Talk:Acorn Archimedes
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Contents |
[edit] Old discussion
"it could run a piece of software faster and with better visual quality than the more-famous Commodore Amiga" - I was an Archimedes owner, so I have no axe to grind, but is that true? Faster maybe, but I'm not sure the standard graphics capabilities were unambiguously better than the Amiga. For a start, didn't the Amiga have some sort of hold-and-modify display which allowed all 4096 colours on screen at once, as opposed to a maximum 256 colours on the Archimedes? And the palette was not very flexibly redefinable in 256 colours on the Archimedes either, but I have no idea what the Amiga's capabilities were. -- S
- The Arc graphics chipset was actually inferior in speed to the Amiga one, but the seperior CPU meant it could out-perform it anyway. Compare Zarch (Arc) with Virus (the mildly stripped-down version of Zarch so the Amiga/ST could handle it). The Arc was better at handling higher screenmodes than the Amiga. I was an Amiga500 owner, & I think the Arc was the better of the two. The CPU was so weak that it greatly limited what could be done with the chipset's capabilities. Crusadeonilliteracy 13:44, 4 Nov 2003 (UTC)
- I looked it up: The CPU in the Amiga500 was 0.7MIPS, whereas the 8MHz ARM CPU in the early Archimedies was 4.5MIPS. Ouch was the Amiga was underpowered with its 1970s CPU. I knew the 68k was slow, but I didn't realise it was in the same league as the CPU in the Apple II.
- (While this discussion is old, that last statement still deserves a reply for the sake of others who might read it.) "I knew the 68k was slow, but I didn't realise it was in the same league as the CPU in the Apple II." It wasn't. You have to very be careful when comparing MIPS values from different architectures. The 68000 was a very different architecture from the Apple II's 6502, and its instructions were much more powerful. Even if you consider memory bandwidth alone, an 8 MHz 68000 had about 4 times as much bandwidth as the Apple II's 1 MHz 6502. The same warning about MIPS comparisons applies when comparing a CISC architecture like the 68000 to a RISC one like the ARM. Colin Douglas Howell 06:09, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
- It's quite an invalid comparison indeed. The Amigas CPU may have been inferior to the Archimedes, but it's laughable to compare it to a 6502.
- (While this discussion is old, that last statement still deserves a reply for the sake of others who might read it.) "I knew the 68k was slow, but I didn't realise it was in the same league as the CPU in the Apple II." It wasn't. You have to very be careful when comparing MIPS values from different architectures. The 68000 was a very different architecture from the Apple II's 6502, and its instructions were much more powerful. Even if you consider memory bandwidth alone, an 8 MHz 68000 had about 4 times as much bandwidth as the Apple II's 1 MHz 6502. The same warning about MIPS comparisons applies when comparing a CISC architecture like the 68000 to a RISC one like the ARM. Colin Douglas Howell 06:09, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
- I looked it up: The CPU in the Amiga500 was 0.7MIPS, whereas the 8MHz ARM CPU in the early Archimedies was 4.5MIPS. Ouch was the Amiga was underpowered with its 1970s CPU. I knew the 68k was slow, but I didn't realise it was in the same league as the CPU in the Apple II.
We had access to a fun beast which was an Archimedes on a ISA card which we installed inside a 30386 PC; they shared the keyboard and display IIRC. The main idea was that we could run our Smalltalk port on the Archimedes. It soon became obvious that the 25MHz PC was being absolutely crapped on (in a left-behind-eating-its-dust kind of way) by the 8MHz Archimedes, with better graphics to boot. Phil 16:02, Nov 27, 2003 (UTC)
I believe initially that Acorn set up a lab out on the West Coast of America to develop an operating system for the Archimedes. However, I this effort foundered and the abominable Arthur was hacked up until something decent could be developed. RiscOS (2 ?) was then developed to replace Arthur, and provided many of the features seen in modern GUI systems today. In some cases, such as saving files using drag and drop, RiscOS was better than even current systems. Jonathan
- Yes, see ARX. I wonder what happened to it. It's a pity Acorn didn't dump Arthur for it, for as good as RISC OS was, an OS on par with MacOSX in the 1980s would've been quite a selling point. Crusadeonilliteracy
A4 - 2 MB RAM (A5000 hardware in a laptop case)
- This page states that the A5000 was an A4 in desktop form, not the other around around. Which is correct? Crusadeonilliteracy 03:54, 31 Jan 2004 (UTC)
The story about archimedes being ditched in favor of win '95 is kinda pov, and sort of wrong too I think. Archimedes was obsoleted by the RISC PC (which is basically a much faster dual-processor Archimedes)) from the same company. I'm pretty sure Win '95 wasn't the major factor. (My poor wrists still remember Win '95 :-/ ). [For completeness: PCs were cheaper than RISC PCs though, so some people may have (unwisely :-P ) followed that 'upgrade' path ;-) ] Kim Bruning 10:55, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Without resurrecting the infinite number of "my computer's better than yours" battles from the 1980s, comparing the speeds of main CPUs when contending for "most powerful" system is simply nonsense. On many 80s machines, the speed of the main CPU was irrelevant, as it did no work other than to orchestrate all the other chips, which greatly outpowered the main CPU. If you compare Amiga and Arc games, you'll see that scrolling/sprite games are generally slow or very slow on the Arc, as the ARM is not designed for blitting and scrolling fullscreen games and its VIDC is no help. However, CPU intensive games (such as 3D games) perform far better on the Arc than on the Amiga. Kyz 02:20, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- Indeed, the basic Lander demo blew people away at the time.
- Actually, MEMC and VIDC do provide support for hardware scrolling the screen. The start, end, and start-after-VBL addresses for the video buffer can be programmed in the MEMC at addresses that are multiples of 16. This easily enables vertical hardware scrolling. The 16-byte minimum increment is too much for direct horizontal scrolling, but the VIDC allows programming the start and end of the graphics and the colored border part of a scan line independently at pixel resolution. If border and graphics overlap, the border overrides the graphics display. This can be used to create a graphics screen that is slightly wider than displayed and use the border to mask off columns of pixels on the left and right sides (at the price of having an always black border). MEMC 16-byte increments can be used every couple of frames to jump the picture horizontally and VIDC scan line shifting/masking can be used to smoothly scroll the frames in between.
- What the Archimedes lacks, compared to the Amiga and Atari ST, is separate bit planes. All bits for a pixel (1, 2, 4, or 8) are contiguous in memory. This makes impossible the popular trick on the other machines of using some bit planes for background, some for foreground, and being able to redraw these independently. MEMC and VIDC also support a single hardware sprite, but that is intended for the mouse cursor and too limited for much else. IIRC, the hardware does not provide a horizontal raster interrupt (and nothing like the Amiga's Copper co-processor, of course), but an IOC timer-triggered interrupt can be efficiently used for the same purpose.
- —Naddy 01:06, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
-
- The Amiga had a dual playfield mode, where you could independently scroll the two layers. But the bit planes sucked. For N planes that you want to affect, you have to do N blits. That means N times the setup overhead. It's less efficient than packed pixel. Mirror Vax 08:07, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
[edit] What, no photo???
- -- User:70.149.166.7 17:45, 6 October 2005
You could also try requesting one at Wikipedia:Requested pictures#Computers -- Solipsist 17:04, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
[edit] backward compatibility
Was the Archimedes backward compatible with the RISC?
- Huh? The Arm processor the Archimedes used had a RISC architecture, if that's what you mean. Cpc464 01:31, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Future work
I'd like to get this moving again. Aside from a picture (we definitely need a couple) it's lacking simple things like an infobox and a refs section. It also fails to mention that 4th Dimension were the best games company that ever existed, which is objectively true. Chris Cunningham 15:37, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
I must say I don't like the current picture; the flat screen monitor, while cool, is not really typical. I'm sure loads of people have one kicking around, but if not I could take a picture of my A310 with the 'original' and IMO much more typical rebadged-as-Acorn Philips monitor (AKF11 IIRC). (It's probably better if someone else has a photo, the flap covering the controls on mine has broken off and hence has a visible chunk of blu-tac holding it on. ;-) ) - S --195.137.91.247 23:27, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
[edit] A420
I seem to recall the A420 is an urban myth: only the A410 and A440 were released, though all three were released as A4xx/1 versions. And if I'm going to be pedantic, none of the 300 or 400 models had an 'A' prefix: they were called Archimedes 410/1 (for eg) 81.179.140.82 16:23, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Impact
If I remember correctly:
- Tesco only switched to RM after Acorn ceased producing desktop computers.
- The major cause for blame for Acorn losing market share to the IBM PC was not multimedia capabilities - even latterly for the most part the same software was being produced for all 3 platforms including 3 in 1 CD ROM. The biggest impact was the growth of parent school governors who wanted to see machines like they used at work.
80.177.52.130 (talk) 12:13, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
