retrozoneorg

This is great work Jay. Just reading about everything you have done is impressive. Then I look at the video and the photos and I realise how much work has gone into this. Thanks so much for doing this. It gives us all a chance to enjoy Aquarius games on a real system. I can't wait.

I have a Archimedes A3020 which was donated to me by a nice lady from west London who stumbled upon my website. We used these almost exclusively in schools here in the UK. I remember our IT room was full of RM Nimbus machines emulating BBC Micro's! But in the corner there was a Archimedes! Which the teacher was always using! When I started my Design Technology lessons in year 8 I got my first taste of the Archimedes and the true brilliance that is the game Elite! I also went on to produce my first computer animation on an Archimedes - a circuit diagram showing the flow of electrons. Archimedes were more powerful than IBM PC's by a long way - the thing that held them back??? PRICE!!! They were too expensive! The processor could not be matched by anything else at that time - but Acorn messed up on their operating system which forced many users to upgrade later. The Archimedes graphical hardware was not as advanced as the Amiga - but the faster processor made up for a lot of that. 3D games were very popular on the ARC but 2D sprite games were very processor intensive due to the Video Hardware restrictions. The RISC PC went on for a long time after the Archimedes - and some people are still using them. Google search for the RISC PC Pizza Oven!

I once had a dream that nuclear war had broken out and people were scattered around the globe. I managed to get in with the head of a makeshift settlement by showing him all my retro-computers in the back of my van (I was probably the only person with a working vehicle). I spent the rest of the dream trying to set up some sort of Social Security computer system for everybodies details so we could reunite people from seperated families etc etc. Very nobel stuff. I remember seperating all the Z80 based machines and 6502 based machine into seperate networks! I woke up in the moring completly shattered. I hate dreams where I'm working hard!

Don't forget the Dragon 32 and Dragon 64 machines! Welsh computers based on the coco. Most dragon software should also work on the coco.

3rd one! Dam! I'm late. Anyway my reason for that choice is because I have both and nc100 and portfolio and they are very limited machines. But the sharp is a little more rare and interesting.