Whats the common thing between this Nintendo
Console, this SmartPhone and this Personal
Computer from 1992?
They all run on the ARM architecture.
A 32bit architecture thats low power, low
cost and very fast.
With over 100 billion ARM procesessors produced
as of January 2017,
ARM can be found in just about every mobile,
handheld and smart tv device today.
But where did ARM originate?
To answer that we need to go back to 1987
and take a detailed look at one of the first
ARM computers.
In the late 80s , riding high on the success
of the BBC Micro, Acorn Computers Limited
in England released the first general purpose
computer based of its architecture they they
dubbed ' Acorn RISC Machine' or ARM.
The computer was called the Acorn Archimedes
- and As we know , this architecture is widely
used in just about every single embedded and
mobile device today.
Like the BBC micro before it, This 32 bit
computer were targeted towards education and
schools.
The A3000 series range of computers were the
first arm based computers that had the single
part case design, that both the Amiga and
Atari ST utilized also.
I was lucky enough to get my hands on an Acorn
A3010 - this machine was geared for the home
computing market and games rather than for
the classroom and it has features to back
this up.
Lets take a look.
The A3010 comes with a very distinctive keyboard
with green function keys.
This is in contrast to the red function keys
of the Acorn A3000 computer and BBC Micro.
It features 1 Mb of Ram out of the box , and
on the right hand side contains a floppy disk
drive, capable of reading high density disks
up to 1.6Mb in size.
On the left side of the case is a standard
reset switch which is also something that
the Atari ST came with.
On the back of the unit contains a power on-off
switch.
It requires 220v AC from the wall
The A3010 is the only Archimedes computer
that contains a TV Modulator connector, to
the left of that is a standard video VGA RGB
output, next is standard headphone jack, then
we have a mouse connector, and again unique
to the A3010, two standard joystick ports.
Finally a standard RS-232 serial port rounds
out the connectors at the back
Opening 
the machine is fairly trivial, just use a
phillips head screwdriver to remove the three
screws at the bottom of the case.
Flip the machine back upright and you will
notice that the case is held together using
plastic tabs.
This is similar to an Xbox 360 case.
Simply pushing the plastic tab will allow
the top portion to be detatched from the bottom
portion of the case.
Work your way across and and the top portion
will simply lift away.
Next, we need to remove the keyboard.
There are 2 plastic ribbon connectors attached
to the motherboard.
gently removing these will allow the keyboard
to be safely lifted.
The A3010 comes with a build in speaker which
is a very handy addition, and in order to
remove the metallic shielding use a Torx screwdriver
to remove this screw at the base of the shielding.
I suspect there might be more screws normally
but mine are missing.
Once thats done the shielding can be removed.
Just make sure you disconnect the floppy drive
power and speaker connectors first.
So lets take a look at the motherboard.
Starting on the right are the RAM chips.
the Archimedes A3010 usually has 1Mb onboard
but this unit has a 4mb Ram Expansion installed.
The two chips next to those are for the operating
system called RISC OS.
Like the Atari ST, the OS is built into ROM
chips and does not need a disc in the drive
to boot from.
In fact the Archemedis computer will always
boot to RISC OS even if you leave a floppy
disk in the drive.
The CPU is known as the ARM250 which is a
32 bit RISC processor that runs at 12Mhz.
the original ARM2 CPU found in the A3000 ran
at 8Mhz.
The TV modulator provides the ability to connect
up the A3010 to a standard TV, and on the
right we see that the powersupply is built
into the case as shown by the large transformer.
The CMOS battery holds all the settings including
time and RISC OS preferences and the screenmode
you selected.
These batterys are notorious for leaking so
keep checking them every so often and replace
them at the first sign of trouble.
But you may be asking where are the graphics
and sound chips on the motherboard?
Well the ARM250 also houses both of those
in addition to an IO and memory controller
chips.
This is truely the first System on a Chip
or SoC that is common in many devices today.
The ARM250 runs at around 7 MIPS or Millions
of instructions per second - which, if you
compare is rougly equivalent to an Amiga 1200
with a 68030 processor running at around 33
Mhz.
Out of the box this translates to the A3010
providing far superior processing power, however
the Amiga had its custom chips and with good
coding can outperform the A3010
So technical specifications aside, how does
this computer perform and what are the games
like ? booting up the machine will launch
you directly into RISC OS.
This is a very nice user interface with excellent
built in applications, RISC OS is multitasking
operating system as seen by my example here
of formatting a floppy disk while utilizing
the inbuild paint program.
The keyboard is very nice quality, much better
than the spongey Atari ST keyboard and has
a satisfying click with each keypress.
The speaker is a nice touch, it doesnt sound
amazing or anything but it gets the job done.
Take a listen.
Ok ok so what about the games?
Well many of the games were Amiga ports, but
most of them were very good ports taking advantage
of the Archimedes 256 colors on screen and
8 channel sound.
Here are some examples of excellent ports
from the Amiga.
The Archimedes also had many custom games
for the system, as well as some excellent
ports . Heres a quick sample of a few.
And finally , theres some handy tools online
available to create your own floppy disks
from disk images out there.
This tool is one example called - OmniDisk
- is a simple command line tool.
You will need a Windows PC with a floppy disk
drive.
Unfortunately a USB floppy disk drive wont
work.
