Acorn Archimedes RISC OS in 2021 (Raspberry Pi 400)

risk os is an operating system that will be instantly familiar to anyone who went to school in the uk back in the late 80s to mid 1990s and it was actually the built-in operating system on the standard school computers of the day the acorn archimedes and back then it was actually the first gui based operating system that i ever used and risk os was a real revolution in its day first released in 1987 originally under the name arthur it was designed for aikon's new arm chipset which originally stood for acorn risk machine and of course today powers everything from your mobile phone your tablet and even apple's new m1 max and its user interface had many forward thinking and quite intuitive designs that we don't see in modern operating systems now acorn included risc os with all of their arm-based machines until the cancelled phoebe computer that was due to be released in 1998 but got cancelled at the last minute when the company had a refocus the following year and changed their name from acorn to element 14 and essentially abandoned all of their computer development distanced itself from the education market and instead focused on set-top boxes and iptv services before being acquired by broadcom in late 2000 with for all intents and purposes arm holdings taking over its parent company's operations and the rest of the company's assets been sold off to various different parties now it's a complicated path to follow and this isn't supposed to be an acorn history video but i thought that was quite interesting to explore the operating system itself has survived though and again it is a bit of a complicated path with two separate forks of risk os being developed after the demise of acorn a company called risk os limited licensed the rights from element 14 and continued development and the rights were then sold to castle technology who developed their own fork of the operating system before they came together and were released as an open source project in 2018 so the history is pretty messy and complicated but really all you need to know is risk os lives on today and it can actually run on various platforms including the raspberry pi of course being arm-based and essentially the raspberry pi is a modern-day acorn archimedes so really it is the natural platform for the operating system to live on and for this video we're going to use the latest raspberry pi 400 and i love this machine being an all-in-one design it is very reminiscent of the acorn archimedes and on here we can check out the latest version which is a modern evolution of the very first os for arm processors and it has been quite a few years since i last gave risk os a proper test drive in fact my last video on it was back in 2013 which scarily was almost a decade ago now when i tested it out on the then new raspberry pi 2. so today i'm going to be installing the latest version on the current raspberry pi 400 giving it a test drive checking out what's new in the latest versions and even trying to get some classic acorn archimedes and bbc micro apps and games running and installing risc os on your raspberry pi is actually really straightforward you'll need a blank sd card either a brand new one or one that you formatted and i tend to use the official sd card formatter tool just to be sure that you're getting the full capacity of your card and you could actually just download the raspberry pi images software from the raspberry pi website and you will see that risk os 5 is one of the standard options in the installer but there is another more fully featured version of risk os available for the pi called risk os direct and this distribution comes with a load of pre-installed software games emulators so instead i'm going to be running this version now the process is slightly more manual but i'll put all the links in the video description and if you go into their website you will see there is actually a pre-made disk image for the raspberry pi 400 available for download so we'll grab this off the google drive link and then i'm going to write the image to the sd card using etcher now you probably could just use disk utility on the mac but etch is also available on windows mac linux so i'll show it this way for the video and then five minutes later when the card is written and verified we can take it out and put it over into the raspberry pi and i've got the pi 400 hooked up to this samsung monitor via hdmi got a mouse connected the power supply and i've plugged in an ethernet cable as i don't believe that risk os currently supports wi-fi on the pi but that should be all we need to get going and before we start there is one thing to note you will actually need a three button mouse to use risk os now this is not a problem for most people as the scroll wheel clicks in to be the third button on most modern usb mice including the official raspberry pi mouse but risk os does rely pretty heavily on the middle mouse button so then i'll put the sd card into the pi power it on and as you'll see the boot time is very fast and we will see the risc os direct desktop for the very first time and just before we jump into that i wanted to take a quick moment to give a big thank you to this video sponsor my wonderful friends at blinkist now obviously we're all busy you know i've got two day jobs got a family a podcast my youtube channel my retro computing hobby and if you're like me you've got a busy life blinkist is perfect for us now it's a tool to widen and progress your knowledge and put you in touch with your passions in life by allowing you to read top non-fiction books by pulling out just the key messages the important stuff that's in there and putting them into 50 minute text and audio explainers that they call blinks and they've already got over four and a half thousand titles and they do something called shortcasts which are blinks for podcasts and of course privacy is a huge concern for lots of us are using technology today and i've been checking 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you'll be really helping out the channel by showing some love to our sponsors so a big thank you to blinkist for their support of my channel and the first thing we'll see is the risk os desktop or as it's known in risk os the pin board which is this area here where you will see all of these um icons left out on the pin board and where you will open your applications and do your file manipulation all of that in this area here the pin board and then we have the icon bar along the bottom of the screen here now i did mention before that risc os has some concepts that are quite alien to users of modern operating systems as you've got to remember you know this came out originally back in 1987 and back then the standards for user interfaces weren't really decided on and you know they were still kind of making it up as they went along but it's quite useful that the risk os direct team have put on the default wallpaper a handy little cheat sheet here that shows you a few of the um keys that are mapped to different keys on the raspberry pi keyboard and also it shows you what the mouse buttons do as well now i mentioned before that the middle mouse button is essential to the operation of risk os as really the middle button is the equivalent of a right click in most other operating systems so if i press in the scroll wheel on my mouse you will see the context menu appears and that is how you access menus on all of your applications throughout risk os if i do right click you'll just see this air rubber band here to select things on the desktop so same with the left mouse click so left button is select right is adjust and the menus are the middle scroll wheel so you really will need a three button mouse to use anything in risc os and looking down here in the icon bar you'll see that we've got the raspberry pi logo here in the corner on the original risk os i remember that being the archimedes logo and then later it was the acorn logo and this is actually defined by the theme that you set in risk os so i'll get into that in a bit more detail soon but if we click on this this is something i always liked in risc os the fact that you can actually manually allocate resources to different system tasks and things that are running so if we look down here for example you can see there is a ram disk there and the ones that are red you can actually just click on and change their values so we can actually define how big the ram disk is and how much ram it will use so if i put that down to zero you'll see the ram disk will disappear then i can put it back up again and it will come back we can actually set how much ram we want to allocate to the ram disk now obviously today i mean this is using um this raspberry pi has got four gigabytes and we can access two gigabytes of it in here by the looks of things not as essential as it used to be when you had a one megabyte acorn archimedes 3000 and you needed every single byte to run those demanding games but it is quite cool that actually the user has full control over what different system tasks are using in terms of system resources so i also did like that about risk os and you can kind of you know deep dive into all the settings here as well so that's very cool and next to it we have a monitor icon now what i'm going to do here actually is downgrade the screen resolution because in my videos when i record them at 1080p i also get a lot of comments of people going i'm trying to watch it on my phone and i can't really see what's going on so if we click on there you can see that i can actually change the screen resolution to something a bit more visible we'll do 1280x720 and accept that and hopefully um things are a bit more visible now if you're watching on mobile next to it this is something that i think the risc os direct team have installed with their distribution i don't remember this being as standard on risk os but it is a little calendar widget that if you click on it it brings up a full-blown organizer um kind of like an old-school filofax so you've got your calendar in there you can put your um things that are coming up your diary events in there anniversaries want to remember your other half's uh birthday and your wedding anniversary you can keep all your addresses in here too and any notes that you want to put in you can just add into this section here and even though this looks very old school i mean one thing that you find with a lot of old programs is they cut off at a certain date and stop working anymore but as you can see here in 2021 everything is still accessible in here and we have a few um different icons here along the top that was quite interesting a phone what's that do maybe we can do voice calls if we've got a voice motor must have been in here you're not too sure what that does so uh yeah it's cool to have that included though and actually as we get a bit more into this you'll see that the risk os direct team i've actually put a load of third-party applications in here that will uh help you with your day-to-day running if you want to use risk os every day and they've actually left out a load of programs here on the pin board that we'll look at in a bit more detail in a sec but if you look at the other side of the icon bar here and this is where our storage lives so um that just shows you the resources and nothing really much in there then we've got my um usb stick here so if i click that i can access everything that's on this usb stick a standard fat32 formatted 32gb usb stick and you can it makes it really useful to transfer programs from other systems over to the raspberry pi as from what i remember with risc os web surfing is quite limited so there may be you know certain websites where you want to download games and programs that might not work on here but you can do it on your modern windows or mac machine just move them over and next we have the internal sd card with a load of programs that are installed in the risk os direct distribution the apps directory now this is from the original risc os on the acorn archimedes with a few extra programs in here i do remember on the original archimedes machines these programs were in rom i believe so i remember at school using things like uh this draw program here that actually if i double click it you'll notice that the window didn't instantly open instead it appears down here on the right of the icon bar and then you need to click it again to open the program so again you know another alien user interface concept if you used to windows or mac os today and this is quite a basic um vector drawing package and i remember you know messing around with this in a it classes at school back in the day and uh it doesn't look like it's changed much at all actually um we can actually check out the information on this we go to info here and there you go um author acorn computers 1993 although is version 1.41 from april last year so maybe it's been updated but you know the fact that they actually attribute this to a call 1993 maybe it's unchanged um it looks very similar i've got admit and then we'll discard that and we've also got edit i remember you know writing documents in that school as well a very simple kind of text editor um yeah the font actually looks like the um the old school acorn archimedes system font in here as well um which i think we can change yeah we've actually there's quite a lot of different fonts included here yes the system font that was yeah the old school font that you got the archimedes back in the day um we'll change that to yeah maybe something more modern there you go looks a bit nicer for modern displays and then if you want to save this again this is something that is very different in risk os to most operating systems if i wanted to save this document here we'll uh we'll put it in the ram disk for now obviously anything that you put in the ram disk is going to be lost when you reboot the machine but you know for temporary storage and i'm hardly losing a novel if i delete this file it is quite useful so what we do to save it is again we middle click to get the menu we go to save here and as you can see it'll bring up an icon we can give it a name and then on most operating systems you would get a file save dialog box where you'd have to go through and manually navigate into the area of your storage where you wanted to save the file in risc os though what you do is because we've already got it open there you literally just drag and drop it into the area of your storage that you want to save it and it's that simple and actually i do really like that because the amount of times i've got a directory open on my windows desktop and then i want to save a file in it but instead i've got to click on save and i've got to manually find that location again when it's already open in the next window it would be nice just to drag and drop it over so actually that is a really nice function in risc os also in here we have the help application you will notice that everything all of the apps in risc os have an exclamation mark before them that's how you signify that it is a program and so if i double click on this this is quite cool now as you can see if i hover over an icon we will get some information about what we can do with it so that appears down there in the bottom right and then if you hover over anything you will get some useful information on um what the program is maybe some useful tips on what you can do with it what the mouse buttons do they go click select to display the route so if you ever get lost in risk os it is quite good for holding your hand and giving you some information to help you out so that's quite cool to have we'll quit that and one thing you'll find with risk os direct is that it is heavily orientated around programming now that doesn't make sense because you know back in the day with the acorn bbc micro and the archimedes being these standard school computers there was a massive ecosystem of programming tools around them so if you look here on the pin board we have a programming directory if i double click on that there are loads of different interpreters and compilers for lots of different languages we've got c there uh php python as well and i must admit my programming days are well behind me now you know forgotten everything i learned back in the day but actually on these niche platforms like risco as it is really good because he can get famous in these communities by programming an application or a game or something that's missing from the platform and pretty much everyone that uses it is going to download it because you know they want new software so it is a good way to get into development and kind of sharpen up your skills by developing on um niche platforms like this and also we have the legendary bbc basic included two if i double click that you will see that we land into what looks like a bbc micro and it says there this is bbc basic version five copyright acorn 1989 and bbc basic was generally regarded as the best basic on any of the 8-bit machines back in the 80s you could even put like inline machine code in your basic programs as well and any of those old magazines that you've got with typing listings chances are they probably will work just fine in here as well unless they do anything funky with you know bbc hardware but it is great to have this built in and uh you know i remember just doing the the old program in uh basically we often did in shops back in the day when i went in tandy you'd always leave this on and then leave the shop and leave it running on their machines very childish but yeah still makes me laugh and then to get out of here we just type in um quit and it will take me back to the risk os pin board and now let's check out a few more of the included applications with risk os direct so if i go to the sd card you'll see there is actually quite a big selection of different um categories in here so if we go to audio video um apps is the same as the one that's left out on the pin board there you'll see there are various media players in here so if we go to um am player that i think is like a winamp clone yes as you can see that looks very similar to winamp and they actually do include some media files as well so you can give all of these programs a test drive for going to here and there are a few uh songs in here that i hope are copyright free so we'll click play on there and you'll hear that audio start playing now one thing i'll point out because it took me a bit time to figure this out if you've got a raspberry pi 400 and you're running risk os you will only get audio out of the second hdmi port i was scratching my head for ages wondering why i couldn't get any sound out of the machine then i read it on the forum you've got to use the hdmi port that's furthest away from the power connector so uh just a little tip that might save you a bit of time but as you can see here you know it's um playing mp3 files just great which obviously you expect from a modern machine but you know on risk ice back in the day this would have been an impressive demo as would playing video files as well now they do include um some movie trailers in here so you can test out video playback on risk os so um hopefully again i won't get a copyright strike for these these are only movie trailers uh but again only 480p and the raspberry pi 400 can obviously do you know hd no problem at all i'm not sure on the video playback capabilities of risk os in terms of high definition but you know this playback here looks really smooth no drop frames or anything and uh yeah nice little user interface here we can make it a bit more full screen by clicking that so again you know you can watch all your media and everything in here it's very nice to have included there's also a cd player application bundled with risk os direct i haven't got a cd player attached to my machine but if you had a usb cd drive i imagine you could probably play your music cds while you were doing your work in risc os a sample editor included here as well now i must admit i'm not too up on music production i used to try a bit in a pro tracker on the amiga back in the day but um i was never very good at it but um nice to have that included too there is also an internet radio streamer here as well uh so if you've got any of you know your shoutcast streams that kind of thing you should be able to stream them just fine and there's actually a few uh by the looks of it they're already set up in here to play and even though i've closed these programs you'll see they are still running down the bottom here so to quit them we need to just double click on them and uh make sure we exit out of the programs to get back any ram that they might be using so it comes out of all those the diversions folder contains a bunch of games in here so it is quite cool to see stuff like um scumvm which will let you play all of those old-school lucasarts point-and-click adventure games i used to love them back in the day loom monkey island and obviously none of them are installed out of the box probably due to copyright reasons but they are easy enough to find all over the web so nice to have a port of that on here hopper which i guess is a full screen application this is quite cool with some very eight-bit looking graphics yeah i thought this would be just a frogger clone um not sure on the controls there we go how to go up and down yeah can't get him to move but you get the idea you've played frogger before so we'll uh press escape to get out of that we also have a puzzle game on here i remember this been in the original risk os actually um just got to rearrange them by now get the numbers in order robot arm well i always wanted a robot arm attached to my computer back then and actually looking at this it looks like it's more than just a simulator disconnected maybe you can actually control a real robotic arm with this application by the looks of it which yeah okay that's just a give me an idea of a project that i want to do now very cool to have that included there we also have doom here as well which is quite a surprising addition by the looks of it the yeah the original shareware version of doom and how does this run very nicely actually yeah nice high resolution graphics for doom here and uh yeah really smooth you know not dropping frames and everything very nice to have this included too um and i think with the version of doom on here if you've got you know the the wad files from the full versions or any third party do mods and stuff you can run those in here as well they just stick the the shareware version in you know to uh to avoid any copyright problems we all know what doom looks like but very nice that running on here yeah i'll come out of that now otherwise i'll be uh sitting in it for the next few hours we have mine hunt which uh yep exactly what you thought would be minesweeper we do have a bunch of images included too that we can view with the uh the image viewer so double click that a nice 3d rendered apple um this one that looks a bit like a directory tree of risk os and uh yeah nice drawing of an mg from 1978 and we have a more fully featured word processing program called writer that actually from the icon looks very similar to the old microsoft word logo there um and again this looks really nice you know if you're used to those old versions of word this will be second nature we also have a bunch of network applications included here as well we've got avalanche here which looks like a vnc program so if you want a remote control on the machines or or this one from another computer on your network you could do that we have an ftp program here as well always useful to have to transfer files from various ftp servers around the net and omni i'm not exactly sure what that is i've double clicked it before um i remember that busy cursor that looks the same it looks like a network manager okay cool um we have i imagine this is an email client yeah i'm not sure how compatible this will be with um you know things like gmail and outlook uh but you can put in your uh your pop3 server there as well not sure if it supports imap um i have to give that a little test later and get that set up and servers i've got an http server on here as well so yeah if you want to host your website on a risk os looks like it could be possible and we have a couple of web browsers included too now last time i demoed risk os we were using netsurf which is included here as well um there is a browser i didn't use last time called auto browser and from checking out some of the forums they do recommend using auto browser as a more modern alternative to netsurf so we'll uh we'll give it a quick try now and see how it handles websites okay it looks like it's uh there's a library i can't access here we do have a lot of things running though so i'm going to give the machine a quick reboot and then hopefully we can launch that so i'll middle click on the raspberry pi logo click on shutdown um yeah it warns me that there is stuff in the ram disk that's fine though click on restart and the reboot only took around 10 seconds so uh not quite as quick as the old um risk os machines i used at school when everything was in rom but still a very decent boot time so we'll put that back to 720p and let's try otterbrowser again which fingers cross will work now i think maybe something else yeah this one's not working can't know the library that it needs okay we might have to give that a miss in this demo then let's try netsurf and see if that's changed much since the last time i test drived it i do remember this being quite a speedy little web browser so um we'll have a look risk os nice and responsive you know the the page load speed there was pretty good click on that see what the rendering's like and we're checking out wikipedia there i'm also going to test out my podcast website as well as we've got embedded media in here now playing embedded media is often a problem for um less well-supported web browsers um yeah and i'm looking here it's actually all the rendering on the page is wrong there's meant to be a little widgets to play the media in here but they're just coming up blank so um yeah it doesn't look like that works let's quickly try as well something that i'm i'm almost certain is not gonna work but we'll test it out anyway see what youtube looks like on here now again when you're using alternative operating systems actually embedding youtube videos in a web browser is quite a challenge for them you know it's quite a technical achievement for a web browser and i know from using stuff like um morph os and uh very sort of haiku for example and actually playing youtube videos in the browser is something that generally is not that easy to do on alternative operating systems as you can see here yeah since it's loaded the page we literally just have a little black boxes where the video is meant to be on youtube's home page there may be a way around it and often you can get script programs that will then pull the youtube videos directly from youtube server and just play them in a window so that might be something that's possible so uh i'm not really surprised about that but you know thought it'd be worth a quick test anyway and if you want to get some additional programs installed on here as well there are two different package managers included in risk os direct now the first one is pacman so if i double click on here you will see that we've got a load of applications that are all point and click to install um you know there's all sorts of stuff in here as well we've got utilities you know we've got a a bit torrent client there there are a bunch of games that are spotted then um your platform games uh mp3 audio editor that converts to wav files risk os font editor so there are a lot of applications i imagine these probably date from uh all throughout risk os's history so there might be some that go back to the 90s some more modern ones as well but you know having a package manager in here really makes it a simple way to track down programs that you might want to use and again installing them so if i wanted that font program there um i imagine just a case of clicking there and there you go install and it will download it and install it for you making it very very simple so we have pacman and there is another one included here as well which is called store so if i go into the sd card i think we can find it in here there we go the pling store which is a separate repository for files um with paid for applications in here as well so you look through here i mean again we have a load of free stuff here but there are some programs here that you can actually you know commercial packages that you can pay for like um this one here um x6 turbo graphics that's you know 29.99 um we have one here data power three is a hundred pounds um and this one looks like it's uh one of the finest examples of risk os software um looks like it's a database program so uh looks very cool um i'm not gonna pay a hundred pounds for a database program i'm not going to use for a video but it is cool to see commercial applications still being available in here i mean i'm not sure when that was last updated um so give me any information on there how new that is we can see this version 316. yeah but i'm not sure whether i mean they've got a website that i imagine you could probably get more detail on but i'm not sure whether it you know hasn't been updated for 20 years or it's something that's still in active development um a bunch of other things in here as well that they're charging for did i spot um yeah doom trilogy yeah 1499 and you can get a bunch of doom games here as well um that are enhanced for um seven and eight so uh yeah cool to have a legal way to play and download doom on here and i mean it is kind of a bit confusing i guess for new users having two separate package managers but you know if you just learned that if you want to get commercial applications you're going to get stuff from the playing store um very cool to have them included though and again you know saves you a lot of time looking around forums and websites and trying to track down applications to use on risk os so that's a few of the things that you're going to find in risc os 2021 you know the risk os direct distribution that has a lot of this stuff installed out of the box but again all of these will work in the standard risk os i imagine it will just be a case of manually installing them but i know my channel you're interested in the retro stuff so what we're going to do next is we're going to have a look at running old school bbc micro and acorn archimedes games applications software in risc os direct okay now let's take a little trip back in time and check out some old school bbc micro and acorn archimedes applications and games running inside risk os direct and again you know the guys have put so much work into this distribution and saved a lot of headache for you by including a bunch of programs and emulators to get those classic applications working in here and actually if you check out the youtube channel wi-fi sheep they've actually got a really comprehensive tutorial in there that's about an hour long actually by i think it's a risk os direct team that kind of takes you deep into all the operations of the operating system how to configure all this stuff as well so if you want something that's a bit more in-depth to get things working and how to use risk os i will link that up in the video description definitely worth a look and as you can see here in the emulators directory we have a few different folders containing different emulators including a dos pc one that you know we're not interested in here but if i go to the acorn 26 bit folder you will see in here we have something called acorn mode that will actually boot into essentially a sandbox virtual machine of risc os 3. um but also if you look here the acorn drive that is the storage you'll be able to access within acorn mode so again i've got a few um classic applications and games and discs i've already put in here one thing to be aware of is if you download games from the internet you may need to change their file type to be able to use them as disks as you can see here we've got one that just says data on this with if i middle click on it go to file and then go down to set type we need to change that to floppy so i'll type that in press return and as you can see now it becomes a floppy disk icon so one thing to be aware of when you're downloading things often the file types get corrupted by you know hosting them on linux web servers and that kind of thing so now what we can do is we can boot into acorn mode and it is risk os 3 from 1992 exactly as you remember it on the acorn archimedes and if i click here on the game disc doesn't see all this stuff here the host fs this is that directory i showed you before with all of the um games and applications in there and all the classic apps some of which i demoed a moment ago are in here that you know you would have gotten rom on the uh the acorn archimedes back in the day so it is you know quite nostalgic to see these uh original versions of them again and that color palette i forgot about that yeah you can actually change the uh the screen palette from here as well and then yeah the older acorn logo there again you know doesn't look much different considering there's been there 30 years between the versions almost but you know it's nice to see this original risk os theme again but let's check out a few of the games on here now there are two different ways of playing games some of them are games actually just put double click and you can launch them you know hard disk installable games other ones are game discs that you'll need to mount the images so first of all we'll check out a few of the ones that they've actually bundled in here um including pacmania that was a very popular game on many platforms back in the day and the version of pacmania on the acorn archimedes was a really good one actually um a lot of these games were ported by a company called chrysalis back in the day who would pour atari st and amiga games and arcade games over to the acorn archimedes and i did an entire video recently showing some of the gaming capabilities of this platform that were often untapped at the time you know having an amiga at home i didn't realize that you could play arcade quality games really on the acorn archimedes because you know really we just use them for education at school so yeah you've got a nice version of a pacmania running inside the emulator here you know very smooth scrolling and it plays really nicely and another chrysalis port is speedball now again you know big game on other platforms back then and the acorn archimedes version of this another really good port obviously the bitmap brothers legends back in the day and as you can see it runs very quickly in this emulated acorn mode on the raspberry pi maybe a little bit too quickly and looks a bit frantic but again you know it's running really well and if you found a speedball 2 back in the day i mean definitely one of the best sports sims of the 90s and you'll enjoy this and of course one of the most famous games that really feels at home on the acorn platforms was elite and actually you can download elite for free for the acorn archimedes and the bbc micro from david braven's website these days as well now i've got to admit i was never clever enough to play elite back in the day so um i'm not going to be the best person to demo this i was a bit more into my platform adventure games and these kind of space sims weren't really my thing but generally from what i know the acorn archimedes version of it which i'm failing to control all here is regarded as the best elite version from back then so uh if you're a fan of it you'll definitely be at home playing this i however i'm going to quit out on this game quite quickly because i've got no idea what i'm doing and there is another way to launch games as well now the ones i've demoed so far are hard disk installable but you can see in this folder here in games disks i've actually got some floppy disk images that we can mount by going into the apps folder here and then there is a program called adffs which lets you mount disk images and use them as if they were actual floppies on the machine so uh a demo that i'm sure most people remember who used the acorn archimedes back in the day you just drag the adf images and drop them onto the adffs icon in the icon bar here and then we can open the game lander now this was a game by uh david brabant of elite fame and this was actually bundled with the risc os system discs i remember at school playing this and been blown away by the incredible 3d graphics on this it looked really advanced for the time i was again light with elite i love david braven's games but i've always been crap at them and actually this was quite hard to control i remember um i think this actually came out as a full game called a virus later on but there was this demo here it runs a lot quicker on here than it did on the a3000 back in the day which actually makes it even harder to control than it was on the acorn archimedes but again you know it's uh if you really want to test yourself i guess you could give it a go at this ridiculous frame right here and again we have another chrysalis port of a game that was famous on other platforms obviously the infamous lemmings everyone loved this game back in the day and it got quite a nice port to the acorn archimedes as well which is um of course playable in the acorn mode here and again lemmings is very similar on most platforms it did have some nice music on the um acorn archimedes version though and it is cool sometimes you know if you're used to playing these games on other platforms sometimes it's interesting just to see kind of how the other half lived and you know what these games were like on their alternative platforms back in the day another game that i used to love when i was a kid this is one of my all-time favorite action adventure games the amazing flashback again got a really nice port to the acorn archimedes with some extra frames of graphics as well compared to the version i used to play on the amiga mega drive back in the early 90s and again as you can see you know running really nicely here and this game is a bit like what i imagine a bad acid trip would be like not that i've ever had a good or a bad acid trip in any way shape or form but this game very bizarre this is called top banana and yeah don't have nightmares [Applause] now you might be wondering if the raspberry pi 400 and the acorn archimedes were both arm-based you know the same architecture why do we need to run that old software inside a emulated environment well you can actually run archimedes software directly in risc os by using the a emulator now if we look in here it's actually a module that you can run that will allow 26-bit code to execute within 32-bit risk os so if you installed that module as you can see it's running there now and that should let me run the acorn archimedes software directly in here so click on the readme it'll give me a bit more detail there tells you the platforms are supported now how well this is going to work i'm not exactly sure because i have read on some of the forums that really the safest way to do this is to do it in in the emulated environment because sometimes if you're running games and things that need access to hardware that's not implemented here it can sometimes you know at best crash the system at worst corrupt your operating system install you know by maybe overwriting modern files with older ones so it's advised really if you want to run stuff like games and demos to do it in the older um emulated environment rather than trying to execute it using um something like this so we've emulated the acorn archimedes obviously i'm exploring what's in risco west direct and emulation is a big part of this and so we'll have a look at the other emulator that's included here the um the acorn 8-bit which is the bbc micro now as you can see here there is something called b bit so if i double click that you're going to see down here that an icon appears with the um the old acorn bbc um micro al logo that they had on those machines back then and what you can do is you can actually drag disk images and play them directly in here so if i was just to click it you'll see now we launch into the uh the bbc micro basic and then if i um press f12 on the keyboard now we can try out some software in here now as before when we were loading in the floppy images into the acorn archimedes environment these files that you download and the ssd files they will often need renaming the file type settings so they work in the bbc micro emulator so if we click on one here that actually has the file type set correctly we can see what that should be so that needs to be a dfs image so we'll try here on adventure change the file type and as you can see that will now look like an old five and a quarter inch floppy disk icon and we can then just drag and drop it onto the icon here for the model b and if i can find the keys see there that now the disk image is loaded now unfortunately we can't do shift and break which is the usual way that you would load automatically load a bbc micro disk as um there is no break key on the keyboard and i've tried various combinations i can't get any way to get shift break working here so you'll have to load the game discs manually by the looks of it but i think if we do exact boot yeah that should then load the bootloader as you can see here that is working now and i love this um old-school teletex mode on here this looks really cool a game that i definitely recognize from being a kid one of my favorite games at school was the legendary granny's garden now anyone that went to school in britain back in the late 80s would have played this game it was a real favorite of most kids back then now to load this i think we need to do chain turn num lock off grand one it's been about 30 years since i did this but um yeah that should get granny's garden loading up fingers crossed there we go ready to start of course we are and this game if you're not familiar with it um it's actually quite hard to find online these days for the original bbc micro as and the developers think they're called formation actually still stringently protect the copyright on this game and there is a version that you can run on your modern pc and i think there is one for ios and android as well that they sell for uh quite a low price but trying to find the originals is quite hard as they uh they kind of meticulously take it down from all of the rom image websites so um quite a hard image to find these days if you want the original bbc micro version and the witch in here i think is still the scariest enemy in video game history so we've got a magic tree press the space bar and i think this was all random um let's do three v i'll put the letter first okay b3 not enough magic in that tree yeah and i remember you had to um find the magic tree for no apparent reason at all and until you could get into the game i'm sure this is a riveting video what was the last one you try in here isn't it it's got to be c3 that'll let there we go what now we go into the uh god i remember this it brings my memories and this music as well [Music] of course at school back in the day i was actually um i know i'm gonna sound ridiculously cool now i was the computer monitor so uh yeah i'd get in early around half past eight in the morning before the other kids and actually um take all of the we had full bbc micros in our school and um i'd set them up on the trolleys with the cub monitors and uh wheeled them into the classes the kids always looked excited when the bbc micro came in and we're going to play granny's garden though always the highlight of your school day okay we're inside the secret cave now the king and the queen of the mountains have been locked away in here by a wicked witch their six children have been taken away and hidden by the witch would you like to help them now do you remember if you say no because we are obviously being you know petulant kids we'd also be like well no of course we don't that's not very nice so it doesn't let you have to say yes so we have to find the missing children so we need to find esther first of all and the kings and queens pet raven is going to help me see these mind-blowing graphics back in the 80s okay we've got a magic raven do you want to help no okay the king and queen say that he must help us so why ask the question then let's go to the woodcutter's house okay right so the witch has made the woodcutter leave his home and now it's a prison for esther so i guess we're gonna go there come on then let's go eurod he understood it yeah why not let's go in we must solve a little puzzle okay now maybe this is a bit easier to see on a crt monitor it looks like fig actually doesn't it there we go we must be very careful the witch has set some traps for us would you like to take an apple from the tree now i've got a feeling she's going to get us if we do but why not let's give it a go i was a greedy kid i don't know i think as well the witch kind of appears at different intervals in the game depending on the path that you take it's kind of randomly generated it's very dark but you can see a long stick by the wall yeah let's take the stick i've got a stick and an apple so you're doing well here um okay let's go to should go to the kitchen oh no okay so i crashed the game before we even saw the witch okay so we're back here again after i went through all the start of the game too um let's try an apple from the tree again okay so here we are back here um let's try going into the cupboard and the game crashed again at exactly the same time now uh if you haven't played this before and you want to see the witch i'll put an image above her now you know forget resident evil forget slenderman still the scariest video game character ever i love the fact as well she doesn't even kill you already if she just sends you back home gave me nightmares as a kid though and just before we finish up with the bbc micro stuff i thought i'd quickly try out the first ever word processor that i used as a kid this is a package called folio now i seriously haven't looked at this since about probably 1989 when i was in infant school i remember loading this up you know the teacher had had this on a couple of the bbc micros and we'd um we'd do little essays and stories and print them out on the dot matrix printers so uh yeah this user interface is bringing back a lot of memories i've actually tried to look for this online a few times over the years and look at some screenshots but actually it seems quite hard to find so i'm not sure how popular this was so we can do um like a different format let's try doing a news one so we press two on the keyboard there we go and i guess this is going to be like a newspaper okay hello i am writing the news yeah this brings back some memories that's spacing as well i love the fact that the the cursor is kind of shaped like a fountain pen there um yeah very simplistic but you know been the first word processor i ever used as a kid i was a big fan of folio so yeah very cool nice so yeah that's been the look of bbc micro emulation as i mentioned i'll probably do an actual full bbc micro video and share a few more of my memories and old school programs i used to use on that back in the day soon but it is good to know that all of this is bundled with the risc os direct distribution so if you want to jump into um acorn archimedes and bbc micro emulation on your raspberry pi a really easy way to do it so that's been a look at risk os die right now we could go on further you know there's lots more in this distribution but you know this video is probably already way too long i've got to say i think the team have done a really good job of pulling together a lot of the um best risk os software that you'd use on a daily basis and having those fully configured emulation environments as well extremely useful particularly for users who may have used risc os or the bbc micro years ago and kind of dipping their toe in the water again that is a nice way to not only capture that nostalgia but also kind of show you what's new in risk os as well so they cover both sides of it quite well i think so if you've got a raspberry pi lying around i mean maybe you were a user of risk os at school like i was you know back in the 80s or 90s it is really good to kind of see where it's come in those like 30 years since its heyday and how the community are keeping it alive today and i'm pleasantly surprised by the amount of software that is available in both of the package managers and of course even the existence of commercial software is pretty mind-blowing in 2021 but also the fact that it's now open source as well and it has been for about two years now it will be interesting to see where the community steers this project and obviously having stuff like you know the direct distribution that we've got here is definitely a step in the right direction i think so uh definitely worth a download even if you haven't used it before and you just want to try an operating system that is really completely different to anything that you've probably tried before it is worth it just for that i think so if you want to give it a download i'll link it up in the video description thank you for watching this video and a quick reminder that i do a weekly retro gaming and technology podcast you can get new episodes every friday on your favorite podcast client search for the retro hour or you can get us only smart speaker ask it to play the retro hour podcast or just head on to our website at the retrohour.com and while you're here on youtube here are another couple of videos i think you might enjoy i'll see you next time

Channel: Dan Wood

Views: 43,092

Keywords: #riscos, #risc os, #risc os raspberry pi, #riscos raspberry pi, acorn archimedes, acorn, a3000, a3010, riscpc, arm cpu, arm, risc, riscos, retro, computer, bbc micro, acorn bbc micro, computing, retrogaming, retro gaming, Acorn Archimedes (Computer), arm 2, arm architecture, 1980s, 1990s, acorn computer, sinclair spectrum, risc arm, vintage computer, acorn a3000, RISC OS (Operating System), Raspberry Pi (Computer), Acorn Computers (Organization), 90s computing, 80s computing, RISC OS

Id: sneYGad3j5I

Length: 50min 39sec (3039 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 12 2021