Computing from the past??? 2 - The Acorn Risc-OS family

Depending upon where and when you went, chances are that, if you attended school between 1989 and 1996, you would have had the pleasure of using an Acorn Archimedes. Following the success of the BBC Micro, Acorn followed up with the Archimedes range to decent praise and sales, primarily but not exclusively to the UK education market.

The Archimedes range was powerful for their cost and offered a viable alternative to the Mac and DOS/Windows computers of the time. However, marketing, perceived abilities plus some god-awful business decisions meant they remained a minnow to other formats. A legacy does, however, exist in the form of the ARM processing architecture, used by a huge proportion of mobile tech today. ARM, meaning Advanced Risc Machine used to stand for Acorn Risc Machine.

As a quick comparison, here are three screenshots, showing the desktop systems of 1993:

Windows in all of it's glory, still residing upon DOS

System 7 for the Mac

Risc OS 3.11

Now, from a personal point of view, I have always liked the way Risc OS looked. It felt clean and relatively uncluttered compared to the other main desktop operating systems of the time. Indeed, apart from the low screen resolutions that people just had to deal with, the current RISC OS is still a pretty sharp looking OS.

Modern day Risc OS

It also had what still to this day seems to be a very straight forward and versatile mouse set up: three buttons - select, menu and adjust. I have used both Windows and Mac systems since the 80's and still, to this day, the slight amount of extra effort needed to deal with three buttons is more than made up for by the sheer versatility of the set up compared to one and two button systems.

Hardware wise, I only ever owned one Archimedes, the A3000, picked up as a surplus machine when my old school was disposing of them. Although large compared to the similarly styled Amiga 500/Atari ST, it was built like a tank and the example I had still worked perfectly even after several years service.

The A3000 - not the one I owned.

The computer carried over the red function keys of the BBC Micro, a look that was discarded by the follow-on A3010 and A3020 where red gave way to a sickeningly bright green. The keyboard itself, as I recall, was a little spongy but it was robust. The operating system and basic apps were held on ROM chips, allowing them to be upgraded by swapping the chips out. The machine came with a single 3.5 inch floppy drive, no hard drive but did have built in networking (Econet). The system itself was very stable and practically crash proof, something that could not always be said of the Amiga (Guru Meditations, they were called on the Amiga, f***ing annoyances was my term).Whilst they were a tad pricey compared to the 16-bit competition, they offered 32-bit/26bit RISC processing power (32-bit internal to CPU, 26-bit address to the rest of the system - I believe, correct me please if I am wrong). This also meant they compared well to the more expensive DOS/Windows and Mac systems of the time. In fact, in some areas, these other formats were left far behind. They also came bundled with BBC Basic, which in my humble opinion, is the best Basic ever to grace a computer. The Comprehensive school I attended had two networks connected by Econet and I gained a decent grounding in networking because of this. Moving to PC's in the mid-90's seemed very much like a retrograde step compared to the Econet days.

As with the Amiga, there is still a Risc OS community in being today, with quite a few hardware options from the likes of Armini and Raspberry Ro and the operating system itself is supported by two vendors, one covering version 4.29 and 6, whilst the other covers the more open sourced version 5. Version 5 seems to be the most up to date and available version of the OS, which may seem strange but there was a fork in the OS history when two companies developed separate versions and they have kind of travelled in parallel. There is also CJE Micros, who stock an exhaustive range of Risc OS related hardware and software.

Modern hardware is based on ARM based dev boards or the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi. Basic systems can be had for a couple of hundred pounds and it's not beyond the ken of many to do it yourself - source a Pi, grab a download of the OS (which is very cheap) and then off you go. The Raspberry Ro Lite is the aforementioned £200 system and whilst it may lack in the area of storage (easily remedied) and Wi-Fi (Risc-OS doesn't have support for this yet), it's a good beginners option and it can form the basis of a decent main system. The low cost of the hardware makes this a tempting hobby machine for anyone interested in alternatives to Windows, Mac-OS and Linux. If you want something more substantial, the Titanium board based systems can be bought which, if you must have the best, are a very good choice.

Personally, I am tempted by the Ro Lite, it being cheap enough but well-spec'd enough to act as a hobby/secondary system to tinker and get to grips with. And, unlike the Amiga, replacement hardware (the Pi) will never be extraordinarily expensive.

What has struck me with the retrospectives on the Amiga and Risc OS is that both formats remain, to this day, very capable alternatives to the mainstream formats. That is not to say you should bin your existing PC, as there are several areas where even the most up to date versions of OS4 and Risc OS 5 cannot compete It is, however, interesting that despite the passage of time since their originating companies closed their doors, there remains a substantial hobbyist market that keeps these older operating systems ticking along. Certainly, I will be keeping an eye on both formats in future. 

Computing from the past??? The Amiga

Having a rootle around an upstairs cupboard led me to two diskette boxes full of 3.5 inch floppy disks. I had forgotten I had these, they made the move a couple of years ago, been dumped and that was it. Until now...

The dust says it all...

I started having a look through them and soon realised they were the sum total of my Commodore Amiga software collection, some of which dates back twenty seven years! I mentioned this to people at work the next day and had to explain to a couple under the tender age of 25 what a floppy disk was, despite them seeing one everyday when they click save in MS Office. And come to that, why is the floppy disk icon still used when most PC's haven't had one as standard for years?

Anyhoo, amongst the disks were the three pack in games that came with the A500 I bought so long ago: F29 Retaliator (initially the bugged version where the aircraft exploded directly after take off, soon replaced by a working copy), Rainbow Islands (a decent port of a coin-op) and Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters (a glorious 50's sci-fi pastiche of a shooter). My favourite at the time was F29 and the developer, DID, went on to make several more impressive flight sims through the years.

Some other gems in the boxes included 688 Attack Sub and Silent Service 2 - both early attempts at submarine simulations. The former placed you in command of a Los Angeles class nuclear attack sub and did a great job too, it's one title I really enjoyed and would happily play again. As a fan of the book and the film, "The Hunt for Red October", this game captured a lot of the atmosphere that the actual THFRO game did not. The manual that came with the game was also quite informative too. Game manuals back in the day used to be, these days, you're more likely to get a one sheet with an advert(!). Silent Service 2 was a WW2 sub simulator that was equally good at the lower tech end, especially when you were caught on the surface by a couple of enemy destroyers charging towards you!

When games manuals were games manuals...

Finally, there were the classic point and click adventures The Secret of Monkey Island (1 and 2) and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. The latter came on ten disks and as a teenager, I stared longingly at the adverts for a GVP 20Mb hard drive that I think cost as much as the computer itself. That didn't matter though, it meant no more swapping!!! Sadly, it was never to be.

There were also a load of cover disks, this being back in the day when computer magazines put demo disks on their front covers. One magazine (Amiga Power as memory serves but I could be wrong), started offering full games but that was frowned upon by the industry and the practice soon stopped. Demo diskettes eventually gave way to demo CD's when the 32-bit console era arrived, whilst PC magazines continued until the late naughties when downloading became the norm.

They look ok, but whether they still work is a different matter

The Amiga cover disks varied between giving utilities, game demos and tech demos, the latter highlighting the best of amateur coders and what they could achieve on the hardware at the time. I remember some seriously impressive stuff for the time.

Naturally, I don't have any hardware to try these disks out on, but it did get me thinking about the Amiga as a platform and what form it exists in today. With a vague plan, it was off to Google...

A couple of quick searches led my to Hyperion Entertainment  (the rights holder to the modern day Amiga OS) and A-EON, the only supplier of hardware currently supported by the modern day OS. There is also an Italian outfit, Armiga Project, who are offering Amiga 500 compatible boxes for a couple of hundred euros which look quite interesting and might be worth a look if you fancy re-living the Amiga during its heyday.

So, modern hardware for Amiga systems is pretty much limited to either the aforementioned A-EON X5000 (Ars Technica ran a review a few months back) or the Vampire accelerator cards that emulate the original hardware at almost current day speeds. The main downside to these is cost: The X5000 costs £1750 as a full system and the Vampire boards are currently just add-ons to existing hardware though that may change in future. Niche stuff indeed.

Having said that, let's put this in context. Commodore went bust back in 1994, so to have any market in 2017 is pretty amazing and a sure sign of a passionate community. It also means there is at least some money in it. The amounts may not be high, buy it has to be worthwhile for business to run.

I do have the option of buying an original (if slightly yellowed) Amiga, with all of the pitfalls that entails. There are issues with leaking motherboard batteries and twenty five years of wear and tear (or neglect) means that is not really a practical option, especially with some of the prices that e-bayers are asking. There are one or two places selling original refurbished Amiga kit, such as Amigakit, but as with the Armiga, you can go through a couple of hundred pounds easily and that is a lot just to have a trip down memory lane.

However, there are two cheaper options. Amiga Forever is the officially licensed emulator, with various versions ranging from £10 to £50. This allows you to easily re-live the software that made the Amiga the computer it was. This is the cheapest and easiest way to experience the Amiga. If you want dedicated hardware, then the way to go is with the Raspberry Pi. You can get emulators that will happily run on the Pi and give you near flawless performance. The Pi is cheap, a starter kit will cost about £60-£70 and gives you the flexibility to run other operating systems as well.

Would I buy a modern day Amiga? Well, no, not at the current cost of the X5000. Hell, £1750 would get me a kick-ass gaming PC so niche versus mainstream means niche loses. There is the up and coming A1222 board, but that is still expected to be several hundred just for the main board when it is finally released, so cost will still be a barrier to experiencing the modern day OS4. That does leave the emulation route which seems the most likely way I will go.

Rose tinted spectacles aside, the Amiga was a cracking computer for its time. That some enthusiasts have kept the spirit and hardware alive for nearly twenty five years after Commodore died is a testament to its enduring popularity. I cherished by A500 for several years before space and utility dictated that it had to go. It was one of the two personal computers of the era that I enjoyed using. The other, another format that still lives on to this day, and the Acorn Archimedes and the Risc-OS family.