Acorn Archimedes A3010 System Teardown and Review | MVG

Whats the common thing between this Nintendo Console, this SmartPhone and this Personal Computer from 1992? They all run on the ARM architecture. A 32bit architecture thats low power, low cost and very fast. With over 100 billion ARM procesessors produced as of January 2017, ARM can be found in just about every mobile, handheld and smart tv device today. But where did ARM originate? To answer that we need to go back to 1987 and take a detailed look at one of the first ARM computers. In the late 80s , riding high on the success of the BBC Micro, Acorn Computers Limited in England released the first general purpose computer based of its architecture they they dubbed ' Acorn RISC Machine' or ARM. The computer was called the Acorn Archimedes - and As we know , this architecture is widely used in just about every single embedded and mobile device today. Like the BBC micro before it, This 32 bit computer were targeted towards education and schools. The A3000 series range of computers were the first arm based computers that had the single part case design, that both the Amiga and Atari ST utilized also. I was lucky enough to get my hands on an Acorn A3010 - this machine was geared for the home computing market and games rather than for the classroom and it has features to back this up. Lets take a look. The A3010 comes with a very distinctive keyboard with green function keys. This is in contrast to the red function keys of the Acorn A3000 computer and BBC Micro. It features 1 Mb of Ram out of the box , and on the right hand side contains a floppy disk drive, capable of reading high density disks up to 1.6Mb in size. On the left side of the case is a standard reset switch which is also something that the Atari ST came with. On the back of the unit contains a power on-off switch. It requires 220v AC from the wall The A3010 is the only Archimedes computer that contains a TV Modulator connector, to the left of that is a standard video VGA RGB output, next is standard headphone jack, then we have a mouse connector, and again unique to the A3010, two standard joystick ports. Finally a standard RS-232 serial port rounds out the connectors at the back Opening the machine is fairly trivial, just use a phillips head screwdriver to remove the three screws at the bottom of the case. Flip the machine back upright and you will notice that the case is held together using plastic tabs. This is similar to an Xbox 360 case. Simply pushing the plastic tab will allow the top portion to be detatched from the bottom portion of the case. Work your way across and and the top portion will simply lift away. Next, we need to remove the keyboard. There are 2 plastic ribbon connectors attached to the motherboard. gently removing these will allow the keyboard to be safely lifted. The A3010 comes with a build in speaker which is a very handy addition, and in order to remove the metallic shielding use a Torx screwdriver to remove this screw at the base of the shielding. I suspect there might be more screws normally but mine are missing. Once thats done the shielding can be removed. Just make sure you disconnect the floppy drive power and speaker connectors first. So lets take a look at the motherboard. Starting on the right are the RAM chips. the Archimedes A3010 usually has 1Mb onboard but this unit has a 4mb Ram Expansion installed. The two chips next to those are for the operating system called RISC OS. Like the Atari ST, the OS is built into ROM chips and does not need a disc in the drive to boot from. In fact the Archemedis computer will always boot to RISC OS even if you leave a floppy disk in the drive. The CPU is known as the ARM250 which is a 32 bit RISC processor that runs at 12Mhz. the original ARM2 CPU found in the A3000 ran at 8Mhz. The TV modulator provides the ability to connect up the A3010 to a standard TV, and on the right we see that the powersupply is built into the case as shown by the large transformer. The CMOS battery holds all the settings including time and RISC OS preferences and the screenmode you selected. These batterys are notorious for leaking so keep checking them every so often and replace them at the first sign of trouble. But you may be asking where are the graphics and sound chips on the motherboard? Well the ARM250 also houses both of those in addition to an IO and memory controller chips. This is truely the first System on a Chip or SoC that is common in many devices today. The ARM250 runs at around 7 MIPS or Millions of instructions per second - which, if you compare is rougly equivalent to an Amiga 1200 with a 68030 processor running at around 33 Mhz. Out of the box this translates to the A3010 providing far superior processing power, however the Amiga had its custom chips and with good coding can outperform the A3010 So technical specifications aside, how does this computer perform and what are the games like ? booting up the machine will launch you directly into RISC OS. This is a very nice user interface with excellent built in applications, RISC OS is multitasking operating system as seen by my example here of formatting a floppy disk while utilizing the inbuild paint program. The keyboard is very nice quality, much better than the spongey Atari ST keyboard and has a satisfying click with each keypress. The speaker is a nice touch, it doesnt sound amazing or anything but it gets the job done. Take a listen. Ok ok so what about the games? Well many of the games were Amiga ports, but most of them were very good ports taking advantage of the Archimedes 256 colors on screen and 8 channel sound. Here are some examples of excellent ports from the Amiga. The Archimedes also had many custom games for the system, as well as some excellent ports . Heres a quick sample of a few. And finally , theres some handy tools online available to create your own floppy disks from disk images out there. This tool is one example called - OmniDisk - is a simple command line tool. You will need a Windows PC with a floppy disk drive. Unfortunately a USB floppy disk drive wont work.

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 48,235

Keywords: arm, risc, risc os, acorn, bbc, bbc micro, apple, iphone, nintendo, switch, tegra x1, nvidia, arm250, cpu, architecture, acorn risc machines, teardown, computer, home computer, games, amiga, atari, commodore, 16 bit, 68000, cisc, 32bit, acorn archimedes, acorn a3010, modern vintage gamer, acorn computer, acorn archimedes a3010, acorn a3000, modern vintage gamer acorn, archimedes computer, acorn archimedes review, mvg, a3010

Id: NF_9McTFR20

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 28 2017