Acorn Archimedes A3010 System Teardown and Review | MVG

Ever wanted to know where ARM processors originated? The Acorn Archimedes A3010 by Acorn was one of the very first computers with an ARM CPU. Here is my comprehensive tear-down and review of this system!
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[@RevRoxiePM]

Acorn is ARM. They stopped making Acorns, now they design chips. Good video.

[@acmenipponair]

@The Lavian That's only, because Acorn was so intelligent to make a own company for their chip company, which they didn't called "Acorn" anymore, so that also other companies would buy the chips (like Apple for their first PDAs). It became handy, when Acorn went bankrupt, but ARM was able to survive :)

[@kestrimurgel5155]

@@acmenipponair Acorn did not go bankrupt (though they were very close to it). They were the victim of a hostile takeover by asset strippers because their shareholding in ARM was worth rather more than they were ;)

[@The8BitGuy]

Great video! I admit I was not familiar with this computer. The case design reminds me of the Tandy 1000. I like the fact the keyboard layout is almost identical to a modern PC and that it had a standard VGA. That's something I always wished the Amiga had. I also love the idea of it booting from ROM.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

The 8-Bit Guy Um, did you not go to school?

[@Nimmo1492]

He's American. Acorn didn't have computers in American schools.

[@AmstradExin]

In the USA, they had Apple's at schools, not computers. :D

[@EdgyNumber1]

AmstradExin Not much use then...

[@MostlyPennyCat]

Nimmo1492 oh, I thought he was English. What with all the 8 bit computers.

[@timrb]

I remember playing Wolf3D on the Archimedes in high school. Our computer teacher actually put it on a shared drive for us for a class because he couldn't be bothered dealing with our crap.

[@Retrohertz]

That's brilliant. Sounds like a great teacher

[@Noone-of-your-Business]

"Zarch" was the showcase game that was used to promote the Archimedes when it was first introduced to the public. Its lightning fast rendering of filled polygon 3D blew everyone away at the time. The frame rate of the later ports of the game to Amiga and ST computers is so poor that they deservedly changed the name of the game to "Virus". The conversion was still a nice game, but seeing the 25+ fps on the Archimedes still fills me with awe for the RISC CPU.

[@adroharv9213]

I was once the proud owner of an A3000 with an arm3 upgrade which went alongside my Amiga A1200. The power alone of the Archimedes was enough for me despite only a handful of games that I liked. Great memories so much so that I now run Risc os on Raspberry pi

[@darryldee467]

What's interesting is that the four non IBM-PC computers had five letter names that started with A: AMIGA ATARI ACORN APPLE

[@doalwa]

I find it fascinating that the UK had such a diverse and interesting computer scene in the 80s and 90s. I’m from Germany and the first I ever heard of Acorn, ZX Spectrum and the like was when I first got online in 1999 and started researching those old machines online. Fast forward 25 years and all we have today are boring PCs and overpriced Macs...and Smartphones of course..who would have thought that the ARM architecture would rule the world one day? Anyways, excellent video! Your appearance on the Retro Hour Podcast brought me here, keep up the great work!

[@wojiaobill]

Thanks for talking about this! I was interested in knowing more since watching one of RetroManCave's videos on a newer Acorn

[@welshtechie6832]

I had the Acorn Archimedes A3000 - upgraded to a 'MASSIVE' 2MB Ram. Had a HUGE 20GB HD installed to plus an ARM3. Way ahead of their time - but Acorn marketting was bad - should have opened it out before the IBM PC compatibles gained momentum. Your comment of the Amiga A3000 being able to be better with better programming is mute really, as the Arc was further developed to use Geforce graphics cards but the 26bit address space was a an inherent limitation causing problems getting games running on the Pi - some great stuff by JASC mind you! 3D it excelled at and would have had better 2D if they knew how to program it at the time - only Demo makers seemed to push it hard! Mind you I love the Amiga/ST/Archie as these were in the hey dey before the internet! Was a great era!!!

[@callumshotmail]

Awesome, had these in primary school. loved the Lander demo!

[@svavar82]

I am so full of appreciation for your knowledge, like the last piece of advice with the mouse and current market for it. I'm 39 and my first computers were a commodore 64, gameboy, amiga 500 and n64. For some reason the handful of excellent gaming experiences from my childhood are still relevant. Some developers just absolutely nailed it.

[@filelist2004]

Excellent overview, I still have mine from when i was kid. The only Acorn that actually ran every bit of software you gave it unlike other models RiscPc etc

[@Red-Mush]

You've blown up since but I'm more blown away about the quality of a video like this only having 22k views after nearly 2 years.

[@lactobacillusprime]

Excellent overview and inside look into the A3010. :)

[@minks36]

another really well put together video mate , I enjoy watching these :) hope things are all good your way pal

[@ModernVintageGamer]

thanks mate - glad to see you back!

[@paulgascoigne5343]

I remember when our secondary school started its new Information Technology classes and purchased these - upgrading from the BBC micro. we were all so hyped, but back then all the computers were around the edges of the room and normal desks in the middle. We spent weeks upon weeks doing textbook stuff not even touching the computers much to our dismay, it wasn't till the last couple of weeks before end of term we actually used them..

[@alexatkin]

Same here when I moved from primary school where we had one BBC in the classroom vs secondary with still a BBC in the normal classroom but also the computer room full of Acorns. I too remember the pain of not actually getting to use the computers enough, I got to me good friends with the technician (who naughtily pirated me some Amiga games, hehe). I never knew the Acorn had that many games, only ever managed to get Lemmings for it which ran rings around the Atari ST version I had back then. Thinking back, its strange I never got Lemmings for Amiga.

[@supermoon4861]

We had these in secondary school. By the time I did my exams they had replaced them with PCs. In junior school we had BBCs and Amstrads. I remember they were daisychained with a bnc network connected to the bulkier risc acorns as servers for printing and scanning.

[@LambdaCalculus379]

Being US based, I've never seen these computers up close and personal, but they've always been fascinating to me, mainly because they could run rings around most contemporary computers available at the time. Nonetheless, I did take the opportunity to try out RISC OS on a Raspberry Pi, and it's a pretty nifty OS, although I do have to train my brain a bit to work with its quirks! Great video, sir! Thank you for showing one of these systems up close and personal! :)

[@epdm2be620]

Quirks? Is that a brand of cheese? ;-)

[@AndyHugRetro]

Brilliant vid mate. My school had BBC Micros and then later Acorn's. used to play the Zarch demo (Lander) for hours on end. Hadn't realised it had got so many Amiga ports. All the best dude

[@callumshotmail]

8-bit Andy awesome, I always found it mystifying that the executable files started with an exclamation mark.

[@puppyduck1360]

Fantastic review, will done!

[@GadgetUK164]

Great video =D Not many Achimedes videoes around, and this is a very welcome addition!

[@Yukatoshi]

It is an interesting machine, and much better designed than the Amiga 1200.

[@BreakingBrick]

Thanks for the hint about the mouse and their importance and also about their price!

[@GeorgesChannel]

Great video! Very informative, spot on! Great machine!

[@tonyblairr9758]

Wolfenstein on Archimedes looks better than the Amiga version. Yay for British computing. Thanks, Parker from Thunderbirds. Awesome video :)

[@Archimedes75009]

And we had Doom too !

[@dragonbleu1205]

Great video. I never know Archimede in 90's so know I'm more aware of it. Thanks.

[@jennybailey2998]

We had an Arc 3000 in my form room at high school, mind blowing at the time, late 80s.

[@ibd1977]

Nice review. Genuine challenger to the A1200.

[@mszymcza]

Excellent review!

[@ExtremePragmatist]

For those here having trouble finding a working official mouse for this system, I did some Googling and found a serial mouse driver for the Acorn Archimedes on RISCOS Ltd's website. It should work with regular serial mice, although the driver has to be installed manually: www.riscos.com/ftp_space/hardware/serialm.zip From what I've read, later ARM-based Acorn systems have this driver built-in. Anyway, I hope this helps. If you're going to try this, make sure you get a three-button serial mouse, since the GUI was designed with three-button mice in mind. (Disclaimer: I haven't yet tried this driver myself, since I currently don't own an Acorn Archimedes myself. 😉) Great video, by the way! ☺️ It's always fun to see the lesser-known vintage architectures receive some attention, especially one that ended up playing such a profound role in all our daily lives to this day. Keep 'em coming! 👍

[@jarochaf]

Great video and very good graphics. Nice keyboard with green keys.

[@Berryservices]

I remember playing Zarch on the Acorn at school, it was a great game.

[@stevee7004]

Excellent Video!! I'd love to add one of these to my collection. They're hard to come by in the States.

[@dcikaruga]

They dumped the Archimedes name actually, when the A5000 came out, all subsequent models where just branded Acorn. Many games used 16 colour 4096 palette modes as well, often the graphics were just taken from the Atari ST version, some developers felt 256 colour modes were too slow. In RISC OS, you can also press F12 to enter command prompt mode without needing the mouse.

[@xXTheoLinuxXx]

The 'too slow' excuse from the developers could be replaced by 'too lazy'. The Amiga 500 could easily use 32 colours, and if the speed is higher than the A1200 (which could use more colours and higher speeds) I have some serious doubts about what they are saying.

[@CesareVesdani]

It is such a great thing that the ARM processor still exists today. What a shame that Acorn computers and RISC OS operating systems are no longer manufactured.

[@acmenipponair]

RISC OS is still existing, but as a open source system now. Well, Acorn just went the way, all british electronic producers went. Sinclair, Newbury, Amstrad, they all died because of the japanese and chinese rivals, who overpowered them in the 90s, when britains industry died.

[@CesareVesdani]

@@acmenipponair What a shame the UK's industries died.

[@p166mx]

As I understand it Acorn (which later spun out a separate company known as ARM) developed the processor because it needed a BBC replacement but were disappointed with the performance of common 16 bit processors such as the 68000 so I thought how hard can it be to develop their own processor!. Against all odds considering their limited budget they succeeded in something even Commodore couldn't do despite owning their own fabrication facilities.

[@Fredjoe5]

It had Commodore and Atari looking over their shoulders at the time, but poor game support meant it never caught on. Technically a great machine, though.

[@Monkeyboy196five]

I have never been without one ever since my A3000 back in 1995ish. Love them. Had ARM 3 upgrade and 4MB for A3000. Had a RISC PC 600 with 2 MB VRAM and 256 MB DRAM. Had a Castle Iyonix. Coding again now on RPI 2B. It is a shame Acorn didn't do more to push 3010 into games as a genuine alternative to the Amiga. Wish we had enough talent to port more of the better Amiga games like Super Frog, Geof Crammonds F1 GP. Sadly i don't think we had enough machines in the home. Far too many in schools. Definitely a highlight of my life i will always look upon fondly. Good video. A bit more detail in some comparisons, hardware and software, with Amiga / Atari ST would of been really nice. Thumbs up from me.

[@MatthewJohnCrittenden]

Zarch! Chuffing Nora I'd forgotten about that gem. Played it to death on an ST (under the name Virus). Making my way through the MVG archives ... every vid a gem.

[@perfectfutures]

Looks like an amazing machine for it's time. Especially the integrated design, with the SOC and elegant case. Interesting to see that whilst it remained obscure compared to it's Amiga and ST cousins, in the long run it's strengths won out in terms of SOCs and ARM chips becoming standard. It still makes me wonder what more could have been done with it, it looks so flexible.

[@Monkeyboy196five]

Ive been an Acorn fan for 35 years. Still am, just now i run RISC OS on a RPI 2B and RPI 3B+. The 3010 was a very capable machine. Sadly there didn't seem to be enough top rated programmers who were looking to squeeze every last drop of performance out of it ( with games in mind ) but seemed to rely on the pure ARM technical abilities, which to be fair in a lot of cases was enough to outperform Amiga 1200.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

The A3020 with a fast 4mb RAM upgrade and modding a resistor to _double_ the clock speed runs Doom. The current crop of demo coders in the Acorn scene have also managed to get it to output 4096 colours on screen as well as a truly stupid amount of sprites.

[@SabretoothBarnacle]

Nice review... I've relocated the battery on my A3010 to an off the board location for future 'proofing'. Tomorrow I'll be receiving a RiscPC with a 486DX4 card to go in... can't wait!

[@epdm2be620]

Hmmm... the PC card is rubbish. It were slow Cyrix cpu's on these cards while in that era a regular PC was Pentium-based. I think a much rarer, and more interesting, find would be if some of the collectors could show us the real Risc PC 2 prototype (Phoebe computer). Now THAT would be an accomplishment ;-)

[@hpbifta]

If you don't have a mouse there is a workaround if you remember your ADFS commands. hit 'F12' that should bring up the RISC/OS version of the run command/ command console. from type basic and press return. This should launch Acorn Basic which is basically the same as good old BBC Basic. From here you should be able to use all the old ADFS commands to explore the disc drives and possibly even launch programs, that's if you can't do them from the command console anyway, it's been so long and i miss that computer. From the 'F12' console you can do other stuff too, things like '*unplug basic' to free up some extra memory for a game for example. Oh and I once saw an A3010 in a computer shop next to a competitive 386 pc, the pc was running the game virus, the A3010 next to it was running a PC emulator running the same game, and it ran it faster and smoother than the equivalent PC on the market. Oh and the A3010 next to that was running Zarch (The same game just the Acorn version) and guess which looked best?

[@timrb]

For some reason F12 for ADFS console is burned into my brain, despite not touching an Acorn for about 15-20 years.

[@BradR86]

You're absolutely right about the pricing! As someone who used an Acorn A3000 in Primary school, I've been trying my hand at attempting to acquire an A3000 into my retro collection. They are so rare!!! Surely NSW Department of education have sold off their fleet rather than disposed of them back in the 90s. There should still lie a few Acorns in in attics/garages/sheds that should come up eventually!

[@alexatkin]

Sadly not, I had a few Acorns (not sure which models) from a computer recyclers which got skipped as nobody wanted them. I also know when a local school closed down they skipped all theirs too as a friend rescued one of them.

[@CarlosDelAlamo_Estrayk]

Great video! thanks

[@johnflano]

Thanks - such an excellent machine, I used the A3020 through primary school, and at the time they seemed so far ahead of WinTel.

[@RichardHallas]

Not just seemed. Were.

Hey, amazing video

[@willyarma_uk]

A bit late to comment but I have modded modern optical mice to work with Archimedes, Amiga and even the BBC Micro Quest mouse. They all use quadrature encoding and many older optical mice had a larger chip with quadrature pins. The Archimedes needs a special mini-din plug which can be hard to find as there are 2 pin spacing standards with the same pin count.

[@dglcomputers1498]

A little tip is that the final Acorn machine, the A7000, uses a standard PS/2 mouse, you just need one with three buttons. One with a middle scroll wheel that doubles up as a button will work just fine.

[@nonci6]

00:08 small nitpick: the iPhone 5S you showed us and the Nintendo Switch has 64-bit ARM processors, not 32. If you showed us an older smartphone, like a Sony Xperia SP or a Samsung Galaxy S3, then yes, they have 32 bit ARM processors. Other than that the video is great as usual. Keep up the good work!

[@TheUAoB]

Amusing quirk of the ARM250 based Acorns is since it was essentially at that point a very mature chipset shrunk into a SoC with a superior fabrication process, it could clock much higher than the official 12MHz. The performance was limited only by the fact the DRAM controller ran the memory synchronously and there was no cache. This meant the DRAM speed was the limiting factor, so replacing the DRAM with faster chips and a new crystal meant you could easily overclock the system so such an extent that the budget machine could probably outperform the contemporary high end ARM3 based Acorns.

[@oldskoolpaul77]

Amazing!

[@ff_crafter]

Great video

[@jmm1233]

Got the Risc os working on Arch linux , with ArcEm pretty easy to setup , i love it

[@MegaManNeo]

That thing looks amazing! Not just because it's (a possible UK only?) competitor to the Amiga500 and Atari ST but also because it's a SoC running on ARM hardware. Nothing special indeed but this piece of info has some history lesson touch to it. The part that impresses me the most however is the 3D capabilities of this machine. Now, I can't say how well the base 500 or ST perform in that department but the A3010 does really well from what I get here. Thumbs up!

[@Monkeyboy196five]

The 3D capabilities blew away the Amiga 500 / 1200 and Atari ST hands down. Only the Amiga could compete on 2D in some cases.

[@MichaelOglesby]

Great video MVG! Nice to see the insides of an Archimedes. Wow, there's nothing to it. I was expecting loads of capacitors, resistors etc, nope. Although the Archimedes was technically a better machine, I knew of only one person (my neighbours daughter) who had one (albeit a A3000). The Acorn machines weren't popular amongst us kids when I was growing up. I wonder if that was down to poor marketing or limiting software library available? But lets be honest. When you were a kid, you got the computer your best friend had so you could swap games with them. You weren't going to get a ZX Spectrum if your mate had a C64 now would you? But when I was a kid back in the later 80's/early 90's, the most popular computers amongst the kids were: Amiga 500, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum and C64. We had the odd kid here and there who had an Amstrad or IBM PC. Great times #FlashBackMemory

[@epdm2be620]

That was because they were used in schools. And schools had a bad reputation when I (and you probably too) were growing up. At least in the UK. You wouldn't want to have the same computer as the boring ones in schools. So Amiga's, Atari's and Playstations were much more popular at homes. AND a lot cheaper too. The A3010 was the cheapest replacement o/t A3000 usually sold with only 1MB of RAM while the A3020 was a much better option as most A3020 came standard with 2MB RAM inside. Later these A-series got replaced by low-end PC's as they were even cheaper than these low-end Acorns. For the interested people; the A3020 looks exactly the same but has the RED function keys (and red floppy eject button) like the A3000.

[@willyarma_uk]

Ive got an Archimedes A310 and an A3020, I've never seen inside an A3010 and was surprised how different it was as it looks identical from the front except the F keys are red. The battery leaked in mine, took a day or two of finding and running mod wires to fix the broken tracks, mostly on the printer port next to the battery.

[@riccardoiovenitti8688]

Very nice piece of hardware. I'm always fascinated by these old computers I've never been able to use (being in mid 40s I've seen and used many computers at that time). Anyway...what's the video background tune?

[@leelangley3038]

I luckily own two of the 3xxx series and had them back at school. I remember thinking that they were a bit safe and not a home or gaming computer compared to amigas. All these years later I realise that actually they were technically superior at the time.

[@ToddsNerdCave]

Excellent video! I have always been curious about Acorn machines. Is there a demo scene for it? Or any good music/mod tracker type apps?

[@ModernVintageGamer]

there is a tracker app for it called Coconizer - www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=50177 which is great. I only just found out about it last night. Theres also an active (albeit small) demo scene as well.

[@Archimedes75009]

@@ModernVintageGamer There was also the commercial Digital Symphony, by demogroup Bass and sold by Oregan ; and Tracker sold by The Serial Port / Vertical Twist.

[@mikefutcher]

This computer had ... I'm going to say it ... THE best version of the Basic programming language - lots of command for drawing graphics, sprites, easy to use, fast (for basic anyway), and no need for line numbers.

[@yogyog]

Yep - that's how I wrote this: kzbin.info/www/bejne/lXvSYmqbiM2Sqbs yogyog.org/leaf/ Download it for free an play it in emulator!

[@10p6]

I was so excited back in high school when the Archimedes was announced, that was until our school dumped BBC computers and went with Macintosh.

[@ms-ex8em]

hello do u know about lander - on the risc os systems - computers - does it have sound???? how do i obtain sound from it? thanks.

[@dave4shmups]

Incredible computer! What model was that NEC monitor that you had it hooked up to?

[@ModernVintageGamer]

its the NEC Accusync 71V. I did a video on it last year - check it out :)

[@soviet9922]

how you get a 5.25 drive to work that dell ?, the bios no longer includes the option.

[@tanakanaoshi4769]

Gotta buy 2 pcs this week as well

[@patrickjenner3211]

I'm from Sydney and I can't seem to find any of these Acorn machines. My primary school used the A3000 from 1992 to 1999 for games and word processing.

[@firstsurname9893]

A very interesting video for an equally interesting machine, Lemmings and Zarch/Virus/Lander brought back a few memories. However I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the ARM250 is a RISC CPU whereas the 68030 is CISC making speed comparisons quite difficult, you definitely can't just compare instructions per second. As is alluded to in the video, the Amiga comparison is also deceptive because the custom chips can manipulate memory independently of the CPU. Things like screen scrolling, sample playback or disk access have very little impact on the Amiga's CPU usage whereas on the Archimedes practically everything has to be done in software. History has ultimately proven that RISC was the way forward but this was not clear back when these machines were introduced.

[@epdm2be620]

The Acorn also had custom "chips". The VIDC and MEMC where Acorn's equivalents to the Amiga's Denise/Paula- (VIDC) and Agnus- (MEMC) chips. They just didn't have the fancy names like their American counterparts.

[@acmenipponair]

Well, first Surname, since the Power PC Chips, the Pentium Pro and the AMD K6 there are no real CISC processors anymore. Only RISC-cores, that get fed by pipelines where the sudo CISC instructions get broken down in its RISC parts. Quite what a compiler for RISC would have done in the 1980s and 1990s, but much faster and on the fly.

[@justinholmes5614]

My high school had a whole room full of Acorns like these.

[@EdgyNumber1]

Hmmm was *Starfighter* made by the same team that created *Starfox* for the SNES? (In this instance, the ARM chip was in the game cart.)

[@epdm2be620]

Nope. They did made a special souped up version for the 3DO system and later another version for the playstation though. I believe a port of that playstation-version was even released on PC's as well. Prior to Starfighter 3000 they created a polygon based racing game called Stuntracer 2000 comparable to Atari's Hard Drivin'

[@lrochfort]

Great video. RISC OS really was phenomenal, far ahead of Amiga os at the time

[@wimwiddershins]

We had these at college. I remember playing zarch/virus and thinking it played a lot better than on my a500. Wish I'd snaffled one when the school got rid of them. :(

[@ms-ex8em]

Hello does any one know about Lander is there sound on Lander ?? Thanks. In the Fred Harris video it sounds like a car !!

[@activistarts7722]

I need an LGR and MVG collaboration

[@Archimedes75009]

Sure the keyboard is excellent : it's made by keytronic. Did you know the A3010 has an onboard IDE controller ? Like in the A3020 and A4000. To be able to use it you must add the 'missing' parts existing in the A3020 or A4000, with a bit of soldering. For the mouse : you can use a serial mouse, and just load the driver from floppy with the CLI. With faster RAM chips, you can overclock the machine up to 26 Mhz ... kzbin.info/www/bejne/Y6azXpaHaZh4d9k All videos here : kzbin.info How to do that is explained on stardot

[@mistie710]

The A3010, A3020 and A4000 used the same motherboard, just with different areas populated depending on which model it was going into. The A3020 was built for educational use (it had red keys too) while the A4000 looked like a half-height A5000 with a separate keyboard and was meant as a more professional system. The only down side to these three models was the fact that the SoC design meant that you could not upgrade the processor to an ARM3 as you could (with some effort) with the earlier A3000 and other ARM2 based systems.

[@joe72205]

And of course RISC OS is available for the Raspberry Pi!

[@acmenipponair]

Well, why not, they only needed to update the drivers for the new versions of the ARM chip and the new GPU part.

[@wojiaobill]

One question: since the OS is on ROM chips, is it possible to replace the ROMs to change /upgrade the OS?

[@p166mx]

They were usually socketed ROM chips so it was easy to upgrade the operating system. Not sure about the 3010 in this video as it was a cut price model designed to compete with the Amiga and ST. I may be getting this wrong as I was only just old enough to be into computers at the time but I seem to remember it was priced in between the A600 and A1200.

[@Archimedes75009]

@@p166mx Socketed on all machines, including the A3010

[@ifmclaren]

Not quite true about it 'always' booting to the RISC OS GUI. There was a CMOS setting (Language? I can't remember) that could be set to boot to a command prompt, BBC BASIC, or you could auto-boot a floppy (or hdd) as well.

[@Soruk42]

Yep, *CONFIGURE LANGUAGE set this.

[@SabretoothBarnacle]

PS - Don't throw your broken Archimedes mouse away it might be repairable! I have a video on my channel on a recent mouse repair #ShamelessPlug

[@vic20kid8]

LOL this is the youtube guy I was talking about in my post :) how to fix the mouse ;)

[@epdm2be620]

There's a company (Stuart Tyrell) in the UK that sells Acorn-serial-to-PS2 mouse adaptors. Aso later A7000-RISCOS machines have both PS2-keyboards en PS2-mouse ports. While the famous RiscPC only has a PS2-keyboard-port but serial-acorn mouse port. Perhaps for a collector of vintage machines these A7000's are an easier option. Though true collectors of vintage Acorn machines tend to go for the Risc PC (especially with Digital StrongARM cpu's). A cheaper (and perhaps better option) is to obtain a Raspberry Pi Model B (the first single core model) and run RISCOS on that. The first RPI has the least compatibility issues running the latest version 5.23 of RISCOS. While the RPI3 is indeed MUCH faster (3x faster) but has more compatibility problems. And if collecting vintage machines isn't your thing but you still want a taste of this OS there's a great commercial emulator called Virtual Risc PC (Virtual RPC) and a bunch of freeware emulators as well (like e.g. RedSquirell and RPCEmu).

[@KrozMcD]

Mouse? How about throwing away an entire A310 system, monitor and all. I cringe and cry every time I remember binning it all because of a blown capacitor :(

[@Boleo806]

6:48 Betty Boo - Doin the Do! (Forgot all about that song!)

[@mistie710]

So had I. Thanks for reminding me. *grumble grumble*

[@Ichinin]

Have always been curious about the acorn, but it was only available in the Uk. Never saw one here in Sweden. And btw; Elite did make it to the Amiga, and it looked at least as good, probably better.

[@TheSulross]

Looks like a great computer, but wouldn't want to collect one and have to pay shipping prices to get it across the pond Maybe like 8-bit Guy's quasi recreation of the C64, dubbed the Commander X16, the Acorn could become the target subject of a retro recreation effort. Would modern ARM processors, say, the Raspberry Pi4, be able to run its instruction set? Recreating it by spring-boarding off a Pi4 might make such a project go much quicker

[@EastAngliaUK]

that computer seems to be in very good condition for its age.

[@pferreira1983]

Good video. It's a shame that ultimately the Archimedes got little support. 🤔

[@valenrn8657]

68020 and 68030 have similar IPC (instruction per clock).

[@johnflano]

The game music at 7.40 sounds like the song sandstorm

[@KarlHamilton]

Retro Hour brought me here etc etc

[@Pedro8k]

The Amiga did not has a built in psu or reset button or built in os on rom

[@acornandy]

wow MVG knows Acorn!! ha ha wow wish he's seen my StrongARM RISC PC with Ethernet and yes with hard drives too :-) ..

[@DanHowardMtl]

Is there a spec for the mouse? Probably you could take a ps2 mouse and rewire it to work with the Archimedes.

[@epdm2be620]

this guy did: www.kernelcrash.com/blog/modifying-a-ps2-optical-mouse-for-an-acorn-riscpc/2016/03/26/

[@DanHowardMtl]

Very cool!

[@gower1973]

You forgot about the Acorn Electron, it was a cut down budget version of the BBC micro designed as a home competitor to the Spectrum and Commodore 64

[@xXTheoLinuxXx]

I own a Acorn Electron (it was my first computer) it was the competitor of the ZX Spectrum not the C64. The C64 wasn't a budget computer like the Spectrum or Electron.

[@epdm2be620]

Yeah. and it failed miserably due to the fact that it was missing some BBC-graphics modes and was way to expensive. People tend to forget that Acorn was the UK equivalent of Apple. Expensive computers for the more fortunate amongst us. While Sinclair (and in the US Commodore) were truly for the masses. I guess the most affordable Acorn must have been the Atom especially in DIY-kit.

[@xXTheoLinuxXx]

They only graphics mode that was missing was mode 7 (teletext). As far as I know the Electron was 20 pounds more expensive than the Spectrum, but it had a real keyboard. In the early eighties the C64 wasn't exactly cheap were I live. The Spectrum was half the price of the C64.

[@p166mx]

@@xXTheoLinuxXx It also lacked RAM, the Electron was actually fairly successful but by the time proper proper production started more powerful machines such as the C64 were becoming more competitively priced. In many ways the Electron was a suburb machine but I was never sure where it really fitted in as the Spectrum was so cheap and the C64 was better for games.

[@gdclemo]

@@p166mx The Electron's RAM was also only 4 bits wide and in most video modes the CPU would be completely blocked while the video chip was reading the display.

[@TheStuffMade]

It's a great machine, but it was a bit late to the party, by the time the A3010 was introduced the Amiga 500 had already been discontinued and almost everyone I knew at the time had switched to PCs.

[@melanierhianna]

Despite the look its not targetting the 500. The original Archimedes was targetting the Amiga 1000 and was only 2 years later. This is more targetting the Amiga 600 but with the performance of the Amiga 3000

[@thepvporg]

There are adaptors to allow older PS/2 type mice.

[@melanierhianna]

Hold shift down when you boot to boot from the disk!

[@LeeDarkParadox]

I hate to say this but certain gameplay footage looks better than the Amiga !!

[@AntonyTCurtis]

A vintage PC Bus Mouse can be modified to work and they are much cheaper. Only need to open up the mouse and swap the pins around on the cable connector.

[@Archimedes75009]

Antony T Curtis Are you sure ? There is a missing wire in the bus mouse, compared to the Archie mouse.

[@AntonyTCurtis]

Zarchos I have used a modified 3 button bus mouse with my A3010.

[@Archimedes75009]

Antony T Curtis That s very interesting. Could you tell me how many wires you ve got ? IIRC there are 8 wires in a bus mouse and 9 are needed for the Archie.

[@AntonyTCurtis]

The bus mouse I have modified is a Leaguer brand mouse, model LG-BM-3816 and it has 9 wires.

[@Archimedes75009]

Thanks ! Interesting as I bought a lot of bus mouses and bad luck for me : only 8 wires. Could you tell me where you got your mouse from ?

[@vic20kid8]

I bought one of these but the mouse was dead and the average price for one is £50 :(, did see youtube of dead mouse fix and with use of a multimeter the guy found one of the resistors inside was bad and once replaced the mouse was working again so that's on my to do list :)

[@SabretoothBarnacle]

vic20kid ...and good luck with your fix ;)

[@oisnowy5368]

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS? Easy. Boot up into the GUI... then press F12. The * command prompt will appear at the bottom left of the screen. Try typing BASIC and you're into BBC Basic

[@johnparker38]

This game is featured in the video: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dungeon_(1993_video_game)

[@chloedevereaux1801]

ahhh nevyron basically r-type with blood monies ships :)

[@MrPetari]

I like how it looks from outside and from inside. And I'm insider with computers :-) Games are not much impressive. Really can not say who to blame: programmers, low interest for games on A3010, or maybe HW ? :-)

[@mikeuknz]

If my memory serves me correctly the A4000 model uses a PS2 mouse rather than the normal Acorn one and PS2 ones should be easy to source. It has various different characteristics from the A3010 however. HTH

[@epdm2be620]

Only the A7000 uses PS2 mouse (and PS2 keyboards). All others uses the typical Acorn bus mouse. The Risc PC did use a PS2 keyboard though. The A4000 (and A5000 too) did use a "standard" IDE-harddrive :-)

[@WizardNumberNext]

I wish to point out that Commodore Amiga A1200 was powered by Motorola MC68EC020 and not MC68030 and was running at 14.3MHz, no 33MHz. Only big Amigas had any 68030 or better processors and none Amiga ever run faster then 25MHz on stock