It might not have been as successful as the BBC Micro, but the Acorn Archimedes A3000 was a true -and almost affordable- dream machine. It was released back in 1989, came with at least 1MB of (expandable) RAM, offered simple hard drive support, was fairly powerful in 3D, had high resolution 4096 colour graphics, featured a good sound chip, and above all sported that amazingly powerful and innovative RISC technology ARM CPU. It actually was way more powerful than the Amiga and even had the best version of Elite ever.
Find out more about the A3000 here, here or here. For your emulation needs either try the seemingly impressive and quite commercial Virtual Acorn or the freeware Red Squirrel.
Now, why not have a look at this fantastic Acorn Archimedes A3000 eBay auction? Seller ships worldwide, and you'll be getting a truly complete machine with hard disk, 4MB of RAM, tons of software, a mouse, DOS emulator, manuals, cables and a selection of other lovely bits. Paying anything less than 40£, 60$ or 45€ should be considered a great chance at a bargain.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Acorn Archimedes A3000
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2 comments:
The Amiga and Acorn had similar capabilities, sound was equal , the Acorn could display higher graphic modes without interlace but did not have a hardware blitter or decent sprite hardware which made games programming more difficult than the Amiga.
Well...I don't agree.
They were completely different machines.
You can't compare a 68000 and an ARM chip, hugely superior (4 MIPS for the ARM at 8 Mhz, less than 1 MIPS for the <8 Mhz 68000 in the Amiga).
You can't either compare a machine with a 4 channel sound chip (linear) and one with 8 channels (logarithmic).
You can't compare a machine with graphics modes which use planes and one which uses 'chunky' modes.
The Amiga was a game machine, not the Archimedes, it was not thought to be.
The Archimedes on the other hand had many flaws : 256 colour modes are 64 colour modes with 3 automatic hues for each chosen colour.
It has no H Sync so forget fantastic blitter effects like on the Amiga.
Neither has it usable hardware sprites (only one, 3 colours (one kept for transparency), 32 pixels width, unlimited heigth)).
The OS is impressive but it's cooperative multitasking, not preemptive (much better) as found on the Amiga.
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