As someone who went to school in the UK in the 80-90s, I grew up with acorns, and eventually, in Year 9, our school had a RiscPC! The Teacher managed to get it with the 486 card, allowing PC software to also run on it. Amazing machine! Thank you for this trip into the past!
Not a problem! For me my Infant School started throwing away their supply of A7000 machines (I naturally even back then asked if I could bring one home, and they declined), so I never used an Acorn in any meaningful way in the education system... I'm just fortunate my Dad was/is a massive RISC OS user and my first few machines WERE Acorns! They are truly remarkable computers and I'm glad I managed to soup one up to this point! 😄
It's a beautiful setup. Acorn has never been available where I'm from, but we did have our share of weird architectures, including Palm PDP-compatible microcomputers.
What a lovely setup. Technology moved forward so quickly back then, and like many others, Acorn couldn't keep up. It's such a shame they didn't release the Phoebe before leaving the market. My only experience of RiscOS is on the Raspberry Pi, and it's very different to Amiga Workbench or Windows 3 that I used back then. In the early and mid 1980s, the school I went to had a very limited number of computers. I don't recall them even having a BBC Micro, but a ZX81, a Tandy TRS80 or two and a Research Machines, Z80 based monstrosity... but we had no computer studies classes. 😂
I do agree that it's a shame the Phoebe never made it to market - would've been an amazing system and maybe there would be a GFX-accelerated Quake for the system/OS like the Classic Amigas have under Voodoo! 😩
What a great video. I think the two slice RISC Pc is the best looking of all the possible versions out there. The single slice is just two small, while anything over two, seems too bulky. I am sure you will have many years enjoying the pinnacle of Acorn computers and RISC OS.
I have an A4/10 waiting for me to fix it up, and some riscos 3.1 roms.. I love the archimedes. We had them at school and I always wanted one but they were too expensive!
I think you are the first one who has shown one of these that I have seen. I didn't know they made a desktop PC like that with all those expansion options or much past the BBC micro style of computers of everything built into the keyboard . Going to look at the wiki it seems they made a laptop and a pocket pc too that I didn't know about. To be fair they were not really a thing in the states but I kinda want to get my hands on one to see where it all started with the Arm platform. It's on the list after replacing the Amigas I lost to time.
Sorry for the delay in my response! Going into this project I thought Acorn was the "British Apple", but I think it's more accurate to say the Archimedes (the predecessor line) and the RiscPC is the "British Amiga". There are plenty of videos on the RiscPC on TH-cam: the most popular one is from "RMC - The Cave"... Though his video did irritate me slightly as he encountered some issues that are really simple to sort out! /lh 😅 I'd say the Classic Amiga is in better hands then these Acorns are: there is an upgrade for the RiscPC called the "Viewfinder", which is an ATi Rage in a AGP to Podule adapter and some special software to make it work, but no one made an OpenGL driver so there are no 3D accelerated games on the platform compared to Amiga; it's more like an RTG card... The same could be said for CPU upgrades - the closest thing we have to an "Accerator" card is "Kinetic" which is INSANELY rare and expensive (same with Viewfinder), and there is no modern substitutes compared to the Amiga (the Warp 1260 and the FPGA Icedrake comes to mind) which sucks! Recently there have been new upgrades for a 100MBPs NIC and a IDE controller (not the one I used as I wasn't aware of it at the time); but the options pales in comparison to what y'all have! 😩
@@MMusselwhite97 Too be fair the Amiga was not as popular here either. Only reason I was into it was because I took an animation class in the early 90s and managed to score one of the hopped up 1200s from the class (for 100 bucks with the monitor) it was stored at my folks house and was given away. I still want a 2000/4000 toaster because I always wanted one. That's why I don't want to go the emulated or FPGA route. I want a real Amiga I can plug real Amiga stuff into. If I ever did youtube I would use it for production. That's kinda what I thought or assumed from everything I have seen about the Acorn/BBC computers were like the Apple II was here. Chances are if you were an 80s kid you had one or more in your classroom and was likely the first "pc" you ever used.
CJE Micro's still have some of the Castle ones (like what I used) available - so your best bet is there! I admittedly need to backup the USB stick software "!SoftSCSI" onto archive.org along with the drivers for the "Mozart" board... I just haven't got around to it yet! 😅
Any chance you could do a play-through of Starfighter 3000? Other than a Arch. menu demo and a lot of the Sega/Console versions on TH-cam, there is very little of this game online. Great video and many thanks for the nostalgia trip!
I'll probably do that when I start livestreaming up again in the coming weeks... I won't do the entire game as it is like 117 levels, and either it'll get too difficult for me, or I'll get bored. It doesn't help that the way the game saves your progress doesn't include the upgrades you bought! 😅
As someone who went to school in the UK in the 80-90s, I grew up with acorns, and eventually, in Year 9, our school had a RiscPC! The Teacher managed to get it with the 486 card, allowing PC software to also run on it. Amazing machine! Thank you for this trip into the past!
Not a problem! For me my Infant School started throwing away their supply of A7000 machines (I naturally even back then asked if I could bring one home, and they declined), so I never used an Acorn in any meaningful way in the education system... I'm just fortunate my Dad was/is a massive RISC OS user and my first few machines WERE Acorns! They are truly remarkable computers and I'm glad I managed to soup one up to this point! 😄
It's a beautiful setup. Acorn has never been available where I'm from, but we did have our share of weird architectures, including Palm PDP-compatible microcomputers.
What a lovely setup. Technology moved forward so quickly back then, and like many others, Acorn couldn't keep up. It's such a shame they didn't release the Phoebe before leaving the market. My only experience of RiscOS is on the Raspberry Pi, and it's very different to Amiga Workbench or Windows 3 that I used back then. In the early and mid 1980s, the school I went to had a very limited number of computers. I don't recall them even having a BBC Micro, but a ZX81, a Tandy TRS80 or two and a Research Machines, Z80 based monstrosity... but we had no computer studies classes. 😂
I do agree that it's a shame the Phoebe never made it to market - would've been an amazing system and maybe there would be a GFX-accelerated Quake for the system/OS like the Classic Amigas have under Voodoo! 😩
Hoping you have many happy years with it :) I have to admit, as an old IT person, I wince whenever I see someone working on a machine without ESD.
What a great video. I think the two slice RISC Pc is the best looking of all the possible versions out there. The single slice is just two small, while anything over two, seems too bulky.
I am sure you will have many years enjoying the pinnacle of Acorn computers and RISC OS.
Amazing video! I remember these at secondary school, i used to play the 3d het game to kill time and doodle on the paint program
Well done! Peak Acorn
I have an A4/10 waiting for me to fix it up, and some riscos 3.1 roms.. I love the archimedes. We had them at school and I always wanted one but they were too expensive!
everything about it is super cool
but damn, that case is super neat!
I think you are the first one who has shown one of these that I have seen. I didn't know they made a desktop PC like that with all those expansion options or much past the BBC micro style of computers of everything built into the keyboard . Going to look at the wiki it seems they made a laptop and a pocket pc too that I didn't know about. To be fair they were not really a thing in the states but I kinda want to get my hands on one to see where it all started with the Arm platform. It's on the list after replacing the Amigas I lost to time.
Sorry for the delay in my response! Going into this project I thought Acorn was the "British Apple", but I think it's more accurate to say the Archimedes (the predecessor line) and the RiscPC is the "British Amiga".
There are plenty of videos on the RiscPC on TH-cam: the most popular one is from "RMC - The Cave"... Though his video did irritate me slightly as he encountered some issues that are really simple to sort out! /lh 😅
I'd say the Classic Amiga is in better hands then these Acorns are: there is an upgrade for the RiscPC called the "Viewfinder", which is an ATi Rage in a AGP to Podule adapter and some special software to make it work, but no one made an OpenGL driver so there are no 3D accelerated games on the platform compared to Amiga; it's more like an RTG card... The same could be said for CPU upgrades - the closest thing we have to an "Accerator" card is "Kinetic" which is INSANELY rare and expensive (same with Viewfinder), and there is no modern substitutes compared to the Amiga (the Warp 1260 and the FPGA Icedrake comes to mind) which sucks! Recently there have been new upgrades for a 100MBPs NIC and a IDE controller (not the one I used as I wasn't aware of it at the time); but the options pales in comparison to what y'all have! 😩
@@MMusselwhite97 Too be fair the Amiga was not as popular here either. Only reason I was into it was because I took an animation class in the early 90s and managed to score one of the hopped up 1200s from the class (for 100 bucks with the monitor) it was stored at my folks house and was given away. I still want a 2000/4000 toaster because I always wanted one. That's why I don't want to go the emulated or FPGA route. I want a real Amiga I can plug real Amiga stuff into. If I ever did youtube I would use it for production.
That's kinda what I thought or assumed from everything I have seen about the Acorn/BBC computers were like the Apple II was here. Chances are if you were an 80s kid you had one or more in your classroom and was likely the first "pc" you ever used.
Can you still get that USB adapter podule? I guess i kinda missed out on that.
CJE Micro's still have some of the Castle ones (like what I used) available - so your best bet is there!
I admittedly need to backup the USB stick software "!SoftSCSI" onto archive.org along with the drivers for the "Mozart" board... I just haven't got around to it yet! 😅
Oh lord please don't wear something with dangly sleeves when working inside computers, that gave me palpitations! Otherwise great video 😂
What about the Hydra card - for multi cpu?
Any chance you could do a play-through of Starfighter 3000? Other than a Arch. menu demo and a lot of the Sega/Console versions on TH-cam, there is very little of this game online. Great video and many thanks for the nostalgia trip!
I'll probably do that when I start livestreaming up again in the coming weeks... I won't do the entire game as it is like 117 levels, and either it'll get too difficult for me, or I'll get bored. It doesn't help that the way the game saves your progress doesn't include the upgrades you bought! 😅
what is that game at 1:07?
That was !Darkwood! You can find it on "The Icon Bar"'s download page! 😉
@MMusselwhite97 thank you : )