Acorn Archimedes recreation is there any project ongoing or started?

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joe_velcro

joe_velcro

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HI All,

I had a BBC A3000 back in the day complete with ARM 3 and sold it off when it wasn't worth a lot to buy a Power Macintosh. Anyway I'd like to have another one and was wondering are there any community projects around remaking them (like certain Amiga models). Not interested in FPGA.

I Googled it and there was somthing came up on the star.dot forums but for some reason that forum looks dead at the moment.

Thanks !!
 
The only way I know of to do it is MiSTer FPGA. I'm looking forward to trying the Acornsoft release of Elite when mine is up and working again.
 
As far as I am aware, there are no plans to revive the Acorn Archimedes brand with new machines.

This leaves you with basically 4 options

Put out a Wanted advert here
Embrace FPGA
Ebay or if you are really lucky, a thrift store find
Emulator such as Arculator (Win) or ArcEm (Mac)
 
Aeberbach said:
The only way I know of to do it is MiSTer FPGA. I'm looking forward to trying the Acornsoft release of Elite when mine is up and working again.
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... and this one is far from great. Only implements a A3000 class machine at roughly 90% of it's original performance, so it's rather slow. I would simply take a Raspberry Pi (the slowest you can get) and run RISC OS 5.28. In conjunction with Aemulator which forces to the system into 26-bit mode almost all games run without any hassle. You can even run games only distributed on floppy and which are available as ADFs using ADDFS (look over to the jaspp forum)
 
Thanks for the replies. Honestly I'm not a fan of FPGA's and emmulation or that kind of thing with my PC or Mac or Ras Pi pretending to be something else. For me its something more than just using it. I don't mind if its a recreation as long as there is some of the original DNA in there (hence the reason I'm going to build an A4000TX). So it would have to have an ARM 3 in it in some way to be an Archimedes as thats what I had back in the day. Appreciate the views and advice though.
 
joe_velcro said:
Thanks for the replies. Honestly I'm not a fan of FPGA's and emmulation or that kind of thing with my PC or Mac or Ras Pi pretending to be something else. For me its something more than just using it. I don't mind if its a recreation as long as there is some of the original DNA in there (hence the reason I'm going to build an A4000TX). So it would have to have an ARM 3 in it in some way to be an Archimedes as thats what I had back in the day. Appreciate the views and advice though.
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If you haven't already, do check out The StarDot Forum
 
The Archimedes HDL recreation that MiSTer uses was written by Stephen Leary aka Terrible Fire. It's a good faithful reproduction that is limited by the maximum timing in the MiSTer Cyclone V FPGA. If there were any love I'm sure it could be improved at sacrifice of compatibility (e.g. Later ARM with pipeline enhancement) but that was not the original goal. The hard work that went into this core could be used to create an physical ARM250 replacement. But I don't see any one interested
 
joe_velcro said:
Thanks for the replies. Honestly I'm not a fan of FPGA's and emmulation or that kind of thing with my PC or Mac or Ras Pi pretending to be something else. For me its something more than just using it. I don't mind if its a recreation as long as there is some of the original DNA in there (hence the reason I'm going to build an A4000TX). So it would have to have an ARM 3 in it in some way to be an Archimedes as thats what I had back in the day. Appreciate the views and advice though.
Click to expand...

The Raspberry Pi does NOT emulate a Acorn. It's actually a (kinda of a) Acorn - the BCM2835 CPU used in the Pi 1 is a direct descendent of the latest SOCs used by Acorn / Castle to power their devices in the late 90s, early 2000s. It's also officially supported by ROOL, the company behind RISC OS.
 
egrath said:
The Raspberry Pi does NOT emulate a Acorn. It's actually a (kinda of a) Acorn - the BCM2835 CPU used in the Pi 1 is a direct descendent of the latest SOCs used by Acorn / Castle to power their devices in the late 90s, early 2000s. It's also officially supported by ROOL, the company behind RISC OS.
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It's still running native 32bit ARM on 32bit ARM, I'd consider a Pi running RISC OS to be authentic enough (although, I'd argue authentic to a later RISC PC rather than an Archimedes). You'd need Aemulator to run 26bit addressing Archimedes applications on an ARM610/StrongARM Acorn RISC PC from the 90s too mind you!

Dunno if I'd call BCM2835 a direct descendant though, at least not of the StrongARM chips in the late 90s stuff :) That said Broadcom did buy out a chunk of Acorn during the breakup, still some Acorn engineers (like Sophie Wilson) working there last I checked, for what that's worth
 
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I used to be a big fan of the Archimedes. I was lucky enough to be at Secondary school in the late 80's when they launched and our school got a lot of them. Mainly A3000, but also other models such as the A440. And I still have all the floppy disks I used that contain all the software the school had, plus every game a friend had as he was lucky enough to own one himself.

Anyway the Raspberry Pi Risc OS setup in the best these days. And using a RPi400 is a great setup to use.
 
Hi,

I posted message on Stardot, concerning a possible remake of the A3000 or A3020, but, alas no one seemed interested.

This came about, due to everytime I try to buy an Archimedes, the sale goes really high.

So I wondered how about entering the A3020/3000 schematics into KiCad and project a PCB. Quite bit of work...

The main problem area is the ARM250 CPU, which seems to obsolete, or could a more up to ARM be used?
 
As explained above the ARM2 + VIDC + MEMC has been 100% faithfully recreated in an FPGA (as has the rest of the Archimedes chipset) and so you can just buy a MiSTer and it will be able to pretend to be an A3000
 
Rob Taylor and Chrissy (amongst others) on the Retro Tinkering discord (amongst others) are recreating the A3000 motherboard
 

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