Any Acorn Archimedes love?

[dcultrapro]

hey guys, I think I may have been too young to truly appreciate the 8bit personal computer love, I had a spectrum etc and my dad had a crazy commodore that he was nuts on but when I was at secondary school we had these awesome Acorn computers, pre windows, they remind me of the Apricot pc my dad bought home one time in the early 90s.

Fondest memories of the Acorns are playing Chaos, Moonquake and lemmings in the corner while the teacher wandered round eyeing up all the fit 15 year old girls in my class lol

I'm pretty sure the Apricot at home ran windows 3.1 but can anyone explain what the Acorns ran? was it a custom operating system? Or archimedes? I know nothing about these old systems as I was too young and far too busy playing games on them !!

anyway lets share the archimedes love!!

[TL]

The Archimedes was the very first computer to use the ARM RISC chip as a processor that we now find a version of in just about every single mobile device out there! I would be willing to bet your phone has one for a start.

It was a very powerful computer but cost a lot of money so you only really saw them in schools as a replacement to the trusty BBC Micro. When I was at school we had 3 of them along side 15 BBC's and I also knew somebody who owned one too. There was some cool games on it but they were mostly just conversions of stuff I had on my ST.

[dcultrapro]

yeah I think a lot of the games were copies of Atari games, but it was pretty good fun and they had a room full of them at Rickmansworth school when I joined in 1993!! They were Acorns though, is that the same as Archimedes?

[TL]

yeah I think a lot of the games were copies of Atari games, but it was pretty good fun and they had a room full of them at Rickmansworth school when I joined in 1993!! They were Acorns though, is that the same as Archimedes?

Yep Acorn Archimedes, they replaced BBC Micro's as the UK school computers some actually had BBC badges on them.

Would have probably been one of these models:



A3000 designed to compete with the ST & Amiga



The A4000 designed as a PC competitor

[dcultrapro]

Yeah that 3rd one looks right, i loved those things!! We had bbc machines at my primary school and acorns at secondary until about 96 then we got proper windows pcs.i remember one acorn could run win 95 in the library, it was epic! My first time on the internet... aaah memories lol

[Havantgottaclue]

I don't remember playing games much on the Beeb, but I used them all the time at school. Mostly programming - I didn't dirty my hands with machine code (which I now regret) but it had a very powerful BASIC. It wasn't the most user-friendly BASIC either - lots of VDU commands to do stuff like UDGs, drawing triangles and the like, but certainly a huge step up from Commodore 64 BASIC which I was lumbered with at home.

The Archimedes I'm a big fan of, too. At our school the head of IT was a huge Acorn fanboy (did fanboys exist back then?) and he bought in loads of Archimedes machines for the computer suite and other rooms around the school. It had a terrific WIMP environment, an improvement over the ST and Amiga in my view, and it was many years before PCs had such an easy-to-use WIMP. Also we did play games on them at lunchtime, mostly Mad Professor Mariarti, Terramex, Zarch and Twin World.

Here's a Youtube video of Twin World, if anyone's interested:

Twin World Acorn Games Video Archive A3010/TV Card

If I can get my Raspberry Pi (if it ever arrives) running RISC OS5 (if it ever gets ported), I wonder if I'll be able to run some of these old games?

[TL]

Fred Harris Introduces the Acorn Archimedes BBC A3000 Part 1

[zapiy]

I never owned one of these, something I aim to change one day. Was there many games?

[TL]

I never owned one of these, something I aim to change one day. Was there many games?

A few but no where near as many as other computers

[dcultrapro]

I only ever saw about a dozen or so, maybe even less, I think the following were the best but I might have the names wrong:

Moonquake
Chaos
Lemmings
Lander (you basically just launch and land a strange looking polygonal shape, the scenary is pretty polygonal etc)
tank (from a first person view you drive around and the graphics were JUST green wire frame)


I actually can't remember any more after that! literally, you could fit all of those games on a floppy disk lol, I remember being one of the few rebels relied on to have them in class lol

[TL]

The one you called Lander is Zarch, which was released on the Amiga and ST as Virus.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALfnZjCiuUQ

[dcultrapro]

that's the badger! I could NEVER figure out how it worked as the game would load and 9/10 the ship would blow up before leaving the ground lol

[TL]

I always remember playing this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwWXloIzqAg

E-Type, a very average Outrun clone.

[Console Compulsive]

I only have the poor little Acorn Electron  Nothing as flash as the archimedes

[TL]

I saw this game recently, I have the Saturn version and had no idea it was originally an Archimedes game! 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8yLRZExpJM