Home Computers - 100 Icons that Defined a Generation - Thames & Hudson

[monel]

Well it was basically an a500 with stuff missing. Some games didn’t work etc. Yet it was no cheaper than an a500 iirc. At the time there was nothing to like about it. Now though it’s a lovely little machine

I know some software had issues but personally I never had any title that didn't work. Must have been lucky.

But the size advantage was real, I liked smaller hardware like the PC Engine and the A600 looked smart and compact from a design perspective. Although it admittedly was released years after the A500.

[JazzFunk]

The first time I tried the rubber keyboard I was shocked, never liked it and was never used to it.

Me too. Felt like touching a wart.

[Brad]

I know some software had issues but personally I never had any title that didn't work. Must have been lucky.

But the size advantage was real, I liked smaller hardware like the PC Engine and the A600 looked smart and compact from a design perspective. Although it admittedly was released years after the A500.

At the time it was replacing the A500+. It supported none of the existing a500 expansions, had no numeric keypad, officially the cpu couldn’t be upgraded. It supported internal ide disks but that was it’s only advantage; everything else about it, at the time, seemed like a downgrade. And commodore charged £50 more for it than the 500+ so it’s no wonder it was a failure at the time. Now though, yeah it’s great. That ide connection means you can put an SD card drive in there. There are accelerators available for it, Ethernet and WiFi pcmcia cards and it’s like half the size of a 500. Fantastic machine and preferable to the a500 these days I’d say.

[Cassius_Smoke]

Wow, you can do all that with an A600? Crazy cool.

[monel]

At the time it was replacing the A500+. It supported none of the existing a500 expansions, had no numeric keypad, officially the cpu couldn’t be upgraded. It supported internal ide disks but that was it’s only advantage; everything else about it, at the time, seemed like a downgrade. And commodore charged £50 more for it than the 500+ so it’s no wonder it was a failure at the time. Now though, yeah it’s great. That ide connection means you can put an SD card drive in there. There are accelerators available for it, Ethernet and WiFi pcmcia cards and it’s like half the size of a 500. Fantastic machine and preferable to the a500 these days I’d say.

How much do they go for now? Would love to type up documents on one.

[Brad]

@Cassius_Smoke Yeah mine has a 40MHz 68020 and about 10 meg of ram I think. THe flicker fixer mean I run my desktop at 640 x 512 + overscan, feeding into either direct to the widescreen LCD monitor or into an OSSC first. I can use the widescreen modes too. Then I have a PCMCIA ethernet adapter and a full TCP/IP stack so I'm on the internet. Using some free software form the AMiga Forever folks my Amiga shows up in my standard Windows file explorer for getting files on and off. Finally I installed the standard Postscript printer driver and now I can print to the HP Lasertjet downstairs over the network. Feels like quite a modern machine in many ways!
@shinobi7000 - Probably £100 for one that still needs recapping (they MUST be recapped). Accelerator with fast ram is £100ish, flicker fixer £100ish, SD based hard disk solution is like £20 + the sd card. A gotek drive (floppy drive emulator) is £30 maybe? Network card is about £25. I actually sometimes type up work documents on Wordworth just for the hell of it!

I'm going to sell mine once I'm sure this Amiga 1200 is working properly so watch the for sale thread if you're interested!

[CAPCOM]

All specs, Amiga v Acorn...both great great revolutionary machines....more so than the Playstation,

[QualityChimp]

Is the Acorn more revolutionary than the PlayStation?

[CAPCOM]

Yes, do you have a SONY chip in your smartphone irrespective of branding....the answer is...

[CMcK]

Yes, do you have a SONY chip in your smartphone irrespective of branding....the answer is...

You might, they do sell a lot of the camera modules to the various phone manufacturers. But ARM is an incredible legacy although they really should be making a shed load more money than they do given how widely adopted their IP is.

[Brad]

You might, they do sell a lot of the camera modules to the various phone manufacturers. But ARM is an incredible legacy although they really should be making a shed load more money than they do given how widely adopted their IP is.

Almost all phones have an ARM processor and almost all phones have camera sensors from Sony so they're about level pegging. Acorn should be celebrated though as they're British!!

[CAPCOM]

That is my point! Should never have beeen sold to the Japanese. May's biggest error had she had so so so so so many!

Should have been security Hawkeye ringfenced....being sold now to NVIDIA. Safer in American hands.

Idiot May!

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/09/15/one-way-save-arm-nvidia-sell-someone-else/

[CMcK]

Really it’s just that ARM arguably don’t charge enough for a licence. A lot of their older designs can be had for free. Apple has a perpetual architectural licence and is making an enormous amount of money selling products using that IP. Ok Apple’s stuff isn’t just using ARMs reference implementation but they couldn’t have done it without them.

[CAPCOM]

ACORN>ARM>APPLE

[CMcK]

Considering Apple’s ARM based chips are better than ARMs reference designs I’m not sure that’s true.