NTSCuk Acorn Archimedes Retrospective

[Valiant]

So after watching Micro Men tonight and seeing all the specifications on the drawing boards in the closing third act for the 32 bit machine I wanted to ask...

"Who here actually has one?"

Any variations or models

You know lots of firsts

ARM RISC based of course

"Who had them in their school's computing department?"

"What did they teach you about computing programming and coding?"

Here's the wiki games list Some missing I do believe like Chocks Away!

My favourite!





11 most Influential processors of all Time

What issues of Retro Gamer have Acorn features?

This one?



Acorn Arcade

[HC_O]

So after watching Micro Men

Was it any good??? REALLY wanted to watch this, but the wife was so bored whilst I was watching Electric Dreams before hand that she had had enough by the time this came on after, so we watched Stargate Universe instead.
will watch it on the BBCi Player

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00n5b92/Micro_Men/

[Baseley09]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbPQ2pvPdTw

Fervour was the one!

We had them all over our school, A3000 mainly with a few A400 & (the slice? i think that was the term) ones. Of course it was recomended to parents that their kids had them at home and going to a posh school quite a few kids did.

I remember them being involved in one of the first Tesco computers for school schemes, and being wowed by a gfx demo of the queens soldiers in Dixons!

Few memories of the system....CD-roms of clip art!.....going online at school....we also had it hooked up to some satellite dish and ran some sort of atmospheric/weather program on it. Mental at the time.

[CMcK]

I used the Archie at school same model as the opening post by the looks of it. It was mainly there to control a CNC via laborious machine code programming. But our tech teacher liked games so I had the chance to play E-Type, Elite and Zarch/Virus.
There was also some really quite impressive graphics and video demos for the machine as well.
My memories of the OS are hazy but everything ran very smoothly and quickly. The games had very good framerates making contemporary ST and Amiga games look a bit clunky.

[samanosuke]

We had a couple of them in the science lab but only the teacher's pet got to use them. The rest of us got lumbered with the BBC Bs, which I was secretly a fan of anyway.

[Oldgamingfart]

We still had A3000's when I left school in 1996. There was just one room near the library that had Windows 3.1 (NT?) PC's all networked, and one or two PC's with painfully slow Internet access. It used to take the whole lunch hour just to load up the Nintendo website!
In the technology department there were around three computer rooms with A3000's and one or two A4000's. All the geeky chaps (myself included) would rush the room to see who could score the 4000 for the duration of the lesson, how sad was that!

Normally around the end of term or near Christmas we'd get to play games on the A3000, usually Lemmings, Pipe Dream, or some puzzler.
One problem with them was the odd idiot who would manage to change the video setting to 60Hz, causing the monitor to lose sync, and then usually get a bollocking from the teacher.
Another practical joke was for the user in front to gradually change the Vertical and Horizontal size on the back of the monitor. Oh the hilarity that ensued!

In middle school (yes we had middle schools here), the A3000's were brand new back then. I recall we used to spend the lunch hour on this animation program which was a lot of fun (especially making rude animations). They were a breath of fresh air from the BBC Micro, which would just beep at you a lot, and punish your every key stroke (the Turtle was kinda cool though).

[Hohum]

Was it any good??? REALLY wanted to watch this, but the wife was so bored whilst I was watching Electric Dreams before hand that she had had enough by the time this came on after, so we watched Stargate Universe instead.
will watch it on the BBCi Player
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode...b92/Micro_Men/

Yep, it was really enjoyable - definitely watch it Loved the bits where Clive loses his temper, hehe (attacking Chris Curry in the local pub with a rolled up newspaper! ).

[Brad]

Vic-20s in my school and 1 single BBC B in the corner with a massive CUB monitor.

[MartyG]

I have three Archimedes, an A3000, A3010 ( the one with the green keys ) and a A3020. Also have a BBC Model B and a BBC Master. We had BBC Model Bs at school, I remember this one arse who use to come along and press the break key on everyone's machine. The archies are ex-school equipment, which is why they're blighted with big marks :/ All of these fully work though.









The show was great, it mentioned at the beginning about some scenes being made up, makes you wonder which ones. The news paper beating was definitely true.

[Grapple Convoy]

I remember learning some BASIC on Acorns during secondary school IT lessons. And having to take GCSE IT with the machines, and everyone in my year group, or nearabouts, failing. (Still too unfamiliar with Windows to use that, believe it or not.) The class Arkanoid tournaments every Christmas were the most gaming I ever got from an Acorn though.

[Lorfarius]

I can remember playing....Virus...I think. The 3d landscape game where your pointy ship flies overhead though I think it was just a demo.

[vanpeebles]

A rare post from me but only because I love my Acorns. I have my A3010 which I've owned from new, plus a mezzanine A3010 with the ARM2 Card and also my Strong ARM Risc PC which has Risc OS 4 on.

I've spent a lot of time recording videos of Acorn games using a TV card and a VGA capture card on the real hardware here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/peetvanpeebles

[Valiant]

Excellent video channel!

[Baseley09]

A rare post from me but only because I love my Acorns. I have my A3010 which I've owned from new, plus a mezzanine A3010 with the ARM2 Card and also my Strong ARM Risc PC which has Risc OS 4 on.

I've spent a lot of time recording videos of Acorn games using a TV card and a VGA capture card on the real hardware here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/peetvanpeebles

Good work!

[Grapple Convoy]

I can remember playing....Virus...I think. The 3d landscape game where your pointy ship flies overhead though I think it was just a demo.

The Archimedes version was called Zarch. Or Lander, for the demo.