Can RISC OS from 1987 run unmodified on Raspberry Pi 400? CPU instruction set compatibility doesn't build the full legacy software support. X86 PC's unmodified OS from 1987 can still run on modern PC hardware with up to UEFI Class 2. My AM5 X670E motherboard still has CSM.
I never had an Acorn (or used one), but I think the Acorn was probably the equal to the Amiga. It's a pity the worst systems ended up becoming the ones that became predominate.
the Acorn Archimedes was a late 80s computer, so getting a Raspberry Pi, installing RISC OS Direct, and booting into it is a truly legit Retro Computing rig. Ticks all the boxes - step back into the Golden Age of 1980s computing, runs on real hardware instead of an emulator, can get the hardware easily at relatively very low cost (no waiting on a Kickstarter project for a year or more and paying multiple hundreds pounds/euros/dollars) - and on top of all that it can quickly bring up a BASIC prompt, using what was arguably the best dialect of BASIC from the early 80s micro computing rivalries. But at the same time powerful compiled languages available too. The marketing around this should concentrate on selling this as fully legit entry into Retro Computing for the masses (not just the geek classes). Great platform for kids to learn computing at a serious level instead of a trivial level of merely learning to use computers.
But even better, it's running on a native descendant of it original processor. The Raspberry Pi was even created to try to fill the void left by the Archimedes! This is more than retro. This is like a Commodore running on 65816. This COULD have been were this system ended up anyway. Nevermind that the Archimedes inspired the Amiga and Atari "flat: systems. Being from the states I never got to see an Archimedes until the 2000's. Still have never seen one on person. There is rumor of 60hz models made for US power, but at the time the machine that would unquestionably win the proccessor war, as the projecter of almost every smartphone, tablet, andeven the latest Mac!
@@davidste60 I think the look at the hardware is missing the point the amiga was the one of the first PC's to come out of the box new with full work OS desktop, with a mouse), not some sort if add on (even apple Lisa didn't have desktop, it was more of a very fancy electronic typewriter, the desktop was very basic, nothing could be customised at all, the was the zerox machine with a mouse ( not called a mouse I think) from the demo's I've seen go wow even today, when PC's only had a DOS prompt !
@@dh2032 I think you've missed the point. Ratteler said that the Archimedes inspired the Atari and Amiga computers, but those came first. It's about the timeline.
RISC OS Direct is not the 1987 original RISC OS release. Retro unmodified MS-DOS 1.0 from 1981 can still run on modern X86 PC hardware up to UEFI Class 2.
I remember RISC OS 3.11 when I was in primary school in the UK. I have a virtual machine running RISC OS 3.11. I have happy memories and great nostalgia from that operating system.
I used to work for Castle Technology. We were the last company to build all the RISC OS machines under licence during the latter stages of the computer's life. A phenomenal machine and a phenomenal OS. The clarity of the on-screen text rendering with its anti-aliasing was second-to-none
I had an Kinetic RISC PC and a Iyonix from Castle. They managed to keep the platform alive for a few years and thankfully had the vision to open source RISC OS
Element 14 is now electronic parts supplier geared towards the Hobbiest market. They are the main distributor of the Raspberry Pi in the US. You could say they stayed in the educational sector like Acorn.
Now, we have ARM and Risc V chips about. Awesome Risc V mobos and laptops are working their way to market - I'm stoked. Might be good stuff for an Amiga hardware reboot.
Back in the time I had an Amiga but when I saw some screenshots of this os I was really impressed. The Acorn was even more ahead of it’s time then the Amiga.
Yes it was. It's very sad that the Archimedes lost out to the ST, Amiga and then to PCs. How the world could have been. I suppose in a way it's coming full circle now. ARMs are getting more powerful, powering Macs and (slowly) moving into servers. It won't be so long until we all have ARM desktops/laptops running Windows (or RiscOS?) to go with our ARM phones, watches, etc.
In Norway lots of schools had Tiki 100 computers; fairly low-end stuff but developed in Norway... default/most commonly used programming language was LOGO... Acorn computers were used in some special needs schools and institutions I believe, due to the ease of interfacing with custom hardware, though that was mostly back in the 8-bit days of the BBC computer and later the Master variants.
I had an Amiga, and most of my friends (in Norway) had either Amigas or game consoles. The only experience I had with Acorn was the few times they were mentioned in CU Amiga Magazine...
That was a really good video, and really took me back to senior school in the UK back in the day, I used to play Lander for hours on the Acorn. Thank you for a good overview, and keen to give it a try myself and reminisce...
Ah, such nostalgia! My mum was a teacher and would bring home the Archimedes in holidays. Fond memories of playing Elite and attempting to make Arkanoid-style games in BASIC
My primary school in New Zealand had Acorn machines in most of the classrooms, as well as at least one Beeb. Aside from getting traumatised by the witch in Granny's Garden, there was also a word processor, and it may have been Folio - I just remember the blue background. When we got the Archimedes machines, Pacmania and Lemmings were the favourites - everyone was rubbish at Lander. Of courses, when the teacher had her way, it was writing things in the Pendown (I believe that was what it was called) word processor.
I loved BBC Basic. And the RiscOS game Play your cards right. I became an Acorn RISCOS dealer in Fyvie Scotland and ran the business on a 2 slice RiscPC with a Pentium 2 486 co-processor running Windows 95. Ah, the memories. The Video playback then was nothing short of amazing.
Ah yes, Krisalis. Your games were played in many a school during breaks and lunchtimes. MUFC Europe was one I remember.... Edit: oh, and games were pirated on 3.5" floppies
I learned to program on a BBC B my older brother bought in about 1982. The archimedes was a distant dream until I was doing my A-levels. I still program a lot.
I left school in 1989, but our school was heading in the direction of Amiga and Mac for some reason, and skipped the Archimedes which I would have loved to tried.
sigh... If things had turned out just a little differently Acorn might still be around as the 'Apple' of Europe and I'd be using a descendant of the RiscPC and A4 as my daily drivers. Oh, well. On with the show, thanks Dan.
A very nice package that is well put together. Someone really did a fabulous job putting this all together. Not growing up in the UK I really had no inkling of what the Archimedes computer was like. I bought a C64 in 1984 and used it for many years before moving on to the Amiga and eventually Linux on peecee hardware. I'll have to try this out on my Pi and tinker with it. I probably spent a few hundred hours playing Elite on the C64 and it'll be interesting to try this version.
First OS I used on a computer was Risc OS on a computer at Primary School... A7000s I think from research now but I can't remember exactly. Migrating to a Windows world was vastly different to how things worked back then. It seemingly vanished overnight as Microsoft completed it's takeover of the UK market. Acorn may be dead but ARM rose like a phoenix from its ashes. The most prominent game we were playing if I'm recalling correctly was ZigZag: The Romans to teach us about life in the Roman times, it was quite interactive.
Awesome video as always! Just to save you some time, you can use the rubber band select to highlight all those disk images and then set the type in bulk by middle clicking. Also, Shift-PrtScn works as Shift-Break (and likewise with Ctrl) but you might end up rebooting RISC OS instead of the BBC.
So glad you made this. I tried RISCOS last year and didn’t get anywhere with it. This inspired me to give it another try :) One Archimedes arrived just in my final year of school so I had a little play with the game (felt sure it was called Virus?) but as will all the BBC computers at my schools, it was then made off-limits unless you were one of the chosen few, which I was very much not 🤣
The apple and MG Midget examples were not actually 3D renders; they're the classic demo files of the !Artworks vector drawing program. - It had very convincing gradients. (I never had a copy as I think it was fairly pricey!)
It was excellent. I bought a copy back in the day, used it any time I needed to do illustrations for college, although I didn't have the skills to produce graphics like the demos! Corel Corporation bought up the licensing rights for it in 1995 and sold it for Windows machines under the name CorelXara, that put an end to the original Acorn version. Corel has a long history of acquiring or eliminating competitors, even those established on other platorms. Xara (formally known as Compuer Concepts) reacquired the rights in 2000 and continue to this day to sell the Windows version.
Many of the people from Acorn went onto Pace who did the set top boxes for Sky. In fact, I'm sure they were using Risc OS for some of these. I remember when ITV Digital went bust there was a period before Freeview where DVB set top boxes started to appear and I bought one. It was made by Pace and pretty sure it used Risc OS (the Pace DVTA). The company I worked for 2000/2001 was a consultancy and some of the team were in Cambridge doing some QA testing for Pace on that box.
Amazing!! There was one game that sticks in my mind from primary school in the mid 90s - “Around the world in 80 Days” - would LOVE to see and hear that again! Can’t seem to find it anywhere
14:16 New versions of macOS allows to drag and drop a location from Finder to file requester. Just drag an icon from Finder window header to a file requester header (not list of files/folders). MorphOS also allows to drag and drop location from an Ambient window to a file requester. This is better solution because we can choice - drag&drop or select from list of files/folders.
I also recommend the third-party app Default Folder. I use it basically just for one function: While in an Open or Save dialog, I can click on any open windows in the Finder and it will select this folder in the dialog. Have been using it since MacOS 9, I think.
My first high school had these machines in the library with 1 or 2 Macintosh's and a few Win 95 machines in 1997. Everyone wanted to use the Macintosh because it looked different and had one mouse button. They use to form queues just to use them. I'd love to go back and experience using RISCOS again.
I had forgotten Folio! When I was in Primary 7 I used to type out the prayers for Sunday Mass and print them out on that. On RISC-OS there was a desktop publishing package called Impression that could produce professional output while running from two floppy disks. There was a flight sim called Interdictor which had a very realistic flight model and Elite was very good on that platform also. There was also a tank game which was good but difficult.
The Archie was the standard eventually, I had to use the BBC Micro untill near the end when my school got 5 Archies (with the rest of the room still in Beebs) had some fun games on it. So many memories, gotta love some Zarch
OMG nostalgia overload!!!! Was sooo hopign you would launch JetSet Willy that and manic miner were the first 2 games I ever played on a spectrum 48k lol. Pen Down (English and Welsh versions) and Artisan were 2 programs we used alot on the archimedes back in school. Not going to mention taking top row magazines into school and scanning them in then putting the images on a floppy disk for everyone XD
I remember RISC OS from secondary school, we used A3000's allover the school and even ran some Acorn systems which had a PC emulator card in them which were used by the art department I think to run Windows 3.1. That said there were still BBC Micro B's kicking around in the mid 1990's too.
Sounds very similar to my high school. We had 2 computer suites which had a mish-mash of A3000s and A3020s, with 3 or 4 A4000/A5000s, and a handful of Citizen dot matrix printers, a random Canon inkjet and an ancient plotter. Each of the CDT and science labs usually had 2 or 3 BBC Micros sat in the corner collecting dust, which the library had 4 random Win3.x PCs, no two alike. IIRC we had one 286, one 486 and two 386s, one of which had a CD-ROM drive. They were the only PCs in the school, and were used pretty much exlusively playing Worms, and a basic range-finding canon fire game in Windows, oh, and The Incredible Machine, which I *LOVED*. Weirdly, the best specced place in the whole school was the hardly ever used careers library, which had at least half a dozen top of the line, brand new double-pizza boxed RISC PCs, complete with x86 processor cards and CD-ROMs, and gorgeous multisync monitors and HP laserjet printers. They were only ever used to run a "choose your career" program in MS-DOS...while the CDT graphic design lab stuttered on with the A3000s and a plotter dating back to the early medieval period.
@@lmlmd2714 now a primary aged child would be horrified if they didn't have a system with at least 8GB of Ram and the latest version of Windows. Upon said system they'd open Chrome and use it to run a web-based app to do their homework. Imagine the excuses nowadays "Sorry miss: our fibre broadband went down and I couldn't log into the group remote learning seminar as my mobile had the wrong version of Android on it.... I'll submit my colouring in by the end of the day once my brand-new mobile handset is delivered by an Amazon drone"
This brings back a lot of memories, at school when we could we’d play golf or ww2 flying game but mostly lemmings. I also remember the IT teacher saying to us all that Acorn computers would be in every school and home and was the future of computers. How wrong he was lol, but it’s very surprising how much those computers cost now on eBay.
Well, he was almost right. ARM processors and microcontrollers can be found in just about every home and school, as well as in vehicles, industrial equipment, scientific instruments and who knows what else. I doubt the original designers at Acorn could have foreseen the impact they would have on the world.
ahh the memories. Always wonder how RISCOS would have ended up had it carried on fully back in the day, but great to see it's still alive and looking good!
With regard to RiscOS, we are rapidly approaching the point where operating systems are irrelevant. We're actually already there. 99% of people only use their computer to connect to the net. I expect a return of a lot of systems, and an explosion of news operating systems.
Loved the BBC micro in primary school and BBC->Archi->RiscPC in secondary. Played Granny's garden on RiscOS Direct with my 5 year old earlier this year during lockdown. Home schooling like it's 1984!
Wonderful. Folio was a a game changing word processor for the BBC micro. The first WP accessible by the youngest pupils, and the large print outs were unbelievable at the time. It does hold a record, it was licensed to be used for more users in the UK than any other WP at the time. Perhaps it still is ! Virtually every Local Education Authority bought a license to use it for all children and teachers in all schools, hence the huge user base, millions of children. It was very very inexpensive at the time, a few hundred pounds for a local authority. It was not the on screen WP facilities that made it great, it was the large print on a dot matrix printer. Totally revolutionary. The first time teachers could print “professional” LARGE text. Really large at the time. Great for classroom displays. And a range of fonts designed for the primary school. If there were a “Hall of Fame” for the most impactful piece of educational software, this might be number 1.
That apple and the MG are actually vector graphics files... I think they originally came as examples with Computer Concepts' vector graphics application ArtWorks (later bought by Corel IIRC - don't remember what it was renamed to).
I used to play Fervour, Moonquake, Marsquake and Phaethon on RISC OS 3.11. Is it possible to download those for the Raspberry Pi? Those were my all-time favourite four games for the RISC OS 3.11 operating system, which ran on an actual Acorn Archimedes computer.
Pretty sure that organiser app dates back to my days using RISC OS in the early 90s. So I guess the Filofax style was probably a reasonable visual metaphor at the time it was originally written! Kind of amazing to see it in a current distribution.
Unfortunately the Archimedes wasn’t released until after I left school, so it was all BBC micros, remember programming the odd game like Blitz. But the graphic user interface I knew as WIMP on the Amiga, virus was a great game though, once you got used to the controls. My wife did use acorn computers at work for graphic design up until the millennium.
Just to clarify, the M1 Max does not use ARM architecture, Apple only licensed ARM instruction set. The M1 is Apple Silicon and it uses their own proprietary architecture. RISC wasn’t always power efficient, as you can see with SGI and Motorola G series processors. Apple lead a team in the early 90’s to make a version of ARM to be power efficient for their Newton and Motorola agreed to join the effort for their phone business
Actually your terminology and your info is wrong. Apple licence the ARM ISA (Instruction Set Architecture), which includes the instruction set and how the processor must present itself to the outside world. How the processor is designed to work internally is up to the manufacturer, as long as it presents the ARM ISA outwardly. Intel and AMD have been using the x86 ISA for decades. Yet internally, their chips do not work like real x86 chips such as the 386/486. They actually use a microcoded RISC core that breaks down x86 instructions. The original ARM 1 processor was incredibly energy efficient and, for the time, very fast. But CPU designers can choose how energy efficient or perfomant they want a processor to be, nobody says ARM or RISC has to be low power, any more than they say it has to be ultra fast. Intel's Atom x86 CPU was a perfect example of this type of profiling.
I envy british students for having BBC micros and Archimedes as platform back in the day. Can't tell how mindblown I would have been to see a graphical interface on my computer in school. We had C128s using some kind of special programming language (cant't recall the name of it) designed for school computers which was for learning programming fundementals. Needless to say that this was far from having fun with a computer.
I've wanted to get into Raspberry Pi for a bit, now. Nice to know there is a robust OS besides the Linux flavors that runs well on it. Makes the hardware even more attractive.
Lander was also known as Zarch. Its funny but when going through school, there were newer and older computers throughout the classrooms, but everyone loved Zarch and Granny's Garden.
Lander is a very limited demo of Zarch, most of the gameplay is missing. Zarch was ported to other systems under the name Virus... It Really showed how much more powerful the Acorns were when it came to 3D stuff. 3D games on the Archimedes were amazing. :O
IF you held the left shift button while clicking on a !App folder...... I think that was the combination to open the app folder, rather than run the app. Inside is lots of files, Boot, images, program code..... it was interesting to see.
Dan another great video, thanks! Quick notes (hopefully helpful): "Discs" (aka Resources) shows you the NETWORK shared discs from other RISC OS systems (still compatible with old RISC OS making if super simple to transfer files between machines). RobotArm does indeed control the real RobotArm in the picture an dit's super cool. Omni is a client for Microsoft SMB, NFS and also old Apple network file sharing protocol. For the network browsers I definitely recommend to use Iris (a commercial one) which is based on modern Web Kit and so supports pretty much every modern website and javascripts. Iris it's very powerful and definitely way ahead of any browser for all retro OS. At this time RISC OS nightly build support max 4GB of RAM and there are now releases that also support 8GB of RAM. Cheers :)
😀 Dan, your video is one of the best to explore RISC OS in its modern form. But, like all such introductions that I have seen, it focuses on nostalgia and gaming, and so doesn't do justice to the many quality apps that make the OS more practical and useful for everyday use than you imply. For one thing, a random walk around some of the apps in the RISC OS Direct distro could be a tad more informed as to their function, quality and value. Given that the OS is receiving updates from RISC OS Open and RISC OS Developments all the time, that RISC OS Direct is not the only richly endowed distro, and that there exists a community who use it all the time for general use (me included), I wonder if it would be feasible to create a second episode that delves a little deeper? I'd be happy to assist.
It also helps the ip holders by making backups as Burt hurt as Nintendo acts, they had to download all the roms they sell as even they had no backups. People found this out as they forgot to remove the rom code , which was funny watching people call them out on it,
Hahaha. That "Tandy is Shit" just killed me! That must have been a worldwide thing, as I'm in Australia (Darwin at the time) and we used to go to the Tandy stores and type the same thing. If you do a semicolon at the end, it appends the text and makes it scroll vertically and horizontally. Good times.
Well, RiscOS isn't an OS supported directly by the Pi Foundation, they have enough on their plate with Raspian, so it's no surprise they only provide a plain vanilla version. The primary distribution on the RiscOS website is generally bereft of third party software too. I dare say they have limited time and resources which are better spent on keeping the OS itself up to date.
I use my Pi 400 almost daily with RISC OS 5, with the ‘Intel Outside’ wallpaper a lot of you Amiga guys used to have as well! 😂 Such a great operating system, it’s a shame it’s still a bit behind today and with the new 64 bit ARM ISA taking over, I doubt it will be around much longer on bare metal. Great overview as always!
Fun review, thanks. I had a Model B and then a Master 512, but never made it to an Archimedes. I found myself diverting down the more affordable Atari ST route and then to PCs. I am so glad that RiscOS is still alive and being developed.
@@TheUAoB Still have it, although I'm not sure where it's stored. Tempting to dig it out and sell it. Ideally need to find all the disks (DR-DOS and GEM) that it came with, too.
I had an atari ste for games then a falcon. my friend who was into programming had an archimedes and I loved the lemmings, lander versions on it, vastly superior, had good scene demos too
I always had Atari at home (still do!). I feel the Falcon had so much crippled potential. It was a really powerful machine but Atari really hobbled it with the 16Mhz bus and ST style case. People have done some amazing stuff with it over the years though and feel it really deserved a better chance than it got - but yeah, to be brutally honest, much as a I love Atari - it's true the Acorn machines were much more mature and less compromised designs - the advantage of having a large institutional de-facto captive market and lots of vendors on board from the get go, which Atari really, really didn't get the importance of.
i used to like the bbc micro emulator on my amiga. Used to like running emulators on amiga - macintosh, etc. I wrote my final year thesis using LateX on an amiga - that was .. challenging.. but it let me take a disk into uni, pop it into an HP Unix workstation and continue editing there. There was no other home computer you could do that in as far as I know.
Always think Amiga workbench and Tos look rubbish and backwards compared to RiscOS. Never had the games support but the Archimedes has some great DTP, and music apps. Great to see this
Hmmm...Here in the USA, GW Basic [Microsoft, and avalable on MS-DOS machines like the Zenith Z100] was pretty advanced and superceeded PC Basic [the original Microsoft Basic for IBM-PC]. In the late 80's, folks were loading assembler into the Commodore PET vie the embedded Microsoft Basic Peek/Poke. Also, though not available to mere mortals, HP Basic for the HP 9845 was hugely expanded and if memory serves, supported Pascal-like procedures.
My only experience with using RISC OS has been when trying to use Archimedes emulators to play games. There were things about it that I didn't understand, like how an icon can launch a game by double-clicking it, but it also apparently has other files INSIDE it, even though it's not a directory. I mainly wanted to play Elite, but quickly gave up on that. I know how to play Elite, but I can't play it with a mouse or keyboard. I need a joystick and I guess only one cover disk version of it supported joystick control. I suppose I could use JoyToKey, but then again, I didn't know how to turn damping on (so that it re-centers the control when you stop moving), which is why you just kept rolling in the video. Plus, none of the emulators supported save states and I'm not sure how to manage saves natively.
It's like anything else in life, you have to put some effort in to it to get anything out. You weren't born knowing how to work any computers, how to speak a language or drive a car. There are numerous manuals and books on RiscOS and Archimedes that are free to download, not to mention forums and user groups that will help.
I never play with any of the computers from the Acorn era, but it was fun seeing what you guys were able to do and learn. I am wondering if this software would work on a modern ARM/RISC base computer. Thank you.
I worked for a guy who was selling them. Unlike the OP I didn't like that you had to manually adjust resources; like space for sprites, etc! Seemed pretty arcaine to be?
Tried on the Pi0, as a comment said, and the experience was amazing. Tried on the PI400, and not so much (no Internet connection). Not the worst thing in the world, but it makes everything a bit harder. Apart from that, this is a good OS for the PI, much better than the default, boring Debian!
21:22 I have that exact robot arm in the picture (same colour and everthing), and it can be controlled by a computer via usb. So that is more than likely software to control it.
The BBC micro there was one in my reception classroom in 1993/94 also remember three button mice anyone remember Granny’s Garden, thank god for Windows
I remember demonstrating video on this in a Window before Windows had anything like it and when it finally did we called it video for postage stamps it was so bad. It booted instantly.
Cheers. This makes me wanna buy a Pi to use as my main home computer. I’d love to throw out this noisy big old thing I got now. Probably going Linux then tho, but this OS is a neat extra. And I don’t play newer games, so ScummVM, emulators and WINE for those older games should cover my bases.
