The Ultimate Acorn Archimedes talk [video] | Hacker News Reader

The Ultimate Acorn Archimedes talk [video]

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143 pointsforinti33 comments

What a fantastic machine the Archimedes was. If your BASIC programs needed more performance, you just used the BASIC's built in assembler.

In about '94 my Archie could out perform a modern(ish) 486DX PC despite it being an origonal '87 model

I remember getting an issue of "The Micro User" magazine at the beach with Lemmings in the cover and found out it was a kind of machine that I never heard of with a _really_ strange OS that looked like Amiga graphics.

Fast forward 20 years and the processor that powered this machine evolved to something that's on every mobile phone / smart appliance I can see.

More like fast forward 10 years. By ‘97 most mobile devices ( the ones I came across at least) had started to use ARM. Even Palm devices eventually used ARM CPUs

Windows CE devices were also big users of MIPS and SuperH.

I think one of the big features was the amount of stuff built into the ROM- full IDE, word processor, paint, OS and GUI etc. That gives such a freedom akin to the 8bit machines to encourage coding as the baseline is always there, it's unbrickable, fast and more reliable than a hard drive.

Speed wise it could run rings around a low-end 486 for computation, but it had hardware scrolling, timers for interrupts, 800x600 with 256 chunky colours, 8channel DMA sound and so could do perfect Amiga ports.

Checkout starfighter 3000, XC or Darkwood for what it could do

https://youtu.be/-j-1vxPmksM https://youtu.be/fevJ6jzgvGs https://youtu.be/_Bx_m8xXr60

Got to add Zarch to the list, we had one in the 'computer lab' surrounded by BBC micro's, I only touched on a little of it's potential, but this game was mind blowing! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNXypBxNGMo

> full IDE, word processor

Neither of these. Just a very basic text editor.

There was also ARMBE, an embedded Basic code editor. It sucked, though.

Something else that was introduced, that we all take for granted these days, was anti-aliased fonts. At the time it was a huge leap (for me at least)

Real-time spellcheck, as you type, was a feature it had /years/ earlier than MS.

Don't forget vector graphics editor, meaning vector graphics were a native format for RISC OS

Not just on the Arc either - the inline assembler was also available in BBC BASIC on its predecessor, the BBC Micro. I remember you had to put the asm code in a FOR loop so the interpreter could do two passes - one to locate all the labels and one to assemble the result, I believe.

That BASIC also had proper functions and procedures as well as special fast integer variables in zero page, it offered easy access to the whole machine from graphics to sound to ADCs and tape or disk IO. It was also very fast for the time, and the manuals that came with the machine were excellent.

The BBC micro user manual section on the inline assembler is available here for anyone interested in how it worked: http://central.kaserver5.org/Kasoft/Typeset/BBC/Ch43.html

One of the most famous games on the Micro was Repton, which the 16-year old Tim Tyler wrote mostly in BASIC, and then gradually optimised into inline assembly.

The inline assembler was also available on the predecessor to the BBC micro, the Acorn Atom. (I'm proud to say I still have mine even if I haven't fired it up in years).

Like other systems of its time it didn't have a cache. CPU and RAM ran at about the same speed, so waiting for data from memory was only a small problem. Everything worked quite deterministic back then.

Now with Moore's law coming to an end I sometimes dream that RAM speeds might catch up so much that we can get rid of the caches again and that we will get back the nice deterministic performance behaviour we had in the old times.

You will always have caches of some sort because of the speed of light limit, and because moving data accounts for a lot of the power consumption in modern-day chips. What you'd need for determinism is caches that behave more like pure scratchpad storage. Ultimately the OS gets in the way of this, as does multicore (which comes with the need for costly cache-coherency setups in order to keep the desired semantics for shared memory access.)

One of the best things about the Archimedes (and the BBC micro) to me was that you just switched it on and went to work. No minutes of waiting for it to load stuff, just power up and go.

Well, until about 1994, by the time RISC PCs and Hard drives were standard the !Boot system had bloated quite a bit

I’m glad the “Ultimate” series talks are back - hoping for a SNES or NES next.

I always wondered if an original 1987 Archi could have been coaxed into running something like Doom.

If that had been available back then would it have changed the popularity of the system.

Mind you, I always wonder what would have happened if they had open sourced their OS back then and provided the source with a monthly subscription update service.

> I always wondered if an original 1987 Archi could have been coaxed into running something like Doom.

Doom was released for this platform, wasn't it? Indeed, being able to run 3D-ish games cleanly would have been a significant advantage for the Acorn over its home-computer competitors. (I think the 3DO platform was also built on an ARM architecture, and was ultimately far more successful in the gaming domain)

> Mind you, I always wonder what would have happened if they had open sourced their OS back then

The OS still isn't open source even today, long after becoming commercially irrelevant. Quite sad.

Err yeah it is open source https://gitlab.riscosopen.org/RiscOS

AIUI, this is a clone of some sort of the original RISC OS (the version that shipped with Acorn machines). It does feature some real improvements, such as being 32-bit clean which is needed for modern ARM hardware (the Acorn Archimedes had a 26-bit address space).

It’s a derivative of the original code. Much like the BSD derivatives of the original 4.4BSD source.

I think there were some licensing issues originally.

It's not a clone as much as a later version. After the demise of Acorn Computers development of RISC OS continued, but split (somewhat acrimoniously) between two different companies, both producing different versions from diverging descendants of the original source tree.

The RISC OS Open code is RISC OS 5, one of those two descendants. It's based on the original Acorn code, though obviously much improved over the last Acorn version. The most significant change is, as you say, that it uses the standard ARM 32 bit addressing mode, rather than the original 26 bit mode (support for which was removed from ARM chips in the mid 90s). Consequently it has been made to run on Raspberry Pi and various other modern SBCs.

Do you know who ended up with the rights to BBC Basic?

There's BBC Basic in RISC OS Open; you can configure a Pi to start up at the Basic prompt like an old BBC if you like.

It's not the only implementation, though: the language had also been cloned as Brandy Basic (GPL) and also reimplemented in various commercial versions, notably BBC Basic for Windows. In times past there was also a compiled version (ABC) for RISC OS, though I don't know if it's still functional.

BBC Micro can run Doom too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6HQrXCRZsw

Just add a Tube co processor and replace the graphics hardware

https://github.com/hoglet67/PiTubeDirect/wiki https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=13632

It runs doom: https://itrunsdoom.tumblr.com/post/102407771718/the-acorn-ar...

As I understood it the R-Comp port of Doom required > ARM 3 processor not the original ARM 2 as released in ‘87.

The link here is for an arm250 (12mhz) same as the original '87 arch bar the 50% extra speed. I think it's running on a VGA monitor so it'd run faster on a TV.

https://youtu.be/jXo6BtmuZkc

It's a shame he didn't go into StrongARM Acorn machines. A7000 and RISC-PC machines. They were true powerhouses. I went to the Wakefield (UK) Acorn show and was privileged to see the Phoebe! All I remember of the unreleased machine was that the case front was designed by the person who designed the ZIP drive. It was yellow and had a 64Mhz bus which was apparently compatible with PCI standards. Always loved Acorn computers; being a product of the BBC Microcomputer initiative in the UK.

Not forgetting Arthur 1.2 OS the predecessor to RISC-OS!

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