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The first models were released in June , as the and series. Both models included the Arthur operating system later replaced by RISC OS as a paid-for upgrade , BBC BASIC programming language, and an emulator for Acorn's earlier BBC Micro , and were mounted in two-part cases with a small central unit, monitor on top, and a separate keyboard and three-button mouse the middle one used for pop-up context menus of the operating system.
All models featured eight-channel 8-bit stereo sound and were capable of displaying colours on screen. Three models were initially released with different amounts of memory, the A, A and A Speculation gathered pace about new machines in the Archimedes range in early , with commentators envisaging a low-cost, cut-down model with KB of RAM to replace the A in a fashion reminiscent of the Master Compact.
Concurrently with these rumoured product development efforts, work had commenced on a successor to the Arthur operating system , initially named Arthur 2 but renamed to RISC OS 2 for launch.
Unlike the previous models, the A came in a single-part case similar to the BBC Micro , Amiga and Atari ST computers, with the keyboard and disc drive integrated into a base unit "slightly smaller than the Master ". Acorn offered a monitor stand that attached to the machine, [51] this being bundled with Acorn's Learning Curve package, [52] and PRES announced a monitor plinth and external disc drive case.
The new model sported only a single internal expansion slot , which was physically different from that of the earlier models, although electrically similar. An external connector could interface to existing expansion cards, with an external case for such cards being recommended and anticipated at the machine's launch, [50] and one such solution subsequently being provided by PRES's expansion system. The relative affordability of the A compared to the first Archimedes machines and the release of RISC OS helped to convince educational software producers of the viability of the platform.
The appeal of the A to education may also have motivated the return of Microvitec to the Acorn market with the Cub monitor: a re-engineered version of the Cub monitor that was popular amongst institutional users of the original BBC Micro.
The introduction of the A also saw Acorn regaining a presence in mainstream retail channels, with a deal with high street retailer Dixons to sell the computer at "business centre" outlets, [65] followed by agreements with the John Lewis and Alders chains.
The hardware design featured memory modules, each providing their own memory controller and 4 MB of RAM, and a processor module providing the ARM3 and a slot for a floating point accelerator FPA chip, the latter offering the possibility subsequently unrealised of processor upgrades. The FPA, replacing Acorn's previous floating point podule, was scheduled to be available in With IBM-compatible PCs offering increasingly better graphical capabilities, they had not merely matched the capabilities of Acorn's machines, but in offering resolutions of x in 16 or colours and with bit palettes, they had surpassed them.
The A along with the earlier A supported the SVGA resolution of x in 16 colours, although the observation that "Archimedes machines have simply not kept pace" arguably remained.
It was the first Archimedes to feature a high density capable floppy disc drive as standard. No colour version of the product was planned. A notable omission from the machine was a built-in pointing device , requiring users to navigate with the cursor keys or attach a conventional Acorn three-button mouse, such as the Logitech mouse bundled with the machine.
No other provision for expansion was made beyond the fitting of the Econet card and a hard drive. The A4 effectively fit an A into a portable case, having a motherboard "roughly half the size of a sheet of A4 paper", adding extra hardware for power management and driving the LCD, the latter employing an Acorn-designed controller chip using "time-domain dithering" to produce the different grey levels. Just as the processor could be slowed down to save power, so the 12 MHz RAM could be slowed to 3 MHz, with various subsystems also being switched off as appropriate, and with power saving being activated after "more than a second or so" of user inactivity.
The A4's case itself was used by Olivetti and Triumph-Adler models, particularly the Triumph-Adler Walkstation which did integrate a built-in pointing device, this being described as an "all-but-unusable touchpad mouse-controller" by one reviewer. Acorn foresaw educational establishments taking to the machine where existing models were needing to be moved around between classrooms or taken on field trips, [88] although review commentary noted that "the A4 is too expensive for schools to afford in large numbers" and that contemporary Apple and IBM PC-compatible models offered strong competition for business users.
Peripherals for the A4 were eventually produced, with Acorn providing the previously announced Econet card, and with Atomwide providing Ethernet and SCSI adapters utilising the bidirectional parallel port present on the A4 and also the A and later machines. Atomwide also offered the "Hi-Point" trackball peripheral modified to work as an Acorn-compatible mouse which attached to the side of the unit. In , several new models were introduced to complement the A and to replace the low-end A series models - the A, A and A - thus starting a transition from a range of machines of different vintages that still included the A at the low end and the A at the high end to a range that purely featured more recently designed models including the A as the high-end offering and the A4 portable.
Some early units of the A did not actually utilise the ARM, instead having a "mezzanine" board carrying the four separate devices comprising the complete chipset, with this board plugged into the motherboard in place of the ARM An Acorn representative indicated that this solution was pursued to meet retailing deadlines, whereas an ARM representative denied that any "serious delays" had occurred in the development of the ARM, indicating that the mezzanine board had nevertheless been useful during the design process.
The A model was intended to be a home computing machine, featuring a TV modulator for use with traditional PAL -standard televisions, SCART televisions already being supported by all of these models [90] and standard 9-pin joystick ports, while the A targeted the primary and middle school educational markets, featuring an optional built-in 2. Meanwhile, the A was aimed at the secondary education and office markets, offering a separate adjustable keyboard to comply with ergonomics regulations deemed applicable in these markets.
Technically, the A was almost functionally identical to the A, only differing in the supported hard disk size 3. Despite the resemblance to the A, the A along with the other models only provided a single "mini-podule" expansion slot, just as the A did.
The retail pricing of the A was notable as making it the cheapest of any Archimedes machine sold. The pricing and bundles involving these machines was updated in late , introducing a new Action Pack in place of the Family Solution, featuring the game Zool plus Icon Technology's StartWrite word processor.
At the time of these product revisions, the A had become absent from related promotional material, even material aimed at the educational purchaser, [] although it remained in Acorn's price list presumably for the interest of institutional purchasers. Acorn's marketing relationships with high street retailers were somewhat problematic. While outlets such as the John Lewis Partnership proved to be successful marketing partners, electrical retailer Dixons seemingly made relatively little effort to sell Acorn machines despite promising "greater opportunities" in after earlier criticism.
Persisting with the strategy that some purchasers might choose a product positioned between games consoles and traditional PC-compatibles, the distributor, ZCL, aimed to take advantage of the absence of Commodore during the Christmas season. Production of the A and A ceased in , with remaining stocks to be sold during , due to their lack of conformance with newly introduced European Union electrical and electronics regulations.
Reminiscent of the BBC Micro upon its release, the earliest Archimedes models were delivered with provisional versions of the Arthur operating system, [] for which upgrades were apparently issued free of charge, thus avoiding the controversy around early ROM upgrades for the BBC Micro. Following on from the release of Arthur 1. An early competitor, Graphic Writer, was received more favourably but provided its own full-screen user interface. Neither were regarded as competitive with established products on other platforms.
Alongside First Word Plus, the Logistix spreadsheet-based business planning package [] was also commissioned by Acorn from Grafox Limited as a port to the platform. On the Archimedes, AutoSketch was reported to run at about five times the speed of a "standard PC-compatible machine". Although Acorn had restricted itself to supporting the use of its View word processor under BBC emulation on the Archimedes, [] View Professional - the final iteration of the View suite on Acorn's 8-bit computers - had been advertised as a future product in June for November availability.
Alongside this, plans were also made for the launch of a podule peripheral module hardware expansion providing its own processor, a disk controller and connector for a disk drive. The emulator was described as having "very few compatibility problems" and was reported by diagnostic utilities as providing an based system, but the performance of the emulated system was regarded as slow. Acorn reportedly acknowledged this by indicating the imminent availability of "an co-processor".
Commentators were disappointed with the incoherent user interface provided by the software platform, with "Logistix looking like a PC, First Word slavishly copying GEM" and " other 'user interfaces'" amongst the early offerings. The result was the lack of a "personality" for the machine which risked becoming a system that would "never look as easy or as slick as the Mac".
Reactions to the upgraded operating system were positive and even enthusiastic, describing RISC OS as giving software developers "the stable platform they have been waiting for" and "a viable alternative to the PC or Mac", also crediting Acorn for having improved on the original nine-month effort in developing Arthur in the following twelve months leading up to the unveiling of RISC OS. New facilities in RISC OS included co-operative multitasking, a task manager to monitor tasks and memory, versatile file management, "solid" window manipulation "the whole window moves - not just the outline" , and adaptive rendering of bitmaps and colours, using dithering where necessary, depending on the nature of the selected screen mode.
One of these, deferred until after the launch of RISC OS, was Acorn Desktop Publisher, a port of Timeworks Publisher , [] which introduced a significant improvement to the anti-aliased font capabilities through a new outline font manager, [] offering scalable fonts that were anti-aliased on screen but rendered at the appropriate resolution when printed, even on dot-matrix printers. As part of an effort to grow the company's share of the home market, Acorn introduced a bundle called The Learning Curve, initially featuring the A, optional monitor and a set of applications First Word Plus, the PC Emulator, and Genesis.
Providing the bundled applications and other resources in ROM saved an estimated KB of workspace, thus being beneficial to users of 1 MB machines. The printing system was also updated to support multiple printers at once, but in this first version of RISC OS 3 background printing was still not supported.
Edit gained improved formatting and searching support plus transparent BASIC program editing facilities. Notably, support for background printing was introduced. The limitations of RISC OS became steadily more apparent, particularly with the appearance of the Risc PC and the demands made on applications taking advantage of its improved hardware capabilities although merely highlighting issues that were always present , and when contrasted with the gradually evolving Windows and Macintosh System software, these competitors offering or promising new features and usability improvements over their predecessors.
Two fundamental deficiencies perceived with RISC OS were a lack of virtual memory support, this permitting larger volumes of data to be handled by using hard disc storage as "slow, auxiliary RAM" attempted by application-level solutions in certain cases [] , and the use of cooperative multitasking as opposed to preemptive multitasking to allow multiple applications to run at the same time, with the former relying on applications functioning correctly and considerately, and with the latter putting the system in control of allocating time to applications and thus preventing faulty or inconsiderate applications from hanging or dominating the system.
Problems with the storage management and filing systems were also identified. Filing system limitations were also increasingly archaic: 77 files per directory and character filenames, in contrast to more generous constraints imposed by the then-"imminent" Windows 95 and then-current Macintosh System 7 release. Although an update to the FileCore functionality was delivered in , initially to members of Acorn's enthusiast community, providing support for larger storage partitions raising the limit to GB , other improvements, such as those providing support for the use of longer filenames, were still only provided by third parties.
An ARM3 processor was considered essential for "a workable turn of speed", this giving performance comparable with a 4. Regarded as a "programming wonder", the PC Emulator was nevertheless regarded as being "too slow for intensive PC use".
The software provided PC emulation outside the desktop environment, with considerable performance benefits claimed relative to Acorn's product. Regarded as being "considerably faster than the Acorn emulator when displaying graphics", with a two-times speed improvement observed for various tested programs, the product was considered appropriate for gaming, albeit at lower than VGA resolution.
It was also unable to run Windows 3. Having considerably improved graphical capabilities compared to those provided with Acorn's 8-bit machines, a number of art packages were released for the Archimedes to exploit this particular area of opportunity, albeit rather cautiously at first.
One of the first available packages, Clares' Artisan, supported image editing at the high resolution of x but only in the colour mode 12, despite the availability of the colour mode 15 as standard. Favourably received as being "streets ahead" of art software on the BBC Micro, it was considered as barely the start of any real exploitation of the machine's potential.
Typical of software of the era, only months after the launch of the machine, Artisan provided its own graphical interface and, continuing the tradition of BBC Micro software, took over the machine entirely even to the point of editing the machine configuration and restoring it upon exiting.
The program's user interface deficiencies were regarded as less forgivable with the availability of a common desktop interface that would have addressed such problems and made the program "easier to use and a more powerful program as a result".
Although regarded as powerful, the pricing was considered rather high from the perspective of those more familiar with the 8-bit software market, and the user interface was regarded as "only just bearable". Atelier, however, was able to multi-task, providing the ability to switch back to the desktop and find applications still running and accessible.
Unlike other contemporary art programs, it also took advantage of the system's own anti-aliased fonts. One unusual feature was the ability to wrap areas of the canvas around solid objects. It featured a multi-document, desktop-based interface with a range of elementary painting and drawing tools, also allowing images to be created in arbitrary sizes for any of the display modes, even permitting editing of images in display modes with different numbers of colours, albeit with limitations in the representation of image colours when the desktop mode had fewer colours available.
Along with its companion applications, Paint supported the system's anti-aliased fonts and printer driver framework, and by embracing the system's user interface conventions, images could be exported directly to applications such as Draw by dragging an image's file icon from the save dialogue directly to the target application. Despite a trend of gradual adoption of desktop functionality, in , Arcol from ExpLAN offered a single-tasking, full-screen, colour editing experience using the lower resolution x mode 13, supporting only bitmap fonts.
Aimed at educational users, its strengths apparently included real-time transformation of canvas areas, rapid zooming, and the absence of limitations on tools when zooming: arguably demonstrating more a limitation of contemporary packages with their own peculiar interfaces. With expectations having evolved with regard to user interfaces and desktop compatibility, this updated product was judged less favourably, with the partitioning of functionality between the desktop and painting interface being "awkward" and the behavioural differences "confusing", leaving the product looking "rather dated" when compared to its modern contemporaries.
In early , in the context of remarks that, at that point in time, the Paint application bundled with RISC OS was "the only true Risc OS art program" operating in the desktop and not restricting users to specific display modes, Longman Logotron released Revelation, an application running in the desktop environment, providing interoperability with other applications through support for the platform's standard Sprite and Drawfile formats, with vector graphics import being provided by a companion tool, and utilising the system's printing framework.
Apart from observations of limited functionality in some areas, one significant limitation reminiscent of earlier products was the inability to change display mode without affecting the picture being edited. The path editing tools familiar from its predecessor were supported using functionality from Acorn's Draw application, and the image enhancement capabilities had also "undergone a major revamp".
Late in the Archimedes era, this being prior to the release of the Risc PC , a consensus amongst some reviewers formed in recommending Revelation ImagePro and ProArtisan 2 as the most capable bitmap-based art packages on the platform, [] with Arcol Desktop and First Paint also being reviewer favourites.
New packages supplanted older ones as recommendations, some from new entrants within the broader Acorn market Spacetech's Photodesk, Pineapple Software's Studio24 , others coming from established vendors Clares' ProArt24 and Longman Logotron's The Big Picture , and still others from beyond the Acorn market Digital Arts' Picture.
However, the platform and hardware requirements of such packages were generally beyond Archimedes era machines, demanding 8 MB of RAM or bit colour display modes using 2 MB of dedicated video RAM in some cases.
RISC OS was supplied with the Draw application, [] offering a range of tools for creating diagrams and pictures using vector graphics primitives, also permitting the incorporation of bitmap images and text into documents, and managing the different elements of documents as a hierarchy of objects. The file format used by Draw was documented and extensible, and a range of tools emerged to manipulate Draw files for such purposes as distorting or transforming images or objects within images.
A significant introduction to the Archimedes' software portfolio came with the release of ArtWorks by Computer Concepts in late A notable improvement over Draw was the introduction of graduated fills, permitting smooth gradients of colour within shapes, employing dithering to simulate a larger colour palette.
The image rendering engine was also a distinguishing feature, offering different levels of rendering detail, with the highest level introducing anti-aliasing for individual lines. Aimed at professional use, and complementing its sibling product, the Impression desktop publishing application, bit colour depths and different colour models were supported.
Although document processing and productivity or office software applications were addressed by a few packages released in the Arthur era of the Archimedes, bringing titles such as First Word Plus, [] Logistix, [] and PipeDream, [] it was not until the availability of RISC OS that the Archimedes would see the more compelling software developed for the platform being delivered, with Acorn even delaying its own Desktop Publisher to take advantage of this substantial upgrade to the operating system.
Alongside Acorn Desktop Publisher, Computer Concepts' "document processor" Impression and Beebug's Ovation [] provided a small selection of solutions in the realm of desktop publishing.
Acorn pursued the publishing industry with software and hardware system bundles, with Impression typically featuring prominently, [] even in the era of the Archimedes' successor, the Risc PC.
Amongst a variety of word processor applications, one enduring product family for the platform was developed by Icon Technology who had already released a word processor, MacAuthor, for the Apple Macintosh. This existing product was ported to RISC OS and released as EasiWriter in , fully supporting the outline fonts and printing architecture of the host system. Given the platform's presence in education, various educational word processing and publishing applications were available.
Targeting machines with only 1 MB of RAM, various traditional word processing features such as a spelling checker and integrated help were omitted, but as a frame-based document processor it was considered "excellent value for money" when compared to the pricing and capabilities of some of its competitors, even appealing to the home market.
Document layout capabilities were nevertheless available, supporting multiple column layouts, as were the traditional features such as spellchecking and integrated help absent from FirstPage.
Aside from the hybrid word processor and spreadsheet application, PipeDream, being released in versions 3 [] and 4 [] for the RISC OS desktop environment, Colton Software released a standalone word processor, Wordz, in , with plans for companion applications and a degree of integration between them.
Acorn's own interest in developing applications led it to initiate work on the Schema spreadsheet application, only to disengage from application development and to transfer the product to Clares who, with assistance from the originally commissioned developers, brought the product to market.
In the spreadsheet category, Longman Logotron's Eureka, released in , provided robust competition to Schema and PipeDream, seeking to emulate Microsoft Excel in terms of functionality and user interface conventions. A number of database applications were made available for the Archimedes, with Minerva Software following up from early applications on the system in early with the RISC OS desktop-compliant Multistore: a relational database with a graphical "record card" interface and report generation functionality.
Aimed at the education market, with a focus more on "computerised data handling" than data management, Longman Logotron's PinPoint framed the structuring and retention of data around a questionnaire format, with a form editor offering "DTP-style facilities", and with data entry performed interactively via the on-screen questionnaire. Some analysis and graphing capabilities were also provided.
In , Longman Logotron introduced S-Base, a programmable database offering the possibility of customised database application development. Described as "a more disciplined, less graphical approach to database design", the software enforced a degree of discipline around data type and table definition, but it also retained various graphical techniques to design forms for interaction with the database.
Building on such foundations, programs could be written in a language called S to handle user interaction, graphical user interface events, and to interact with data in the database. Being compared to the contemporary DOS-based Paradox software, it was regarded as having more of an emphasis on "database applications" than actual databases, also being considered as similar to the contemporary RISC OS application, Archway, as a kind of "application generator" tool.
DataPower, S-Base and Squirrel were all subsequently upgraded, S-Base 2 being enhanced with features to simplify the setting up of applications and consequently being regarded as "without doubt the most powerful database management system available for the Archimedes" due to its programmable nature, Squirrel 2 gaining relational capabilities and being recommended for its "amazing flexibility" and for its searching and sorting functionality, with DataPower being recommended more for "the majority of users" for its usability and "attractive graphs and reports".
Despite spreadsheet and database applications offering graphing capabilities, dedicated applications were also available to produce a wider range of graphs and charts. With the introduction of CD-ROM and the broader adoption of multimedia, Acorn announced a full-motion video system called Acorn Replay in early , supporting simultaneous audio and video at up to 25 frames per second in the RISC OS desktop or in "a low resolution full screen mode".
Unlike certain other full-motion video technologies, Replay offered the ability to read compressed video data from mass storage in real time and to maintain a constant frame rate, all on standard computing hardware without the need for dedicated video decoding hardware. The compression techniques employed by Replay reportedly offered "compression factors of between 25 and 40" on the source video data, with the software decompression requiring a computer with 2 MB of RAM or more. One KB floppy disk could reportedly hold 12 seconds of video.
In the introductory phase of the technology, support for Replay files was quickly introduced into hypermedia applications such as Genesis and Magpie, with software developers being the primary audience for the creation of content, largely due to the expense of the equipment required to capture and store large volumes of video data.
Software developers would engage the services of a suitably equipped company to convert source material to digital form, with the Replay software then used to process the video frame by frame, employing image compression techniques and "a form of Delta compression ", ultimately producing a movie file. Acorn's introduction of Replay prompted comparisons with Apple's QuickTime system which was already broadly available to users of Macintosh systems.
Replay's advantages included the efficiency of the solution on existing hardware, with even an entry-level A upgraded to 2 MB of RAM being able to handle 2 MB of data per second to achieve the advertised In contrast, a Macintosh system with 2 MB of RAM was reportedly unable to sustain smooth video playback, although audio playback was unaffected by the dropped video frames, whereas a 4 MB system could achieve 15 frames per second from a CD-ROM drive, although such a system was more expensive than Acorn's ARM3-based systems that could more readily achieve higher frame rates.
One disadvantage of Replay on the Acorn systems was the limitation of playback to colours imposed by the built-in video system. Educational software and resources providers saw the potential of Replay to deliver interactive video at a more affordable price than existing Laservision content, although it was noted that, at that time, Laservision still provided "the best quality, full-screen, moving image to date". Opportunities were perceived for making compilations of video clips available on CD-ROM for multimedia authoring purposes, although educational developers felt that the true value of the technology would be realised by making video like other forms of information, permitting its use in different contexts and works and thus offering children "control over the media".
Educators also looked forward to more accessible authoring possibilities, with children being able to record, edit and incorporate their own video into their projects. Indications that this situation would change were present in the QuickTime market, with it already supporting the creation of short movies in conjunction with video digitiser cards and editing tools such as Adobe Premiere. Support for video authoring on the desktop emerged in with the Replay DIY product from Irlam Instruments: a single-width podule suitable for A and A computers with 2 MB of RAM or more, these being the only models available at the time with the necessary performance.
The podule accepted analogue video input from video cameras, recorders and laserdisc players, allowing the video to be previewed in a window on the desktop. While recording, no preview would be shown, and the hardware would digitise the audio and video input, transfer the data to the computer's memory, and this would then be sent straight to a hard disk.
At its introduction, the video quality was limited to "normal Arm2 Replay, that is colour, x pixels at Uncompressed video occupied around 21 MB per minute, but processing of such video using the provided Acorn Replay compression software would bring the size of the resulting video down to around 4 or 5 MB per minute.
Compression was, however, relatively slow, since the compression scheme was asymmetric, meaning that decompression was fast enough to facilitate playback in real time, but compression could take "a few minutes for every few seconds of video".
Further developments in the video authoring domain were brought to the platform by Eidos , who had developed an "offline non-linear editing system" around the Archimedes in , involving the digitisation of source video and its storage on hard disks or magneto-optical media for use with editing software.
Such software would be used to produce an "edit schedule list" based on editing operations performed on the digitised, "offline" video, and these editing details would subsequently be applied in an "online" editing session involving the source video, this typically residing on "linear" media such as tape. To support the more convenient offline editing environment, a highly efficient symmetric compression scheme known as ESCaPE Eidos Software Compression and Playback Engine had been devised, offering movie sizes of around 1.
Together with the Eidoscope software, based on Eidos' professional Optima software, it was claimed that "no other computer platform has anything to match in terms of convenience and sheer usability" and that these developments would "encourage a lot more Archimedes users to have a go at making movies".
Aimed at non-professional applications, Eidoscope was limited to editing movies up to a resolution of x and did not support time codes. Since the video controller would not support display modes smaller than 20 KB, the lowest resolution modes were supported in the operating system by employing modes with twice the horizontal resolution and duplicating horizontally adjacent pixels.
The A [90] and A [78] supported additional display modes:. Apparent confusion about monochrome monitor support upon the launch of the Archimedes models led Acorn to clarify that the A series had "extra circuitry" offering two additional display modes "of up to by in monochrome, and columns by lines of text, but only using a special monitor", [] this being connected using two BNC sockets one for signal and one for sync.
The A and corresponding R-series workstations offered three BNC sockets, adding one for a separate horizontal sync connection for certain monitors.
The A unlike its predecessor, the A, did not support high resolution monochrome modes. An expansion to speed up the VIDC chip in the Archimedes from 24 MHz to 36 MHz was announced by Atomwide in , offering higher resolution display modes for machines connected to multisync monitors. The SVGA resolution of x was also supported in up to 16 colours.
Monitors such as the Taxan Multivision were only usable in multisync modes without the VIDC enhancer whose accompanying software sought to "redefine all modes" to be compatible with the display as well as providing new modes. One drawback of VIDC enhancer solutions was the increased memory bandwidth used by the VIDC at its newly elevated frequency, slowing down machines when using higher resolution modes, particularly machines with ARM2 processors and slower memory busses.
Consequently, other solutions were adopted to work around the limitations of the built-in display hardware, notably "graphics enhancers" such as the PCATS graphics enhancer from The Serial Port, [] and "colour cards" such as Computer Concepts' ColourCard and State Machine's G8 which provided a separate framebuffer, holding a copy of the normal screen memory, for use in generating a video signal independently of the system's main memory.
This permitted higher refresh rates up to 70 Hz even for higher resolution modes, although the maximum size of the screen memory imposed by the VIDC KB also imposed a limit on available resolutions and colour depths, with x being the highest resolution colour mode that could be supported. However, such cards were also able to support more flexible palettes in colour modes than the VIDC, and for lower resolutions, greater colour depths offering over 32, colours could be supported.
Alongside bandwidth constraints, a fundamental limitation to the size of VIDC framebuffers was imposed by the memory controller, limiting the size of framebuffers transferred to the VIDC through DMA to a specific KB physical memory region. With IBM PC compatible systems leaving the Archimedes "well behind the competition in the display stakes", the ClusterCard was seen as attempting a solution similar to a local bus architecture on the A, with the potential to "transform the A into a serious graphics machine, with possibly as good a display potential as the next Acorn series equipped with VIDC20s".
The full version of the card was reportedly available for A series, A series, A and A machines. Somewhat distinct from general graphics enhancements, various products were also introduced to support the broadcasting industry and other professional imaging applications. Nevertheless, a licensing agreement had been reached with Acorn to "enable Risc OS graphics functions to be fully emulated".
The Archimedes was capable of producing eight-channel, 8-bit, stereo sound, with the video controller chip being responsible for sound generation, it having direct memory access capabilities to independently stream audio data to the output circuitry.
The Archimedes did not provide hardware support for floating-point arithmetic as standard, but the system was designed so that one might be added, with a floating-point co-processor instruction set architecture having been defined by Acorn for programs to use. Accompanying this, a software module providing an emulation of such a co-processor, handling these additional instructions in software written using conventional ARM instructions.
The co-processor was described as a "cut-down" ARM with only eight registers available instead of sixteen, offering instructions to transfer values to and from memory supporting single, double, extended double and packed binary-coded decimal representations [] , to transfer values between the main CPU and co-processor, to transfer status information from the co-processor, to perform unary and binary operations on values, and to perform comparisons.
In the first generation of Archimedes and series machines, only the series had the appropriate expansion capability to add a floating-point unit FPU or co-processor, although the emulator was supported on all models.
The Archimedes models based on the ARM3 processor supported a completely new "arithmetic co-processor" or "floating-point accelerator" known as the FPA. Reception from major software producers such as Computer Concepts and Colton Software was cautious, with the former's products not making any use of floating-point instructions and thus not standing to benefit, and with the latter's using such instructions but indicating skepticism about any significant benefits in performance.
Observations from testing the FPA10 confirmed that applications such as Resultz and PipeDream 4—both Colton Software products—and other spreadsheets, whilst ostensibly standing to benefit as number processing applications, exhibited "no noticeable speed improvements", this being attributed to these applications' avoidance of unnecessary calculation and the more significant overhead of servicing a graphical user interface.
Other programs such as Draw and ArtWorks—a Computer Concepts product—used their own arithmetic routines instead of the floating-point emulator FPE and, as anticipated, were therefore unable to take advantage of the accelerated floating-point instructions.
However, various free of charge or low-cost programs ported from other systems, such as POV-Ray , plus selected native applications such as Clares' Illusionist and Oak Solutions' WorraCAD, did exhibit substantial performance gains from the FPA with speed-ups of between five and ten times. The Basic64 interpreter bundled with RISC OS which was "much slower than Basic V normally", with the former using the FPE and the latter providing its own floating-point arithmetic routines, ended up "slightly faster" due to observed speed-ups of around four to around eleven times, with non-trigonometric operations benefiting the most.
Programs compiled by Intelligent Interfaces' Fortran compiler were reported as running "some routines up to 20 times faster with the FPA10". The product was perceived as "good value" but having restricted usefulness with the general lack of support in many applications, these employing their own routines and techniques to attempt to provide performant arithmetic on the base hardware platform, and a lack of incentive amongst software producers to offer support without a large enough market of users having the FPA fitted.
With the FPA10 having finally become available but only rated to run at 25 MHz, and with ARM3 upgrades being delivered at frequencies as high as 35 MHz, [] a higher-rated part, the FPA11, supporting 33 MHz operation was developed [] and apparently delivered in products such as a processor card upgrade for the A The ARM3 incorporated a 4 KB on-chip combined instruction and data cache, loosening such external constraints and thus permitting the processor to be run productively at the elevated 20 MHz frequency.
One hundred percent compatibility with the ARM2 was claimed, and a facility was provided to disable the on-chip cache and to slow the clock to 8 Mhz in order to handle software that ran too fast with the ARM3 running at full speed, but as originally provided, the ARM3 was not compatible with the existing hardware floating point co-processor solution due to the introduction of a different co-processor interface in the device, this interface eventually being used by the FPA device.
Since the ARM2 was soldered directly to the motherboard in the A using surface mounting techniques, the upgrade had to be performed by a fitting service, and prices included courier collection, fitting, testing and return within five working days. With the A having been launched with a 25 MHz ARM3 fitted, these A upgrade boards carried a processor running at this higher frequency relative to earlier upgrades. Other vendors produced ARM3 upgrades.
In late , Simtec Electronics announced a board with an additional socket for the FPA device, thus allowing older machines to join the A and A in potentially taking advantage of it. In contrast, Aleph One stated that the FPA would "not be available for a long time yet", indicating the pursuit of "a better solution based on the newer Arm chip plus an FPA".
Other vendors had apparently ruled out similar ARMbased products on the basis of cost. The company also released a "turbo RAM" upgrade for ARMbased machines to provide similar performance benefits to an ARM3 upgrade, replacing the RAM with a faster type that then permitted the processor to be run at a higher frequency, thus pursuing the alternative approach to enhancing system performance increasing both the processor and memory speed to that pursued by ARM3 upgrades introducing a faster processor with a cache.
A "super turbo" version of the board with 20 MHz crystal and 45 ns dynamic RAM devices was reviewed and apparently available subject to component availability, reportedly achieving Aleph One, having founded the ARM3 upgrade industry, found that increased competition from "six or eight companies making Arm3 upgrades" drove down prices to the point that "margins fell, and the bottom fell out of the Arm3 market".
However, revenues from ARM3 upgrades allowed Aleph One to pursue the development of IBM PC-compatible podule expansions and eventually the PC processor card for the Risc PC, these having "a higher intellectual content than Arm3 upgrades" and being more difficult for potential competitors to make.
ARM3 upgrades were produced for several years, but with the ARM3 part being "officially discontinued" by its manufacturer VLSI in , upgrade vendors such as IFEL were predicting scarcity and unable to guarantee further supplies of such products. Demand for such upgrades, even in , was reported as "steady" with schools still upgrading "batches of old A and A machines".
Integration of the PC system involved the Archimedes providing display, keyboard and disk support. In the initial version, the supplied PC application would put the Archimedes into dedicated display mode and thus take over the display, but subsequent versions promised operation of the PC in a window, much like the updated PC Emulator from the era. Separate serial and parallel ports were fitted on the expansion board due to limitations with the ports on existing Archimedes machines, but integration with those ports was also planned for subsequent versions of the product.
The stated performance of this new card was approximately twice that of the based card but only "40 percent of the performance of a standard 33 MHz DX PC clone". However, upgraded Windows drivers reportedly allowed even the based card to exceed the graphical performance of such a based clone, effectively employing the host Archimedes as a kind of "Windows accelerator".
In , Aleph One collaborated with Acorn to produce Acorn-branded versions of the PC cards for use with the A and A which used a distinct "mini-podule expansion system". Acorn also offered bundles of the A with a hard drive and each of the cards. Such remarks were clarified by Acorn's technical director, indicating that an Intel "second processor" was merely an option in an architecture supporting multiple processors. Redesigned PC cards were released in , introducing the option of a faster 50 MHz SLC2 processor for a reported doubling of the performance over the fastest existing cards.
The supplied software was also upgraded to support Windows in a resolution of x at up to 16 colours, and optional network driver support was available to use the card as a Novell NetWare client and for Windows for Workgroups 3. Pricing remained similar to earlier models. The Windows User benchmarks rated the performance as similar to a fast SX-based system or a "standard" DX-based system, with the faster processor yielding a more favourable rating, but with the hard drive and graphics tests bringing the overall rating down.
Use of a hard drive fitted directly to the card, using its own dedicated IDE interface, was reported as providing up to ten times the level of hard drive performance relative to using the system's own drive, but use of the SmartDrive caching software made any resulting performance difference marginal. A range of podules providing access to parallel processing capabilities using Inmos Transputer processors were announced by Gnome Computing in late Digital signal processing capabilities were provided by the Burden Neuroscience DSP Card, originally developed by the Burden Neurological Institute as in-house hardware for use in conjunction with Archimedes systems but marketed by The Serial Port.
This card was fitted as a single-width podule but, unusually, needed manual configuration instead of identifying itself to the host computer. The podule itself offered a 32 MHz Motorola digital signal processor together with KB of RAM, two bit analogue-to-digital converters, two bit digital-to-analogue converters, and serial communications capabilities. A pin connector provided the means to interface the board to other hardware.
An assembler was provided, although this reportedly required Acorn's Desktop Development Environment to function, and software was also provided to interact with the board, view memory and register contents, and to visualise memory ranges in real time. An application was also provided to play audio tracks on CD Audio and mixed-format discs through the drive's headphone socket. The drive itself used a caddy to hold the discs inserted into the drive. As a significant technology in the delivery of multimedia content, the focus had shifted from merely using CD-ROM as a cheap storage medium for large amounts of graphics and text to aspirations of providing "high-quality, full-screen graphics coupled with hi-fi stereo sound" on CD media, with the principal challenge identified as being able to deliver compressed video that either a computer or a drive could decompress without compromising video quality or introducing incompatibilities between different manufacturers' products.
Acorn's video solution for its own computers was the Replay system, introducing compression formats and associated software for playback and authoring. However, laserdisc technology, which had been used several years earlier by Acorn for interactive video applications, notably in the BBC Domesday Project , was still seen as being a "promising rival" to CD-based video formats, having finally "become successful in multimedia training" and by then "being aimed at well-heeled home video enthusiasts".
Reservations about the read-only nature of CD-ROM discs was also seen as a "wounding flaw", leaving users to consider alternatives for convenient bulk storage, with magneto-optical drives emerging at this time. Nevertheless, CD-ROM adoption was seen as inevitable, particularly given the format's benefits for holding large amounts of text and making the searching of such text convenient, and with government initiatives having helped to make an estimated titles available for both MS-DOS and RISC OS.
The dual-function nature of the media and the ability to use drives to play audio also made such products generally attractive purchases, particularly for home users and with Photo CD also regarded as an attraction, although the introduction of Philips' CD-i and Commodore's CDTV risked a level of confusion in this market as well as presenting another challenge in terms of compatibility for Acorn's own products and technologies. Acorn would go on to announce Photo CD support in its products in early , [] with operating system and application enhancements being delivered by the end of that year.
Although the video and memory capabilities of the Archimedes machines were generally unable to take advantage of the higher colour depths or the largest sizes of the scanned images on Photo CD media, the introduction of future hardware from Acorn, featuring the next generation of video controller from ARM and supporting bit colour displays, was anticipated.
With the imminent arrival of RISC OS for the Archimedes, later coverage around the start of praised the desktop and supplied applications, noting that "RISC OS is everything the Archimedes' original Desktop should have been but wasn't", and looked forward to future applications from Acorn and third parties, only lamenting that it was "a shame that this impressive environment was not in place at the Archimedes' launch, but it's still not too late for it to turn some heads".
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Seth Kurkowski. Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from 9to5Mac. Over 32, organizations leverage Mosyle solutions to automate the deployment, management and security of millions of Apple devices daily. Request a FREE account today and discover how you can put your Apple fleet on auto-pilot at a price point that is hard to believe. Ben Lovejoy - Jun. The announcement of Apple Pay Later has made waves in the Buy Now Pay Later world, with some suggesting that existing companies like Affirm are going to be hard hit.
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