Acorn - The Diamond of the UK and their legacy

[Valiant]

Everyone must have been touched in some way by the utter brilliance of this company where be it from a BBC in the classroom to having the privelage of owning a BBC Model B or Electron at home, or the true heir to the Amiga's crown in the Archimedes.

Now if some of you didn't know this fact it may suprise and shock you that Acorn were actually ahead of Microsoft at one point with the development of an operating system for the PC for IBM. Things didn't work out though due to silly Cambridge procrastination. ft:

Tell me your Acorn memories of days gone by please?

Games, memories, Grannys Garden and so forth.

Also I'm trying to track down some good Acorn websites to trace who actually holds the rights to the IP.

I think the world could do with a new Acorn computer right now containg all the positive attributes of the Atari STE, Amiga, Archimedes and PC.

I dream of such a low cost complete package computer emeging again...free of Windows and Microsoft. It would of course run Linux plus come in built with it's own OPEN SOURCE operating system similar to the Amiga's but now much more advanced.

Any help on this matter and that of gathering information on the corporate history of Acorn would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[C']

The only game that remember for the BBC was Dread Dragon Doom or something which was some sort of semi-educational title that ws the only reason I wanted to use the machine at school for.

[jabberwock1977]

I'd have to say Elite still ranks in my top 5 games ever. It really did give a feeling of adrfift being in space with infinite possiblilites. Today's designers could learn a lot from it. Though prehaps its time has gone and that style isn't so suited to todays gaming culture.

[JibberX]

You've stumbled on my weakness, I've used/owned a good majority of Acorns.

The true legacy would have to be the ARM processor, or Acorn Risc Machine processor, although they changed that to Advanced Risc Machine. A low footprint power consuming chip, no fans no heatsink, in most Mobile phones, powers the GBA, powered the 3do, powers Psions and a few Palms.

The best games I played we on RISC OS, the 32bit (24bit) operating system, which included:

Elite, the best version ever made

Stunt Racer 2000, the best racing game I've played

StarFighter 3000, the best space shooty game ever made

For history et al, try http://www.drobe.co.uk/ or http://www.vigay.com/ the scene is still alive, a true 32bit OS and hardware has been release call Iyonix runs RISC OS 5 on some kind of StrongARM XSCALE somthing or other.

[Typhoon Thompson]

Strikers run and Plan B (I think that is what it was called).

Oh yeah nand yee ar kung fu.

[MD]

The BBC Micro was okay, but it was too expensive to be a true gaming machine. The Acorn Electron was too slow and by the time it sold in any numbers was the time Dixons reduced the machine to clear....

However it did have three true classic games in the form of

Elite
Exile
Revs

Three games which were ahead of their time, thankfully Elite was converted to every machine under the sun.

Acorn buggered up with the Archiemedes first with the Arthur O/S which made MS-DOS look modern... then by remaining expensive as Commodore reduced the price of the Amiga... then by making RISC PC, which was nice but much more expensive then a PC...

Still it had Zarch (Virus) and a nice version of Elite.

[hobo]

Bizarrely it was a BBC that got me into gaming....memories include...

Strykers Run (how bloody hard were these, great graphics for the beeb though)
Strykers Run 2
Dare Devil Dennis
Elite
Bat and Ball (on free BBC welcome tape you got with the machine)
Crystal Castles
Exile
Paperboy (black and white ****e version but thats how starved I was for good games on the beeb)

and others my memory forgets...

And yes the educational ones as well, Grannys garden and the Dragon title mentioned above, both played loads at primary school.

[chocklo]

My first home computer the bbc model B

so many happy memories - remember the first time we went though each program on the Welcome tape. Kingdom, my first experience of a game with some depth - 'the thieves have come toi join you cos they think it will be easier to grow food than to nick it'.....or something like that. There was also some other pointless utilities on the tape - I remember something called Biorhythms - what was that about?

Other Acorn gems-

Monsters
Killer Gorilla
Snapper
Planetoids
Alien Swirl
Attack on Alpha Centuri
Escape from Moonbase Alpha
Dare devil denis
Overdrive
FRAK!
Spinx Adventure (some hated it - I thought it was ace!)
Sabre Wulf
Alien8
Zalaga
Passgo (not many people will remember this one!)
Repton
Citadel
Palace of Magic
Stryker's Run
SR Codename droid
Castlequest
Dunjunz
Ravenskull
Stairway to Hell
Elite
A golf game that I can't remember the name of
Snooker
Thunderstruck
Boffin
Boffin2
Contraption
Manic Miner
Imogen
Exile
April (not sure if anyone else will remember this one)

[Spacecowboy]

I had an Acorn Electron when i was a kid (about '84-86), my fave games were:

Canyon (a vertical shooter, in which your plane moved down the screen instead of up it!)
Frogger
Hunchback
A Pac Man rip off

And there was what i can only describe as an early version of IK+. It was absolutely amazing for the time.

[hobo]

Other Acorn gems- ..............................

my god, the memories came flooding back when I read that list thanks.

[JibberX]

Acorn buggered up with the Archiemedes first with the Arthur O/S which made MS-DOS look modern...

I beg to differ, 1987 saw this:

[MD]

Compare that to a low end 16Bit Macintosh of the same year and it looks rather poor. It was also fairly buggy and it wasn't until RISC OS 1 that it really looked like an OS for a 32Bit System. GEOS on the Commodore 64 looks better then Arthur...

[Ady]

I never owned a BBC or Acron, but two games on those machines rocked me hard; Repton and Imogen.

I want a GBA update of Imogen. In all it's monochrome glory. Now.

[SonicMarmalade]

Chocks Away on arch = mutts nutts of 2 player biplanery.

Elite Plus on arch was also more `Elite 1.5: Almost Frontier` in many ways and pissed all over the same-as-elite versions on other systems.