Talk: Acorn Archimedes
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"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)
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)
