422]

It blew my mind the first time I learned Acorn created the ARM chips in most phones... It seems as though ultimately my primary school was ahead of the curve by being full of Acorn computers ;) Shame they very rarely let us on them.

[@user-yv2cz8oj1k]

Gone but not forgotten... as Raspberry Pi can run a RISC OS port. And that's running how much more memory and clock speeds?

[@Matty112uk]

I left secondary school in the summer of 94 and I remember we only had about two or Archimedes machines. Sadly, I never got to use one before I left. Most of our schools computers were still the old BBC machines, by which time were positively archaic! Great video!

[@benclapp6100]

4:00 - you just hit me right in the nostalgia - that screen sums up much of my childhood. my middle school's (1992-1996) computer room was still full of Archimedes. I think we all spent far too long playing on the paint program or 'Lander' :)

[@MagicFerret69]

I used one of these at school while everyone else was on a BBC . I loved this system. Fast reliable and as you mention easy to get around

[@MaximumRD]

I found this platform to be very interesting. Something I would have loved to experience first hand.

[@andreacau7541]

This PC would have deserved more attention from the public of its time

[@obsoletegeek]

Man, I want one

[@pdjames1729]

have a look on Lukes comment - I don't wanna spam

[@pdjames1729]

that 3010 is the classic SOC collectors machine too. It's the first ever production computer with a System on Chip.. memc cpu vidc and io are all on the one die :) these were four different chips, in pqfp packets with legs on :D in an original 300 or 400 Archimedes xx also why it destroys the arm2 8mhz machines, even at the same clock speeds. ridiculous though it sounds, the bits are closer - it matters a lot -lol

[@TheSulross]

Funny thing is, you can easily and affordably get something that's pretty comparable - and you don't have to jump on eBay to hunt for it. The RISC OS has been open-sourced and is still being maintained. And hence there is a port of RISC OS to the Raspberry Pi - which uses an ARM CPU, of course. And the Pi, as small a little thing as it is, has specs that far exceed these Acorn machines of the late 80s, early 90s. Get a Pi and go to the OS download page at the Pi website, scroll to the bottom - will see link for RISC OS. Once you hook display, keyboard, mouse, power supply to the Pi, install the SD card to boot from, you'll be put into a retro nirvana experience. And bonus is that the BBC BASIC that is part of this RISC OS install is way, way better than Microsoft BASIC. It had a faster, more performant implementation (when running on the same hardware footprint) and it offers a better, more structured programming dialect of the language (and has a very note worthy woman computer scientist that was responsible for bringing about the BBC BASIC that people know and use). And the RISC OS provides a code editing experience for BASIC programming that is much better than, say, the Commodore 64K kind of BASIC programming experience. This is an entirely authentic pathway to becoming a retro computing experiencer and not just a passive observer. There are really no excuses for not diving in. You can't buy a board today that natively runs classic Mac OS or Amiga or Atari. (There are attempts to recreate these in FPGA implementations, but they're not fully there yet and the boards are costing $300 to $400 for such efforts.) For less than $40 one can get a Raspberry Pi and run the RISC OS and step back into that golden age of micros of the heady 80s, early 90s.

[@respectforkurt944]

I remember the acorn at school in 1987 when I was nine- great machines. The BBC micro in 1983 when I started school, just awesome. Great machines. I'd advise getting the one with the first inbuilt hard disk, whatever one that was probably the A4000 (someone correct me if im wrong on that, my family had the Archimedes at home too, but we had if memory serves an external hard disk that was the size of a breeze block lol!) which like the mac was significantly faster than pcs of the era because of that risc chip....and remember the O.S on Acorns was all in Rom. Just very very fast computers of the day.

[@CesareVesdani]

I love the nostalgia that Acorn Archimedes computers had.

[@jameshilder4366]

Wow, brings back school memories, but stunned you created this entire video with mentioning the ‘funky demo’

[@dave4shmups]

I love how you can start programming in BBC Basic, right underneath the desktop! That’s cool! Unfortunately we never got these computers here in America.

[@kelv7574]

It was super handy, and you could also use it to compile ARM assembly code into binaries e.g. absolute (like .exe) or relocatable modules (think of plug in OS extensions allowing you to add new commands e.g. like play a Soundtracker music module from anywhere with *play, provide new filesystem support, etc). There's so much more (the consistent !app structure for building riscos desktop programs, etc). If you can find digital copies somewhere, the RISCOS PRMs and Dabhand Guides Archimedes Assembly Language are awesome and tell you everything you could ever want to know.

[@bantymcgee977]

Way, way ahead of its time on many fronts. Even the BASIC on this was incredibly fast.

[@Dysphoricsmile]

I wish you would have compared Elite with the current PC port of the game, I have only ever played it on DOS Box, even though I was gaming on a top of the line Zeos 486DX2 in 1991 - my dad bought it for "the family" (basically he KNEW he wanted, and figured me and my brother would quickly fall in love with it - which we did! But obviously, my mom almost never touched it, apart from Solitare!) I knew how to run DOS at nearly a professional level by late 1992, my favorite games in the early days were the likes of Wing Commander 2, Savage Empire, Commanche64 - and many others, some very popular like Lemmimgs, some all but unknown at the time. Never got into Elite though at the time - even though I jad a PC capable of full 3D at 640x480 to 800x600 and eventually even 1024x768 and above by the time games like Quake were around - my dad went through upgrades like CRAZY at the time - I don't even remenber all the different video and sound cards we got in the early days, though in 1992/3 I DO remember the first video card upgrade, he bought it to play full 3D flight sims at the best available performance, it was an 8 MB Diamomd Edge 3D accelerator, which IIRC had to be plugged into the 2 MB "2D" based video card, but it may have replaced it... Because even the video card and sound card and even the 350 MB HDD our Zeos brand FULL Tower 486DX2 top-of-the-line were all top notch, as they should be, since my dad did spend something approaching $5000 - I KNOW it cost no less than $3000! Anyway within 2 or 3 years (I forget exactly) we had upgraded the entire motherboard for a Pentium 133 which of course, was top of the line when dad bought it, I actually think it was a Pentium PRO possibly... And then the VooDoo3 right after the TNT, eventually I was playing games like Hexen at 1024x768 at around 60 FPS with video settings maxed out! THIS is why the N64 and PS1 were the LAST consoles we ever owned! Going from my family's PC to the N64 to play Hexen was TORTURE! As were those AWFUL CONTROLLERS! To the point where I NEVER played it on N64, Unless we had 4 people on split screen which made it great for hanging out. Of course since my whole family are PC people, we had LAN parties, and I LOVED THEM! Hexen on N64 was absolutley TERRIBLE! Much lower frame rate, resolution, constant hitching - and this was something like 2+ YEARS after it came out on PC, and I was already playing at MUCH better quality in every conceivable way! To me, looking back on all this COMPUTING HISTORY - it is nothing short of AMAZING! Almost miraculous- to think that RIGHT NOW - on my lap sits a Tablet with a 64 bit Quad core ARM V8 CPU - with a tiny Adreno GPU - that can EASILY blow away even PC games from just 6 or so years ago, and compared with my first PC ever, that nearly $5000 Zeos 486 - this tablet is LIGHT YEARS MORE POWERFUL IN EVERY WAY! And it even has a TINY 256 GB Micro SDXC- that is the size of the tip of my pinky, and it holds THOUSANDS of times more data than every single BIT of memory combined from my Zeos, Hell the 3 GB of RAM in said tablet is still hundreds of times more! And it is ALL BASED OFF OF ACORN ARCHIMEDES ARM TECHNOLOGY! Combined with Google's Linux based Android OS, it is SURPRISINGLY powerful in every way! 3D games run amazingly well and never fail to surprise me with how good they look compared with my INCREDIBLY powerful X86-64 desktop! ARM technology is really amazing!

[@pdjames1729]

it's insanely great :) not the gfx, they are fine. Tidy Classy and Fast - but the on screen buttons - so no function keys (yay - stupid but it's why the Nintendo port is so good xx) Other ships fight between themselves - often completely ignoring you. You are in a Live universe. and.... Police... omg the f---&& police. Fly in formations - dominoes and shoot as one. It should have been open world - god if they had... we would have had ARM everything (our current state of being ;o) 10 years earlier

[@channex8179]

Brings back memories of playing fireball II at school. I actually found one of these in a Mini Skip about 10 years ago but could not find any software for it so chucked it out! Wish I had kept it now 😢

[@EskeAndersen]

Your videos are getting better and better.

[@Sinn0100]

Aaah, love the 386 advertisement! My first computer was a 486DX2 I built for Doom. This was in the very end of 1994 and the Pentium machines looming over the horizon.

[@ElektrONEloQ]

RiscPC owner since the release here too. 😎

[@ichrismoku]

used to play Chuck rock and lemmings on my old acorn with my dad as a kid.good times. it really surprises me how ahead of the curve it's graphics and audio were compared to its competitors at the time.

[@damianjblack]

I spent my last two years at school using an A5000. Miss that rig. Talking PenDown was so much fun when you were 14. ;-)

[@ChallengeTheNarrative]

I remember using this at school. Great computer. So diverse in what is could do.

[@Zerbey]

The Acorn line of computers is the reason I have an IT career today. Both the BBC Micro and the Archimedes range were incredibly well spec'd machines for their time, the Archimedes in particular easily beat the Amiga and Atari ST for raw power. I begged my parents for an A3010 but they couldn't afford it :( Nowadays I can relive my childhood by running RISC OS on a Raspberry Pi, and all of the old software runs perfectly still.

[@alastairward2774]

I remember Lander and Pacmania so well from school, lucky friend whose Mum could take one home from her school.

[@simonsunnyboy]

I always wanted to have one. As too late too ambitious, they were scarce here in Germany as well. We had an A3000 without red keys but 2MB upgrade, RISC OS 3.11 and serial port upgrade. A stunning machine, definitly beating the crap out of any Amiga 500 or our own Atari 520STM. But alas noone else had one. I personally would have liked the A3010 for the TV output and joystick ports.

[@TheAkashicTraveller]

"Learn computing and programming in school" and then after 2000 they decided fuck that shit Microsoft Office lessons only.

[@presidentkiller]

I didn't know the ARM processor existed before PDA's, and now it's present in almost every piece of hardware that isn't a PC. I guess Commodore and Atari can just dream of having a legacy like that.

[@crpgdev]

Good review. Used one in my last couple of years at school. Never realised some of those games came out for it.

[@franksommer8151]

Didn´t know, that ARM came from acorn... Anyway, no RISC, no fun ;-)

[@estherc317]

Just discovered your channel and this is amazing, thank you. I have the Special Edition Monstrosity version of this :-) and have so many good memories attached to it.

[@richjohn76]

We had the early archimedes machines at highschool, impressive at the time, but straight home for A500 Amiga Gaming everynight!

[@SteveM000100]

4:35 - The fancy Watford Electronics building! (In Luton)

[@phar2010]

I remember visiting WE when it was located on Lower High Street Watford.

[@cruxinc]

i have an a420/1 and i bloody love it.

[@davidknight247]

I recall that there is an Easter egg in the rom. Some text which from memory says something like "help, I am trapped in this factory" or something similar. Can't remember if it was in all roms or just certain versions. My brother had an A300 and I had an A3010 so it was probably one of those.

[@davidknight247]

A3000

[@davidknight247]

"Help, I'm being held captive in a sofrware factory" according to the interwebs

[@Nostalgianerd]

+David Knight That's pretty cool

[@vlogan79]

I had an Acorn A3010, still miss it. I bought Dune 2 for the A3010, which came on 8 x 800kb floppy discs - a massive amount of disc swapping required to play it. I transferred it to 4 x 1600kb discs, but even that was frustrating. So I finally persuaded my folks to get a hard drive - 120Mb for £120. Loved it. Wrote a lot of code in BBC BASIC (the best BASIC, obviously). Even bought a C++ compiler, I think called EasyC++. I miss that machine - held on to the hard drive for years, but I think it's gone now.

[@Missfredawallace]

Sophie Wilson! what a genius. I love her. x

[@cleminan]

8:42 The A5000 (1991) was developed from the Acorn A4 (1992) laptop project, The A300/A400 series were ageing and they needed to pay the bills. The A30x0/A4000 machines were cut down versions to sell to the Sub-£1500 market Acorn was very bad at targeting.

[@Gattancha]

The A3000 is what I regard as my first computer. My school had 2 Labs of them (so around 60) as well as 1 lab of Beeb's. All connected together via the Econet network stack and a version of BASIC I've never come across since - COMAL! It is this computer that really got me started with computing - as well as the C64 and Spectrum 48K we had at home... Up until we got hold of a Packard Bell PC running Windows 95 in order to to play "Discworld".. I recall being taken to PC World because I "knew about computers" - I had never even heard of Microsoft at this point, but within a month I knew Windows 95 and DOS like the back of my hand!

[@Wol747]

Nostalgia indeed! The brief shot of Watford Electronics reminded of leaving my wife shopping while I bought my second Archie - I knew she wouldn’t approve..... You didn’t mention the A3 laptop which I used when travelling to write complex BASIC programs. Acorn RISC and the Arc series were way ahead of what was coming out of the States at that time - and putting the whole OS into ROM (wasn’t it just 2 Mb, including games, paint, vector graphics programs, word processor etc?) made it impossible to hack at the OS level. And the 3 button mouse made it so intuitive. 32 bit, too - for some time during which IBM and Microsoft were wondering whether to go to 16 bits or stay with 8 bits. Look at the coding now on Windows - Gigabytes of sloppy and buggy code which eats up chunks of memory and requires hours of updating every week.

[@TheEulerID]

The other thing that is often not mentioned is that scalable fonts were built into the operating system along with anti-aliasing (albeit that only worked properly with a white background). Also, not unconnected, was the built in support for vector graphics. The release of RISC OS 3 and proper outline font support was roughly at the same time as Apple released TrueType in Mac System 7 in 1991. Vector graphics was very much at the heart of the graphics rendering in RISC OS and the way that graphics objects could be dropped and scaled into documents was a revelation for somebody using a contemporary Windows machine. At the time Microsoft were in the era of bit-mapped fonts only, and they only introduced scalable fonts with Windows 3.1, which was not something found on most desktops. It took multiple Windows iterations for MS to get that one "normal" desktops. The one big problem with RISC OS scalable fonts was printing. If you didn't have a (very expensive) Postscript laser printer, then it was laboriously slow bit map printing to render documents. Of course, you needed a Postscript printer for Macs too, but they sold into a different market. The Windows world and printing was also a major pain in the early 1990s where what came out of a printer was mangled by the substitution of resident fonts.

[@Neffers_UK]

I remember towards leaving high school they got a few of the A3010's in to replace some of the swathes of A3000's in the "I.T. Room" - a place no class ever seemed to use strangely. I thought they were gorgeous. It was like going from looking at an ST to a Falcon or from an A500 to an A1200. All lovely looking computers in their own right, but that next level of shiny really caught my eye. Sadly I never got chance to use the Acorns that much. It was almost like when the "first school" I was at had a BBC Master to share between the whole school, rolling in with the CUB monitor on a bespoke over engineered trolley, nobody got to use it for a decent length of time.

[@silfortytypex]

Great video on a system that we never got in the USA. Keep up he awesome videos I love your work!

[@AmbersKnight]

Just a thought on the name. Whilst its probably true that it is named after the great scientist, Archimedes was also the name of Merlin's owl. This would also seem in line with calling the operating system Arthur as I know some did.

[@Archimedes75009]

It is named after the Greek mathematician as Acorn stated in the official presentation of the machine (video is on YT).

[@greekretrogamer4355]

A500 dominated AtariSt and Archimedes !!! But as I remember, Archimedes at that time was a very expensive and powerful machine ( workstation they said )

[@WelshMullet]

I think I had one of the desktop style ones of these in primary school. We had lessons on how to use what I think was one of the later RISC OS's. This would have been in about 2000. Was very weird when my family already had a Windows PC at home! The next year the acorn per classroom was replaced with a "computer lab" of about 15 Windows PCs as part of a hardware refresh across the whole county area.

[@gdm413229]

Don't forget the fact that the Motorola 68000 CPUs are used in early Macs as well as Amigas and Atari ST's.

[@KuraIthys]

Not to mention the Sega Mega Drive and Neo Geo... When you look at the early home computers and consoles, until we get into the era where 3d games start to become common, you see the intel X86 family off by itself... The closely related Zilog Z80 and clones. (surprisingly similar in several ways to the X86) The 6502 and derivatives such as the 68c816 (Seen in the Apple II, C64, NES, Snes and a bunch of other systems) And of course the motorola 68000 and it's close relatives...

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Yeah, it was all Zilog Z-80, MOS 6502 and Motorola 68k for a long time. IBM POWER and PowerPC had little share in the home market but stayed mainly in the server and large computing realm, even after x86 came along. Which btw are RISC internally since atleast 1993.

[@DJKav]

Most of the 80's arcade machine game boards we're powered by Motorola 68k and Zilog z80 daughter boards.

[@Pervypriest]

Intel and AMD make cisc processors Even today as the x86 architecture is orginated from a Cisc design..

[@threebrothers8196]

This was my first computer back in the day, had good times playing great games such as Wolfenstein, Chocks Away and Stunt Racer 2000, to name a few. It's a shame they didn't bring in great game designers to utilize the hardware, could of been a classic.

[@gamepad3173]

that's quite the though I never heard of Risc OS until now. though the Arm Processor does live in in Single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi.

[@Hebrew42Day]

Now ARM is poised to take back market share in the desktop market and definitely low to mid range laptops. Rumor has it all macs in the future will be running the ARM architecture.

[@JanuszKrysztofiak]

The other point of RISC was a reduction of addressing modes to a "load-store" model to save on transistor budget: load data into one of many registers, operate on it there and store the final result. Whereas a model CISC would do otherwise: provide each data instruction with a full set of various addressing models (especially direct/indirect memory addressing). As a consequence, CISCs tended to have fewer data registers. The CISC/RISC distinction is rather blurred these days, with CPUs operating internally on hidden microcode, not the 'official' instruction set directly. One should add that a CISCy instruction set may have some advantages too: it is easier for humans to write and more logic can be stuffed into the CPU cache.

[@smittenthekitteninmittens2679]

in my primary school we had bbc micros and then in secondary school we had acorns..Nostalgia indeed!!!

[@clearnitesky]

I had one of these. The one with the stickers!! I was still using it up until about 2000 when I bought my first PC. Unfortunately the ROM has gotten messed up in storage and it no longer boots. Otherwise I'd probably still use it for something. Writing or whatever... You're right that the keyboard was solid. :)

[@oktup]

"...a now infamous microprocessor". What makes it infamous?

[@CasualCommodore]

Wow, never connected ARM to Acorn. Interesting! :)

[@pdjames1729]

check our their servers xx they are Half the price per bang on Amazon cloud hosting - right now :D I'm buying shares like no tmrw xx

[@TheJamieRamone]

Oh my! That's the new central city planning computer for the city of Newton and most of Eurofed, correct? Oh my, yes!

[@StangerStrange]

You have yourself a new subscriber, your channel is superb.

[@alanmonaghan3657]

wow i remember all these games from school man, couldn't remember what system it was on, just "the computer" in school, these went a long way to making me become a game developer, i even remember the teddy dress up game lol

[@SylvesterAshcroft88]

That was pretty good value at the time, my first pc was a windows 95 ibm pc, although i did have a vtech educational laptop before that, this is really cool for such an old machine!

[@EdmundKempersDartboard]

"Risc architecture is going to change everything." "Yeah, risc is good."

[@VolJoe]

I had no idea about this machine. The only thing you left out about ARM is that a Risc processor sits at the heart of every single x86 chip produces since -06. And given they built instruction set conversion into hardware (millions of transisters) it's the reason x86 can't compete in the mobile market today.

[@brandon9271]

Wow.. I was born in 1979 and I've NEVER heard of Acorn! Very interesting! Wish we'd had these instead of crappy Apple IIe

[@MrQuijibo]

So weird to see someone in 2017 review a system i got for school almost 20 years ago and was junked as obsolete maybe 17 years ago.

[@Bakamoichigei]

12:09 Dang, Elite does look _pretty frickin' sweet_ on the Archimedes. 😄 Heh, I was in Lave just the other day, swapping out some parts on my Krait before heading back to the Pleiades...

[@jakehepworth8938]

8:36 - what was the name of that early learning program displayed on the 3020? It was the first game I ever played and cannot remember what it's called, nor can I find it anywhere on the web.

[@synesthesiaamethyst6207]

Yuzo Koshiro's 1980's PC of choice for music composition...

[@retrogenius8397]

The A3010, the one most likely to be purchased as an alternative to the Amiga 1200, had a CPU about the speed of a 20mhz 020 (or 030 as they are pretty much the same thing for general computation speed) but it had only 1mb of RAM which is quite restrictive when you consider the space taken by 256 color bitmaps. The video output on a regular TV from an Archimedes has a border just like the Atari ST and Amstrad CPC unlike the Amiga which is full screen (except where 320x200 mode is used for games when they are running on a 320x256 resolution PAL screen of course) and finally converting the source code from 68020 of Amiga AGA/CD32 to ARM is not going to work well. So games like Pacmania and Lotus II instead of being the best versions fall somewhere between the ST and Amiga versions. Saloon Car racing is probably the best comparison for raw speed given F1GP by Microprose was never converted to the Archimedes. It is a fine machine but it just does things a little different than the 1985 Amiga 1000 as it has nothing like the power of the 2D assisted custom chips found in that machine. The lack of high quality software specifically written around the Archimedes unlike Shadow of the Beast 1 which was 100% designed around the Amiga 1000 (and hence A500) chipset. I really like the machine but ultimately without the best of the best being converted in the best possible way to the Archimedes it would be doomed to failure. As a creative machine it didn't have Deluxe Paint and Animation series or anything like it and midi packages were covered perfectly by a stock ST. The best thing Acorn could have done is written a software based PC x86 emulator into the OS to counter PC sales around the mid 90s when the only choice left for purchasers was single task OS Mac or putrid Windows (the OS for chumps and toilet cleaners). A great machine that never ever got their own spiritual development of things like the Amiga OCS focused Shadow of the Beast 1 or Lotus II (which uses the CPU and blitter time available to within a millisecond to achieve those arcade quality results in speed and animation) ultimately killed it not because it was too late to the party. Windows PCs only sold into the home because Commodore had been forced into bankruptcy when the loans were called in.

[@galahadortiz3258]

This was my first computer as a kid.

[@TheonlyJesusduck]

What a machine! 🖖

[@kgm1000uk]

You'll need CAPS for that PRINT command to work!

[@Nostalgianerd]

+Kevin Melling Yep. School boy error

[@HuntersMoon78]

Used them in my local school - We all had a copy of Virus which got played when the teacher was out of the room

[@petermitchell6348]

Now go on to explain how Geoffrey Dummer from Hull, Yorkshire went on to conceptualise the integrated circuit that led to the computer processor.

[@cassette_50]

Another ace system review!

[@Nostalgianerd]

+I only did it for the Timex Calculator Watch Thanks!

[@RockRedGenesis]

Your reply with his name is quite amusing, it's like your saying you only did the review FOR the calculator watch, lol

[@Archimedes75009]

Thanks for the upload. High quality video, very informative. At the beginning, instead of '8 bit stereo sound' which is true, it could be more accurate to state '8 bit logarithmic 8 channels sound with 7 independent stereo positions' (to differentiate from the Amiga) and later in the video the name of the operating system isn't 'RISC 2' but 'RISC OS 2' ;-) The A3010 could be expanded to 4 Mbytes of RAM like all the Archies (some of them up to 16 Mbytes to be accurate). The Acorn A4 laptop and the RISC iX machines are missing in your list of Archie systems ... Games like Nevryon, Chocks Away, Stunt Racer 2000, Chopper Force, Big Bang, Revolver, Darkwood, Arcturus, and the playable demo of Scorpius could have been demonstrated : they were great and specific to the machine. The videos are on KZbin.

[@a3HeadedMonkey]

I fucking love your videos, man.

[@Nostalgianerd]

+a3HeadedMonkey I fucking love your comments, man ;)

[@krillarbran]

my primary school was plastered with BBC Micros and later A3000''s. I became somewhat the schools IT technician. Any problems they came to me first. Teachers were almost clueless.

[@doctorsocrates4413]

More powerful than the amiga and atari ST put together but software houses were not interested..The gaming potential of the archie was incredible.

[@Art-is-craft]

The software producers were not interested because Accorn was too late to market. All those software businesses had already invested their resources. It was a case of bad timing and poor marketing.

[@dodgecukc]

Lander! Many school hours spent playing that.

[@EdgyNumber1]

At last some attention on these machines.. I wish, dearly, that they could bring back BBC BASIC.

[@dapowerfulmastermind]

TheSaintST1 well, if you have a raspberry pi, you can dl disc os and have fun!

[@robinw77]

bbc.godbolt.org/

[@Tim_3100]

Used the bbc acorn but the school i was back then kept the bbc acorns till 1996 when it scrapped them with like 40 new Windows 95 based pc's the school did not get a achimedes or A3 series models

[@Mark-ml3nv]

The ARM legacy lives on in the desktop computer that is the new Apple Mac Mini M2 Pro.

[@bobalong3681]

Chocks Away and Mad Professor were worth a mention

[@chriss2664]

Amazing machines. I dont have one any longer. But am using an Original Pi B overclocked to 900mhz on Risc OS direct. I use it like an every day machine, emails browsing.... just not youtube... using Risc OS direct. Probably use it more than my Windows machine as so bloated and slow... so i recommend anyone wanting to try something similar... grab an old pi. Risc os and there you go... brought your book btw Nostalgia Nerd.... very good. Like a retro bible... are you gonna make a new book on Handhelds soon?

[@maxxdahl6062]

Wish they'd come out with a version compatible with the pi zero 1 and 2, and USB ethernet adapters. I'd really love to play around with risc OS since we never got the acorn PC's nor the OS here originally here in the USA.

[@chriss2664]

@@maxxdahl6062 yeah it's out for the PI zero. I dont think the PI zero 2 yet. But sure it's in the pipeline. Nah just buy an old crusty model b+ for a peanuts. Has the ethernet etc. Overclock a bit to say 950mhz... there you go... exact same. No point with PI4s or 3s really. Risc OS (at present) only knows how to use one of those quad core chips in later models. If you do get Risc OS I recommend the Risc OS Direct version... not slating ROOL... but it's so much easier... if you wanna run 26bit software etc... plus you'll have a bit more space out your SD card from the go as it normally gives just under 8Gb without even mucking around... hope that helps.

[@maxxdahl6062]

@@chriss2664 Hmm. Might just need to find a compatible USB ethernet adapter. Since I still have my zero 1 around here somewhere.

[@chriss2664]

@@maxxdahl6062 I know there is a list somewhere it it helps (maybe ethernet hats, I can't remember)... best place to try is Stardot Forums probably...

[@maxxdahl6062]

@@chriss2664 Thanks man, I appreciate your help. :)

[@davidknight247]

Star fighter 3000! My second favourite game on the Archimedes after Elite. I see it is still being updated by a person unrelated to the original developers.

[@smittenthekitteninmittens2679]

wow i just got a flashback of not doing any work in school and just playing the lander demo..!!

[@noop9k]

David Knight 3DO version of this game was great!

[@dykodesigns]

I have some fond memories of playing lemmings and pacmania on the A310. I also quite enjoyed terramex. The downside was that it was a rare machine in the netherlands. My dad has kept it around but the Stk520 harddrive is not working anymore. Any options of a CF-card retrofit? I've got lemmings on the mastersystem and I find it to be quite an authentic port.