ChinnyVision - Ep 280 - Acorn Archimedes A3000 System Review
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 ก.ค. 2024
- A review that has taken 2 years and 3 machines! ChinnyVision looks at the Acorn Archimedes A3000, a familiar site in classrooms of the early 90's. It's 32 bit ARM processor leaves a legacy that still impacts each and every one of us today. We look at the machine, some of the software and the pitfalls you may come across when trying to buy one.
Note the video says the machine has a pre-emptive multitasking operating system like the Amiga. It does not. It switches. Sorry for the mistake.
/ chinnyhill10
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The video says the machine has a pre-emptive multitasking operating system like the Amiga. It does not. It switches. Sorry for the mistake, it's what I was told by my Acorn owning friend many years ago when Windows 95 launched!
Well, it kinda does; the module system was pre-emptive. You're wrong about the colours, by the way; the VIDC was capable of 4096 colours, but only had 16 palette entries, so you could either select 16 from 4096, or 16 base hues which would be available in 16 tints, in 256 colour mode. It was quite a bit better than the Amiga from that point of view.
Oh, and the mouse port is actually compatible with the Microsoft Bus Mouse standard. If you believe it or not.
Which probably explains why you can run an Amiga mouse directly from the header on the main board. Of course the problem is still that you need a 3 button mouse for the OS and Amiga mice don't have them. Probably easier to buy one of the adaptors and 3 button mice kits from Ebay.
Amiga has 64 in EHB mode. And of course you can throw in the custom chip effects and you can get far more than that on screen without needing to touch HAM. I think some games claim as many as 120!
I think I do say its 4096 colours with 256 available but you can only choose the first 16 and the remaining ones are system defined depending on your choice.
I was going to correct that but I saw your post 😁
I absolutely loved my A3000 with arm3. Having something that powerful back then when I also had an Amiga 1200 was a genuine delight. Loved my Amiga too just as much but of the few games on the Archimedes that were genuinely worth playing, the experience in pure 3d terms was always so impressive. Hardly surprising of course. The OS too was impressively unique and had built in basic. Great times. I now use Risc OS on Raspberry pi
I recall Zarch was written in basic which puts things into perspective a bit
"You named that one chip wrong. Reeeeeeeee!" lol
Fantastic machine.
I had an A3000 from about 1991 onwards, and it's a hugely underappreciated machine, IMO.
Obviously lots of good memories of using the Archie at school as well back then.
BBC BASIC IV on the Archie is great, too. It makes it easy to draw pixels and use the mouse etc.
Anyone who thinks the Archie is underpowered compared to the Amiga needs to load up Starfighter 3000. ;)
(the Amiga is great too, of course, but yeah, the Archie is a classic too.)
We had these at school. They were the nuts at the time. I also remember when I was at school being asked to carry a 20MB RM Link 480Z server hard drive out to where the bins were. It took two of us to carry, it would have made a great coffee table!
1. The last BBC Micro was one of the later A30x0 systems powered using an ARM250 (the very first SoC) though it did omit the owl logo.
2. The StrongARM was a processor designed by DEC Semiconductor based on the ARM2. It could be fitted to an A3000 but only by a dealer as the processor was soldered in.
3. Only one of the A30x0, the A3010, series had green keys. The other, the A3020, had red keys.
4. Yes, my A3000 went the same way. *Sob*
5. Last Ninjabread! Reminds me of Microsoft Bob!
I'd pin this but I had to pin my more glaring error.
Sophie Wilson is a bloody genius!
All of them involved in the ARM chip were.
To be fair, the comparable Amiga 500/1000 can technically have 64 colors of a total of 4096 in its palette simultaneously in EHB mode although it only permits the direct choice of up to 32.
I heard you mention that someone went ballistic when you called a chip by it’s wrong name.... I find your videos a constant source of wonder and enjoyment! bravo chinny
The thing was, I even prefixed it with "I could be wrong" or some such!
Loved this video Chinny. I've traded a few A3000s and A3010s in the past, all of which were ex-schools computers, that were more often than not, bearing horrible security markings to the case - from permanent marker stencilling at best, to melted plastic branding of the school's name. I bought around a dozen of them around 2001 from a local school in Boston, Lincolnshire for a donation of around £5 each, with colour monitors, along with a load of Apple Mac LCIIs as they were all going to be dumped. It's never a machine I used for more than a few minutes, or had any interest in at the time, as I was more into other systems. I didn't even keep one of them. I was under the ill-informed opinion that it was just an overly expensive, pretty useless machine that wasn't capable of playing decent games, especially compared to the Amiga. Thanks for putting me straight - it's so much better than that :)
They are lovely. Just get a bad rep from bad schools software. Not really scratched the surface here either. More to come.
Awesome! thank you for your perseverance!! as many here, my main encounter with the Archie was at secondary school.
Really enjoyed that, nice thorough look at the system, thanks for sharing :)
I remember these boxes from my school days. Trying to use a lot of graphics with DTP was quite a challenge with the limited memory in the machines we had access to. And the hours trying to learn word processing using 1st Word Plus and coding using COMAL then doing something graphical with Artisan (maybe even PRO Artisan if we were lucky).
Oh god, this takes me back. Had a lot of fun on a machine just like this one, a long time ago.
Another great Video Chinny. Loved the Arcs at school and hte RISC PC.. Had a RISC PC myself until last year.. They're really underrated machines.
A great video, thank you! I remember Archie’s from comprehensive and still keep up to date with the OS today. It’s definitely worth a go on a Raspberry Pi.
35:00 the box of diskettes spread over table brings back my Acorn memories
"Zig Zag" was a BBC schools series to support the history curriculum. The only episode I remember was that one about the Norman invasion with the ridiculously annoying song that went: "1066, 1066, 1066 at Hastings"...
Nice video, I look forward to seeing what it can really do in the follow-up video, which will be plenty if the tasters in this video are anything to go by. I was too old for archies at school and never touched one until a few years ago, but I did spend many nights drooling over the technical documentation.
I think my first port of call is that huge stack of floppies that came with the first machine. Full of school related stuff. If it's half as good as the work of Belinda, we're in for a treat!
That Acorn mouse reminds me of my AMX mouse that I had for my Amstrad CPC 464 back in the day.
Beautiful opening pun. :)
I'm fan of arm, don't misread me, but it is important to note that IPS (Instructions per second) is not a good comparison between RISC and CISC machines. That the Arm in this machine could perform 4mega instructions per second is cool, but each of those instructions is mch simpler than those of a machine like the x86, a Complex Instruction Set processor. For example, if the average equivalence between average CISC instructions and their RISC equivalents equates to (arbitrary number) ten instructions, then the arm in this video would only be marginally faster than an x86 processor running at a similar clock rate. To do the same as a single CISC instruction, a CISC machine may have to execute many instructions, therefore a measure such as Drystones or FLOPS would be a better benchmark to compare the two architectures in a given implementation. For a wonderful book on this issue, please see "High Speed Computer Architecture".
Another great video and an interesting overview of the Acorn Archimedes!
I remember using these in primary school and really enjoyed them at the time, particularly a piece of software called 'Vikings' which probably ran exactly like that 'Romans' one. I did laugh at that 'Last Ninja' comment too. Haha!
I wouldn't mind adding one of these to my collection as I used to use one in my youth but they are relatively uncommon in Northern Ireland, and eBay appears to be a bit of a crap shoot for a working one.
Yep, the only way to buy one is to get one from someone who has one working and has a new battery. Otherwise you get one full of battery rot and it may have knocked out vital components you cannot easily replace.
oh my goodness, I feel like such a nerd for getting that pun at the start, lol.
look at the product placement on the keyboard :) Great pens btw
If I do something, I like to do it as well as I can. No plastic pens here!
@@chinnyvision I've still got mine and they're going strong :)
Looks like a ZIP ram exapasion module, the Amiga 3000 use ZIPs, as well as some other Amiga 2000 CPU cards, a weird in between thingy of the late 80s and very early 90s between the old DRAM chips and SIMMs.
I think my Packard Bell PC needed those for a video memory upgrade but even Packard Bell didn't know where to get them!
StrongARM… a subtle reference there.
hello do you know about lander on the acorn risc os ? did it have sound can any 1 recall if it had sound ???? thanks
Hello how do u turn on switch on sound on lander? or download the lander with sound? thanks
I used an acorn archimedes back at college i but im not sure if lander had sound thanks
Hooray! :D
Pretty certain we had this or a variant in primary school all the way through the 90s
Remember highschool still using these until around 2000 2001 before it was all pc
can risc os 2 have a hard disc drive too? will it notice one? thanks.
Do you know lander ???? On this acorn does it have sound???? How do I obtain or download a version with sound???? Thanks.
Hi, mate I really find this machine astonishing as in OUR day we were surely playing on the AMIGA A 500/600 (I never wanted a a 600 as it was nothing compared with the a1200 upgrade) or ATARI st FALCON!
I have recently looked at the specs and they were fantastic compared with even the AMIGA A 1200.
I would just like to say you can control/clean up a lot of circuit boards and more importantly neutralize the rot my cleaning the board with a TOOTH BRUSH AND BICARBONATE OF SODA:)
I have owned computers from the earlier 80`s to the present day and have brought systems from the dead doing this my learned friend:)
PS have you played ZARCH compared with VIRUS! on the Amiga/st.
Clearly we are from the same computer era and you make me a very happy man as you too appreciate the old tech, you made me smile and I thank you for your upload, I will of course subscribe:)
PPS I know this may make you cross but could you please recommend an Archimedes emulator for the PC please?
Thank you and please keep the fantastic videos uploads going as I REALLY like your channel, god bless ye mate.
The original board was too far gone. No amount of cleaning would make it work unless you have the replacement chips. Components were falling off the board with the slightest touch. I'd generally recommend white vinegar for battery damage.
the thing is though Lander did have sound at some point and the disc with Lander with sound is somewhere out there or on the internet for download etc. can anyone help me out with this please? I really want Lander with sound many thanks. David Braben wrote a Lander with sound but then deleted the sound module of the game many thanks.
on risc os 2 did lander have sound? thanks........ cos on the Acorn intro video from 1989 there was sound in lander really strange this is.......
Did this ages ago so can't remember but I would have been recording sound.
where can i download haunted house adf files ? for the archimedes ???? thanks
Do u know Lander on this machine? did it ever have sound? thanks........ also do u know much about Dragon or Tandy 16k? thanks.......
Actually the 256 colour mode is set and you can put the 256 colours anywhere on the screen - 4096 colours in total. Restricted and can be changed but work with hues and the like. Games often used the 320x256 256 colour mode, but some ports were done from the Atari ST version as opposed to the Amiga versions looking bad!
That's not entirely true. The hardware has only 16 palette registers but displays 256 colours, and it does this trick by splitting each 8-bit value into two parts: the final colour is determined by using the bottom 4 bits as a palette index, while the top 4 bits contribute 50% red, 50% green, 50% blue and 25% green for each one that was set.
While you can display all of the 256 colours in any position on the screen other than the 16 colours that are chosen the rest are tints (Acorn term) Now with some experimentation you can get a workable pallet but it was a limitation. Much later RISCPC's got this chip upgraded.
Just a point of order: the A3000 didn't use the StrongARM, this chipset was introduced in the very late '90s and was an upgrade for the RiscPC600 & 700 series (which were brilliant machines).
I usually try a weak opening pun. In this case the link was perhaps just a tad too tenuous.
do you know how to launch games from the winuae desktop 3.1 or 1.3???? i mean from cf card or winuae hard disc?? thanks how do i configure the winuae program? thanks
Sorry but I use a real Amiga, not an emulator. I have no idea.
The question you are asking is more complicated than it 1st appears. Most games that the Amiga has are booted directly from floppy by passing loading of the OS/Workbench. Others require the OS setup on a hard drive and then you can install from the disc. Next are the WHDLoad games which are floppy bootable games that have been patched and repackaged to be installed to a hard drive.
When I mention Floppy with WinUAE you are substituting that with an ADF file (basicaly an image of the floppy including the track layout) CF cards are often a substitute for a HDD
Setting up WinUAE is relatively easy once you know the Amiga, but the Amiga isn't like windows so it will feel a bit odd. Take a look at a video by "Ms Mad Lemon"
called "Amiga - Winuae Virtual setup drive (Tutorial)"
I have a real Amiga (using real hardware puts me in a different gear) but I often use WinUAE for when I'm testing something out including different hardware configurations and sometimes just because on the PC I have, it gives me an Amiga more powerful than any ever sold.
my uncle has an Acorn Archimedes 3000, do you know if this computer is anything worth? ..
Mine was an earlier model, the PSU was encased in cardboard not metal :D
is emulation exactly the same as the real thing does any 1 know?? thanks.........
MIPS is only a useful comparison of performance between CPUs of the same family, the comparison doesn't work between a CISC and a RISC since naturally a RISC needs to run more instructions per second since there's less instructions. So what is probably a single instruction on a CISC chip may need about 10-15 on a RISC.
Where these things ever sold outside of the uk
Possibly some European countries in limited quantities. My first machine was from Germany but the documentation clearly shows it was purchased by a Brit teaching out there and it was shipped over from a UK supplier.
My only experience with the Archimedes has been through emulation. I found it kind of confusing that some programs could be run by double-clicking them, but you could also open them and look inside them.
Unfortunately I've been spoiled by the excellent C64 and Amiga emulators that are available and was sorely disappointed with the primitive state of Archimedes emulators. No save states, no joystick support, etc. One company made a big deal out of their commercial product, Virtual Acorn, but they seem to be obsessed with the idea of people running RISC on a modern system, rather than actually emulating a real Archimedes. They charge hundreds for a copy of it and it still doesn't have save states or joystick support and they hard-coded drive zero to a real floppy drive. Meaning that there doesn't seem to be any way to boot disk images. Oh, there's also no provision to limit the emulation speed to that of a real machine.
I guess the freeware emulators run Achimedes software well enough for what little I tried. I was disappointed that you could only play Elite with a mouse though.
Belinda is Belinda!
No! Belinda is the UK!
@@chinnyvision I think we should have a final say on this subject
See @chinnyvision on Twitter. I have indeed set a vote in motion!
I think you fell foul of the words in the Roman Kitchen, Chinny! I don't think there was an actual "Mini-Game" for making bread, it is an application from the early 90's after all!
In other rooms you do tasks so no reason to assume you don't in the kitchen.
It was very strange that Acorn went form the (wonderfully) clunky silly-number-of-chips massive box that wasn't very good at games BBC Micro/Proton to something that may well be evidence of time travel. It really was ten years ahead of its time. But yeah, typically of Acorn it wasn't marketed for games even though it could out perform all the home machines at pretty much everything (don't tell the Amiga owners!) and had some impressively meh/rubbish software as seen in this video!
But now in the world of all the games ever via disk emulation or USB hard disk adaptors, it has the best versions of Zool (fast mode!!), Cannon Fodder, Chuck Rock, Zarch/Virus and Elite. As-good-as versions of stuff like Lemmings (although I prefer the Amiga version) and probably the only 80s home micro that could do 3D reasonably well (definitely don't tell Amiga owners any of that! Wait... I *am* an Amiga owner! I am incensed! blah blah custom chips blah!)
CD32 version of Zool may disagree :-)
@@chinnyvision Ooh, hadn't seen that one. That is nice. I wonder if my A1200 will run it on whdload?
There is a AGA version as well. But the CD32 has Red Book audio.
Anybody know why the A3010 and A3020 series failed/were canned by Acorn? At a time when Atari dropped home computers and Irving Gould's bonus checks drove Commodore into the ground you'd think they'd clean up when the competition was useless wanker special Windows PC and overpriced ugly Macs for Fashionista losers. Hmmmm how odd, perhaps Acorn managers were just as stupid as Atari/Commodore ones.
Expensive, lack of good marketing and world class software. How many Amigas did DPaint and Shadow Of The Beast sell just from demo machines in Dixons?
@@chinnyvision Maybe 1994/5 was just unlucky time for all companies going against the budget AMD CPUs of the time with their non x86 machines. Can't remember much about advertising for the A3010/3020 machines so perhaps the marketing was mostly to existing Acorn users. Dpaint III still has no equivalent on PC for integrated animation features.