Acorn Archimedes RISC OS on Raspberry Pi 400

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Risc OS was the first ever operating system designed for the ARM chipset. Today it lives on as an open source project. I test out the brilliant RiscOS Direct distribution that comes with a load of pre-installed software, all ready to run.
Risc OS Direct: www.riscosdev.com/direct/
Wifi Sheep channel: • RISC OS Direct EP1 - G...
My retro gaming podcast: theretrohour.com
My Twitter: / danwood_uk
My Facebook: / danwooduk
Sources used in this video (under fair use or with permission):
BBC Micro Live S01E01 (5th October 1984): • BBC Micro Live S01E01 ...
Acorn Computer Advert from 1991: • Acorn Computer Advert ...
Welcome to the Learning Curve - Acorn BBC Archimedes Computer 1990: • Welcome to the Learnin...
The Home Computer Minefield : • The Home Computer Mine...
#RetroGaming #RetroGames #RetroComputing

[@danwood_uk]

Sponsored: Please use my special link to start your free 7-day trial with Blinkist and get 25% off a premium membership: www.blinkist.com/danwood

[@pearcomputers]

PinnOS will let you install RiscOS 5.24 as a partition too (not the RO Direct .iso)

[@valenrn8657]

Can RISC OS from 1987 run unmodified on Raspberry Pi 400? CPU instruction set compatibility doesn't build the full legacy software support. X86 PC's unmodified OS from 1987 can still run on modern PC hardware with up to UEFI Class 2. My AM5 X670E motherboard still has CSM.

[@fuzzywzhe]

I never had an Acorn (or used one), but I think the Acorn was probably the equal to the Amiga. It's a pity the worst systems ended up becoming the ones that became predominate.

[@iandavidson99]

I used to work for Castle Technology. We were the last company to build all the RISC OS machines under licence during the latter stages of the computer's life. A phenomenal machine and a phenomenal OS. The clarity of the on-screen text rendering with its anti-aliasing was second-to-none

[@leeshepherd6512]

I had an Kinetic RISC PC and a Iyonix from Castle. They managed to keep the platform alive for a few years and thankfully had the vision to open source RISC OS

[@dem3850]

Gladstone High School, 1988 - Saw an archimedes playing that 'lander' game. Mind was blown. Addiction started.

[@CesareVesdani]

I remember RISC OS 3.11 when I was in primary school in the UK. I have a virtual machine running RISC OS 3.11. I have happy memories and great nostalgia from that operating system.

[@TheSulross]

the Acorn Archimedes was a late 80s computer, so getting a Raspberry Pi, installing RISC OS Direct, and booting into it is a truly legit Retro Computing rig. Ticks all the boxes - step back into the Golden Age of 1980s computing, runs on real hardware instead of an emulator, can get the hardware easily at relatively very low cost (no waiting on a Kickstarter project for a year or more and paying multiple hundreds pounds/euros/dollars) - and on top of all that it can quickly bring up a BASIC prompt, using what was arguably the best dialect of BASIC from the early 80s micro computing rivalries. But at the same time powerful compiled languages available too. The marketing around this should concentrate on selling this as fully legit entry into Retro Computing for the masses (not just the geek classes). Great platform for kids to learn computing at a serious level instead of a trivial level of merely learning to use computers.

[@Ratteler]

But even better, it's running on a native descendant of it original processor. The Raspberry Pi was even created to try to fill the void left by the Archimedes! This is more than retro. This is like a Commodore running on 65816. This COULD have been were this system ended up anyway. Nevermind that the Archimedes inspired the Amiga and Atari "flat: systems. Being from the states I never got to see an Archimedes until the 2000's. Still have never seen one on person. There is rumor of 60hz models made for US power, but at the time the machine that would unquestionably win the proccessor war, as the projecter of almost every smartphone, tablet, andeven the latest Mac!

[@davidste60]

@@Ratteler I don't think the A3000, released in 1989, inspired the Atari ST or Amiga 500, released in 1985 and 1987.

[@dh2032]

@@davidste60 I think the look at the hardware is missing the point the amiga was the one of the first PC's to come out of the box new with full work OS desktop, with a mouse), not some sort if add on (even apple Lisa didn't have desktop, it was more of a very fancy electronic typewriter, the desktop was very basic, nothing could be customised at all, the was the zerox machine with a mouse ( not called a mouse I think) from the demo's I've seen go wow even today, when PC's only had a DOS prompt !

[@davidste60]

@@dh2032 I think you've missed the point. Ratteler said that the Archimedes inspired the Atari and Amiga computers, but those came first. It's about the timeline.

[@valenrn8657]

RISC OS Direct is not the 1987 original RISC OS release. Retro unmodified MS-DOS 1.0 from 1981 can still run on modern X86 PC hardware up to UEFI Class 2.

[@abergethirty]

Element 14 is now electronic parts supplier geared towards the Hobbiest market. They are the main distributor of the Raspberry Pi in the US. You could say they stayed in the educational sector like Acorn.

[@robwyatt]

I worked at Krisaslis in the early 90's, worked mostly on the Acorn ports, its awesome to see some of them running again.

[@johalun]

This is cool. I can't recall ever seeing BBC or Acorn system in Sweden back in the day, it was all Commodore.

[@christopher480]

Thats right.....everywhere else in the world was commodore....only ppl in the uk were desperate enough to use it.

[@koma-k]

In Norway lots of schools had Tiki 100 computers; fairly low-end stuff but developed in Norway... default/most commonly used programming language was LOGO... Acorn computers were used in some special needs schools and institutions I believe, due to the ease of interfacing with custom hardware, though that was mostly back in the 8-bit days of the BBC computer and later the Master variants.

[@svenkarlsen2702]

I had an Amiga, and most of my friends (in Norway) had either Amigas or game consoles. The only experience I had with Acorn was the few times they were mentioned in CU Amiga Magazine...

[@soniquest]

Ah, such nostalgia! My mum was a teacher and would bring home the Archimedes in holidays. Fond memories of playing Elite and attempting to make Arkanoid-style games in BASIC

[@joecater894]

vastly underrated machine... way ahead..

[@offrails]

My primary school in New Zealand had Acorn machines in most of the classrooms, as well as at least one Beeb. Aside from getting traumatised by the witch in Granny's Garden, there was also a word processor, and it may have been Folio - I just remember the blue background. When we got the Archimedes machines, Pacmania and Lemmings were the favourites - everyone was rubbish at Lander. Of courses, when the teacher had her way, it was writing things in the Pendown (I believe that was what it was called) word processor.

[@johnhandelaar]

27:40 In a package manager watch him scroll right past the exact uninstalled PNG library and version which the browser wanted a minute ago

[@danwood_uk]

Hard to pay attention to everything when you’re recording a video. I will give it a download though.

[@nixter57]

I'm AMAZED by how polished this is !? I don't get this kind of "Thoroughness" from years of using.."LINUX" !! TOO COOL !!

[@londongaz2]

Ah now this is mega nostalgic! Brings back memories of the 90s IT suite 😄

[@philard]

Good memories of the A3010. BBC micro before my time.

[@droganPaul]

Wow Folio! That felt so advanced at the time!

[@10p6]

I left school in 1989, but our school was heading in the direction of Amiga and Mac for some reason, and skipped the Archimedes which I would have loved to tried.

[@georgeluyckx1437]

Back in the time I had an Amiga but when I saw some screenshots of this os I was really impressed. The Acorn was even more ahead of it’s time then the Amiga.

[@someusername1]

Yes it was. It's very sad that the Archimedes lost out to the ST, Amiga and then to PCs. How the world could have been. I suppose in a way it's coming full circle now. ARMs are getting more powerful, powering Macs and (slowly) moving into servers. It won't be so long until we all have ARM desktops/laptops running Windows (or RiscOS?) to go with our ARM phones, watches, etc.

[@benroyal3742]

That was a really good video, and really took me back to senior school in the UK back in the day, I used to play Lander for hours on the Acorn. Thank you for a good overview, and keen to give it a try myself and reminisce...

[@itsandyme9192]

My first high school had these machines in the library with 1 or 2 Macintosh's and a few Win 95 machines in 1997. Everyone wanted to use the Macintosh because it looked different and had one mouse button. They use to form queues just to use them. I'd love to go back and experience using RISCOS again.

[@Pugwash.]

I learned to program on a BBC B my older brother bought in about 1982. The archimedes was a distant dream until I was doing my A-levels. I still program a lot.

[@NOPerative]

Now, we have ARM and Risc V chips about. Awesome Risc V mobos and laptops are working their way to market - I'm stoked. Might be good stuff for an Amiga hardware reboot.

[@qwaH]

The Archie was the standard eventually, I had to use the BBC Micro untill near the end when my school got 5 Archies (with the rest of the room still in Beebs) had some fun games on it. So many memories, gotta love some Zarch

[@NMY556L]

I remember RISC OS from secondary school, we used A3000's allover the school and even ran some Acorn systems which had a PC emulator card in them which were used by the art department I think to run Windows 3.1. That said there were still BBC Micro B's kicking around in the mid 1990's too.

[@lmlmd2714]

Sounds very similar to my high school. We had 2 computer suites which had a mish-mash of A3000s and A3020s, with 3 or 4 A4000/A5000s, and a handful of Citizen dot matrix printers, a random Canon inkjet and an ancient plotter. Each of the CDT and science labs usually had 2 or 3 BBC Micros sat in the corner collecting dust, which the library had 4 random Win3.x PCs, no two alike. IIRC we had one 286, one 486 and two 386s, one of which had a CD-ROM drive. They were the only PCs in the school, and were used pretty much exlusively playing Worms, and a basic range-finding canon fire game in Windows, oh, and The Incredible Machine, which I *LOVED*. Weirdly, the best specced place in the whole school was the hardly ever used careers library, which had at least half a dozen top of the line, brand new double-pizza boxed RISC PCs, complete with x86 processor cards and CD-ROMs, and gorgeous multisync monitors and HP laserjet printers. They were only ever used to run a "choose your career" program in MS-DOS...while the CDT graphic design lab stuttered on with the A3000s and a plotter dating back to the early medieval period.

[@NMY556L]

@@lmlmd2714 now a primary aged child would be horrified if they didn't have a system with at least 8GB of Ram and the latest version of Windows. Upon said system they'd open Chrome and use it to run a web-based app to do their homework. Imagine the excuses nowadays "Sorry miss: our fibre broadband went down and I couldn't log into the group remote learning seminar as my mobile had the wrong version of Android on it.... I'll submit my colouring in by the end of the day once my brand-new mobile handset is delivered by an Amazon drone"

[@RetroGameCoders]

So glad you made this. I tried RISCOS last year and didn’t get anywhere with it. This inspired me to give it another try :) One Archimedes arrived just in my final year of school so I had a little play with the game (felt sure it was called Virus?) but as will all the BBC computers at my schools, it was then made off-limits unless you were one of the chosen few, which I was very much not 🤣

[@Archimedes75009]

It was Lander, and it became the game Zarch, later converted to other platforms with the name Virus.

[@davidwalters5958]

Loved the BBC micro in primary school and BBC->Archi->RiscPC in secondary. Played Granny's garden on RiscOS Direct with my 5 year old earlier this year during lockdown. Home schooling like it's 1984!

[@highroyds]

This brings back a lot of memories, at school when we could we’d play golf or ww2 flying game but mostly lemmings. I also remember the IT teacher saying to us all that Acorn computers would be in every school and home and was the future of computers. How wrong he was lol, but it’s very surprising how much those computers cost now on eBay.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

The computer is just a showcase for the CPU. There are no famous custom chips on the PCB. So not really wrong.

[@another3997]

Well, he was almost right. ARM processors and microcontrollers can be found in just about every home and school, as well as in vehicles, industrial equipment, scientific instruments and who knows what else. I doubt the original designers at Acorn could have foreseen the impact they would have on the world.

[@bdm_scot]

Wow BBC Micro not seen that since primary school same great memory’s as you. Please do a follow up with more of your memories :)

[@NicolaiSyvertsen]

That MP3 player had a very faithful VFD recreation. Super nice!

[@retropuffer2986]

I like how your channel has evolved to include high quality OS videos.

[@MrPDawes]

4GB of RAM is massive for RISC OS. You could probably run all the apps you have on your drive and not run out of memory.

[@Mariusz_Wlodarczyk]

14:16 New versions of macOS allows to drag and drop a location from Finder to file requester. Just drag an icon from Finder window header to a file requester header (not list of files/folders). MorphOS also allows to drag and drop location from an Ambient window to a file requester. This is better solution because we can choice - drag&drop or select from list of files/folders.

[@germansnowman]

I also recommend the third-party app Default Folder. I use it basically just for one function: While in an Open or Save dialog, I can click on any open windows in the Finder and it will select this folder in the dialog. Have been using it since MacOS 9, I think.

[@RSimusic]

Amazing!! There was one game that sticks in my mind from primary school in the mid 90s - “Around the world in 80 Days” - would LOVE to see and hear that again! Can’t seem to find it anywhere

[@6581punk]

Many of the people from Acorn went onto Pace who did the set top boxes for Sky. In fact, I'm sure they were using Risc OS for some of these. I remember when ITV Digital went bust there was a period before Freeview where DVB set top boxes started to appear and I bought one. It was made by Pace and pretty sure it used Risc OS (the Pace DVTA). The company I worked for 2000/2001 was a consultancy and some of the team were in Cambridge doing some QA testing for Pace on that box.

[@ash36230]

First OS I used on a computer was Risc OS on a computer at Primary School... A7000s I think from research now but I can't remember exactly. Migrating to a Windows world was vastly different to how things worked back then. It seemingly vanished overnight as Microsoft completed it's takeover of the UK market. Acorn may be dead but ARM rose like a phoenix from its ashes. The most prominent game we were playing if I'm recalling correctly was ZigZag: The Romans to teach us about life in the Roman times, it was quite interactive.

[@andyjackson3663]

First came across "Lander" at the Which Computer Show at the NEC... at the time it was called Zarch... bloody awesome stuff

[@ninline2000]

A very nice package that is well put together. Someone really did a fabulous job putting this all together. Not growing up in the UK I really had no inkling of what the Archimedes computer was like. I bought a C64 in 1984 and used it for many years before moving on to the Amiga and eventually Linux on peecee hardware. I'll have to try this out on my Pi and tinker with it. I probably spent a few hundred hours playing Elite on the C64 and it'll be interesting to try this version.

[@supremeleader9838]

i went to school in the 2000s but we had a few acorns with granny’s garden on them and we used to play every break time LOL

[@MainlyWebStuff]

This brought back so many memories of using the Acorn Archimedes in the 90's :) Thanks so much for posting. Subscribed.

[@proteque]

Thanx for this demo Dan!

[@mikebailey783]

The apple and MG Midget examples were not actually 3D renders; they're the classic demo files of the !Artworks vector drawing program. - It had very convincing gradients. (I never had a copy as I think it was fairly pricey!)

[@TheUAoB]

It was excellent. I bought a copy back in the day, used it any time I needed to do illustrations for college, although I didn't have the skills to produce graphics like the demos! Corel Corporation bought up the licensing rights for it in 1995 and sold it for Windows machines under the name CorelXara, that put an end to the original Acorn version. Corel has a long history of acquiring or eliminating competitors, even those established on other platorms. Xara (formally known as Compuer Concepts) reacquired the rights in 2000 and continue to this day to sell the Windows version.

[@RonHelton]

I never played Elite. Sold several copies while working at a computer store back in the day. I might even have a copy here. lol

[@williamsquires8010]

The IT lab (singular!) in my secondary school still had Acorns in 2000/01. They were all replaced by Windows 98 PCs that summer.

[@FrozenWell]

another use for my 400 gerat, remember being blown away with how good zarch looked on the archimedes back in the day

[@charlesjmouse]

sigh... If things had turned out just a little differently Acorn might still be around as the 'Apple' of Europe and I'd be using a descendant of the RiscPC and A4 as my daily drivers. Oh, well. On with the show, thanks Dan.

[@abloogywoogywoo]

Lander was also known as Zarch. Its funny but when going through school, there were newer and older computers throughout the classrooms, but everyone loved Zarch and Granny's Garden.

[@MixelsLab]

Lander is a very limited demo of Zarch, most of the gameplay is missing. Zarch was ported to other systems under the name Virus... It Really showed how much more powerful the Acorns were when it came to 3D stuff. 3D games on the Archimedes were amazing. :O

[@welshtechie6832]

@@MixelsLab Yup it was called Virus on the ST and Amiga. By far the most superior version was Zarch due to the colour and speed!

[@AdamAinsworth]

Awesome video as always! Just to save you some time, you can use the rubber band select to highlight all those disk images and then set the type in bulk by middle clicking. Also, Shift-PrtScn works as Shift-Break (and likewise with Ctrl) but you might end up rebooting RISC OS instead of the BBC.

[@sinitronics]

OMG nostalgia overload!!!! Was sooo hopign you would launch JetSet Willy that and manic miner were the first 2 games I ever played on a spectrum 48k lol. Pen Down (English and Welsh versions) and Artisan were 2 programs we used alot on the archimedes back in school. Not going to mention taking top row magazines into school and scanning them in then putting the images on a floppy disk for everyone XD

[@SarahC2]

They were cool, the paint program and other apps were written in Arch BASIC! You could write your own without an IDE.

[@timetorelaxfocus9642]

A very elegant looking OS, thanks.

[@BottIsNotABot]

ahh the memories. Always wonder how RISCOS would have ended up had it carried on fully back in the day, but great to see it's still alive and looking good!

[@fuzzywzhe]

With regard to RiscOS, we are rapidly approaching the point where operating systems are irrelevant. We're actually already there. 99% of people only use their computer to connect to the net. I expect a return of a lot of systems, and an explosion of news operating systems.

[@MrLukealbanese]

Superb Dan, well done indeed.

[@randomperson6548775]

Wicked. I didn't know there was a second distribution for Raspberry Pi. Checking it out soon for sure :-)

[@fuzzywzhe]

There's AROS as well, which is (I think) a rebuild of the Amiga OS. It's pretty broken, but you can run it, kind of.

[@inwedavid6919]

Yes the robotic arm can be baught, I have it for my daugter and it works fine, great that the software exist for Archimede

[@AgentSmith2K]

OMG this brings back so many memories

[@GlennBurgess78]

Pretty sure that organiser app dates back to my days using RISC OS in the early 90s. So I guess the Filofax style was probably a reasonable visual metaphor at the time it was originally written! Kind of amazing to see it in a current distribution.

[@wanderingfool6312]

Unfortunately the Archimedes wasn’t released until after I left school, so it was all BBC micros, remember programming the odd game like Blitz. But the graphic user interface I knew as WIMP on the Amiga, virus was a great game though, once you got used to the controls. My wife did use acorn computers at work for graphic design up until the millennium.

[@hkhj139]

you are so detailed oriented KZbinr.. great video

[@SproutyPottedPlant]

I ❤️ RISC OS!

[@koma-k]

That apple and the MG are actually vector graphics files... I think they originally came as examples with Computer Concepts' vector graphics application ArtWorks (later bought by Corel IIRC - don't remember what it was renamed to).

[@stoojinator]

Hahaha. That "Tandy is Shit" just killed me! That must have been a worldwide thing, as I'm in Australia (Darwin at the time) and we used to go to the Tandy stores and type the same thing. If you do a semicolon at the end, it appends the text and makes it scroll vertically and horizontally. Good times.

[@005AGIMA]

This looks really good. Looks like it's running as if it was meant to be. Almost as if, it's the OS the Pi should have shipped with. Love it.

[@mrat42]

Wonderful. Folio was a a game changing word processor for the BBC micro. The first WP accessible by the youngest pupils, and the large print outs were unbelievable at the time. It does hold a record, it was licensed to be used for more users in the UK than any other WP at the time. Perhaps it still is ! Virtually every Local Education Authority bought a license to use it for all children and teachers in all schools, hence the huge user base, millions of children. It was very very inexpensive at the time, a few hundred pounds for a local authority. It was not the on screen WP facilities that made it great, it was the large print on a dot matrix printer. Totally revolutionary. The first time teachers could print “professional” LARGE text. Really large at the time. Great for classroom displays. And a range of fonts designed for the primary school. If there were a “Hall of Fame” for the most impactful piece of educational software, this might be number 1.

[@Thrakus]

It also helps the ip holders by making backups as Burt hurt as Nintendo acts, they had to download all the roms they sell as even they had no backups. People found this out as they forgot to remove the rom code , which was funny watching people call them out on it,

[@Hutschnur]

I envy british students for having BBC micros and Archimedes as platform back in the day. Can't tell how mindblown I would have been to see a graphical interface on my computer in school. We had C128s using some kind of special programming language (cant't recall the name of it) designed for school computers which was for learning programming fundementals. Needless to say that this was far from having fun with a computer.

[@jeffyp2483]

logo? was that the programming language?

[@PaoloFabioZaino]

Dan another great video, thanks! Quick notes (hopefully helpful): "Discs" (aka Resources) shows you the NETWORK shared discs from other RISC OS systems (still compatible with old RISC OS making if super simple to transfer files between machines). RobotArm does indeed control the real RobotArm in the picture an dit's super cool. Omni is a client for Microsoft SMB, NFS and also old Apple network file sharing protocol. For the network browsers I definitely recommend to use Iris (a commercial one) which is based on modern Web Kit and so supports pretty much every modern website and javascripts. Iris it's very powerful and definitely way ahead of any browser for all retro OS. At this time RISC OS nightly build support max 4GB of RAM and there are now releases that also support 8GB of RAM. Cheers :)

[@jyvben1520]

thanks for the info

[@leeshepherd6512]

Iris will be an incredible browser and it will be free of charge. It’s still in beta at the moment but it should be released soon.

[@DarenPage]

That thumbnail encompasses my experiences with BBC micros at school!

[@98SE]

I cant believe you only have 62K subscribers! Great Video, I've subscribed! :)

[@Florin76]

You just open my appetite to buy an RPi400 and play with RISC OS :)

[@SelfIndulgentGamer]

This and the FMTowns are two machines I would love to own :)

[@batlin]

X68000 seems pretty sweet too, some crazy games on it.

[@msc2002]

A lot better distribution than the RISC OS on the Raspberry PI website. So rapid on a PI400

[@another3997]

Well, RiscOS isn't an OS supported directly by the Pi Foundation, they have enough on their plate with Raspian, so it's no surprise they only provide a plain vanilla version. The primary distribution on the RiscOS website is generally bereft of third party software too. I dare say they have limited time and resources which are better spent on keeping the OS itself up to date.

[@TheFlyingScotsmanTV]

i used to like the bbc micro emulator on my amiga. Used to like running emulators on amiga - macintosh, etc. I wrote my final year thesis using LateX on an amiga - that was .. challenging.. but it let me take a disk into uni, pop it into an HP Unix workstation and continue editing there. There was no other home computer you could do that in as far as I know.

[@bigwave_dave8468]

Hmmm...Here in the USA, GW Basic [Microsoft, and avalable on MS-DOS machines like the Zenith Z100] was pretty advanced and superceeded PC Basic [the original Microsoft Basic for IBM-PC]. In the late 80's, folks were loading assembler into the Commodore PET vie the embedded Microsoft Basic Peek/Poke. Also, though not available to mere mortals, HP Basic for the HP 9845 was hugely expanded and if memory serves, supported Pascal-like procedures.

[@steph291]

at 10:35 minutes, you show the RiscOS Organizer.... It looks like Lotus Organizer !!! I loved that software, amazing :)

[@gdparry2727]

We made do with BBCs and RM Nimbus pcs. I'd have loved an Acorn. Looking to get a Pi soon for project (Amiga/Streaming) - might add RiscOS as well.

[@slowlymakingsmoke]

Killer video Dan. It certainly was a quirky machine, but really shows how the 16but machines still had their own personalities. I never had those machines at our school, we had the exciting world of IBM DOS machines. Yeah, contain yourself, it was the pinnacle of computing…;)

[@leeshepherd6512]

32 bit!

[@slowlymakingsmoke]

@@leeshepherd6512 I do apologise Lee, it tend to forget that. The 16bit generation was in full swing when it came out, so often gets lumped in with them. Another injustice corrected. 😁

[@MadBrit26]

Brilliant - ah the memories and the Witch!!

[@sm98710]

Just to clarify, the M1 Max does not use ARM architecture, Apple only licensed ARM instruction set. The M1 is Apple Silicon and it uses their own proprietary architecture. RISC wasn’t always power efficient, as you can see with SGI and Motorola G series processors. Apple lead a team in the early 90’s to make a version of ARM to be power efficient for their Newton and Motorola agreed to join the effort for their phone business

[@another3997]

Actually your terminology and your info is wrong. Apple licence the ARM ISA (Instruction Set Architecture), which includes the instruction set and how the processor must present itself to the outside world. How the processor is designed to work internally is up to the manufacturer, as long as it presents the ARM ISA outwardly. Intel and AMD have been using the x86 ISA for decades. Yet internally, their chips do not work like real x86 chips such as the 386/486. They actually use a microcoded RISC core that breaks down x86 instructions. The original ARM 1 processor was incredibly energy efficient and, for the time, very fast. But CPU designers can choose how energy efficient or perfomant they want a processor to be, nobody says ARM or RISC has to be low power, any more than they say it has to be ultra fast. Intel's Atom x86 CPU was a perfect example of this type of profiling.

[@The_Boctor]

Knew about Top Banana, but didn't expect to see it here. The same team's later game, Big Bang, feels even more acid house.

[@bobmcbob4399]

Yeah, Top Banana was really out there

[@SarahC2]

IF you held the left shift button while clicking on a !App folder...... I think that was the combination to open the app folder, rather than run the app. Inside is lots of files, Boot, images, program code..... it was interesting to see.

[@ovemalmstrom7428]

This is what AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS should be aming for.

[@seanclark6438]

The BBC micro there was one in my reception classroom in 1993/94 also remember three button mice anyone remember Granny’s Garden, thank god for Windows

[@lfrankow]

I've wanted to get into Raspberry Pi for a bit, now. Nice to know there is a robust OS besides the Linux flavors that runs well on it. Makes the hardware even more attractive.

[@wysiwyg2006]

I had an atari ste for games then a falcon. my friend who was into programming had an archimedes and I loved the lemmings, lander versions on it, vastly superior, had good scene demos too

[@lmlmd2714]

I always had Atari at home (still do!). I feel the Falcon had so much crippled potential. It was a really powerful machine but Atari really hobbled it with the 16Mhz bus and ST style case. People have done some amazing stuff with it over the years though and feel it really deserved a better chance than it got - but yeah, to be brutally honest, much as a I love Atari - it's true the Acorn machines were much more mature and less compromised designs - the advantage of having a large institutional de-facto captive market and lots of vendors on board from the get go, which Atari really, really didn't get the importance of.

[@britonkraemer7344]

Cool stuff!!

[@darkstar1360]

21:22 I have that exact robot arm in the picture (same colour and everthing), and it can be controlled by a computer via usb. So that is more than likely software to control it.

[@RichardPeterShon]

wow nostalgic we used the black n white acorns

[@CesareVesdani]

I used to play Fervour, Moonquake, Marsquake and Phaethon on RISC OS 3.11. Is it possible to download those for the Raspberry Pi? Those were my all-time favourite four games for the RISC OS 3.11 operating system, which ran on an actual Acorn Archimedes computer.

[@globetrotterdk]

Thanks for the video. RiscOS is new to me. My first computer was an Amstrad PCW 8256. What is the notation program open at the end of your video?

[@BernardUK]

😀 Dan, your video is one of the best to explore RISC OS in its modern form. But, like all such introductions that I have seen, it focuses on nostalgia and gaming, and so doesn't do justice to the many quality apps that make the OS more practical and useful for everyday use than you imply. For one thing, a random walk around some of the apps in the RISC OS Direct distro could be a tad more informed as to their function, quality and value. Given that the OS is receiving updates from RISC OS Open and RISC OS Developments all the time, that RISC OS Direct is not the only richly endowed distro, and that there exists a community who use it all the time for general use (me included), I wonder if it would be feasible to create a second episode that delves a little deeper? I'd be happy to assist.

[@josefont11]

I never play with any of the computers from the Acorn era, but it was fun seeing what you guys were able to do and learn. I am wondering if this software would work on a modern ARM/RISC base computer. Thank you.

[@gonegahgah]

I worked for a guy who was selling them. Unlike the OP I didn't like that you had to manually adjust resources; like space for sprites, etc! Seemed pretty arcaine to be?

[@lordpurchase9189]

I want to play Badger Trails, Granny's Garden, Around the World in 80 Days, Darryl the Dragon. Fun School 4. There were so many games I'll never see again. I've not been able to find any of the games I remember from the Acorn.

[@adr-richard5581]

In the Late 80's my school was still running BBC's >.

[@nickblack9891]

Folio! OMG I was 10yo again for a few seconds,. Good job 😀

[@sketter1969]

very good

[@TheFlyingScotsman]

Folio was the first word processor I ever used!! That and Prompt Writer

[@gumbi79]

never seen grannies garden , the game that everyone remembers about the beeb is Chucky egg

[@someusername1]

There was also a game that came on the Model B's 'Welcome' tape that was a very simple farming simulation if I remember correctly. I greatly enjoyed playing that. Can't remember that name of it. And of course Elite on the BBC... fantastic game.

[@scarter9447]

Everyone in my old school library used to play Tea Shop :)

[@sneakyrussian2600]

Brazil Was the first operating system for an ARM in 1986 and pre dates Arthur / RISC OS

[@Archimedes75009]

Any info on Brazil ?

[@Vlad-1986]

Tried on the Pi0, as a comment said, and the experience was amazing. Tried on the PI400, and not so much (no Internet connection). Not the worst thing in the world, but it makes everything a bit harder. Apart from that, this is a good OS for the PI, much better than the default, boring Debian!

[@richardwicks4190]

Looks like they've improved it a lot. I tried RiscOS like a year ago, and I had the impression it was quite unstable at the time. Or maybe that was AROS - that's the Amiga equivalent.

[@another3997]

RiscOS has been stable for years on the Pi. Obviously when certain new Pi models come out, it takes a bit of time to test and adapt the OS to run on them, but otherwise stability isn't an issue. AROS on the other hand is the total opposite, still being in the very early stages of development. Which is a shame, because the Pi and ARM are ideal platforms for such an OS.