I've been sitting on a bunch of old discs (not
literally, mind) for years now. With the increase in people
seemingly interested in the history and resurrection of old
Acorn ARM-powered computers, I thought I might as well put this
stuff up for download.
RISCOS Ltd and
Pace Microtechnology, the developers and
copyright holders, have officially cleared distribution by this
website of these disc images. My thanks to them.
Thanks also to Peter Miller, who sent the RISC OS 2 (Please
note the spacing) Applications and Support discs, and the
Arthur Welcome disc. Markus Huber has contributed lots of
Developer discs, and he and Nick Gill both supplied the A3000
Test disc. Alan S, whose surname I don't know, has supplied
the A3000 rolling demo, plus the Clan discs, which have not yet
been linked. The A3010, Tesco and A5000 rolling demos were
provided by Darren, who posts to Usenet under the ROS402dn
alias. The disc images have been provided by Ralph
Corderoy.
The original A3xx and A4xx Archimedes machines were launched
in 1987. Computers running the latest iteration of the
operating system, RISC OS 4, are still manufactured today.
Castle Technologies own
the rights to the Acorn brand,
RiscStation
supply a range of eponymous machines, and
MicroDigital have a model called Mico.
In late 2002,
Castle Technologies launched a radically new
machine, called
Iyonix. This, for the first time, breaks
dependence on Acorn's original chipset design. There is
also a machine called the Omega from
MicroDigital.
A major caveat is that:
if you try to run applications
from any of these discs on current generation RISC OS machines,
you could cause yourself a problem. If you do, power
the machine down and restart while holding down the Delete key.
This should get you on the path to a fix.
Most of this stuff should also run under emulation on a
Windows PC. There is a commercially available emulator called
VirtualAcorn. This is available for 」29 for the A5000 flavour,
complete with RISC OS 3.1 ROM images or 」169 for VirtualRiscPC
with RISC OS 4 ROMs. You can buy from
here. Various dealers have jumped onto the
bandwagon, and are bundling VRPC with PC clones. My personal
feeling is that this is not a good idea. There's nothing
special about most of the boxes in question that I can see. Buy
a decent box and install it yourself.
All data is stored as zip files. Each zip contains the
contents of an original floppy disc. Archive names are the
names of said floppies. As and when I get round to it, I'll
put up disc images too.
If you've got to download to a PC and want to unzip on an
Acorn (because all the filenames will break horribly if you
don't), you need to download
DEARCHIV.BAS. Copy this to an Acorn-format
disc or whatever, set its file type to BASIC and run it. Its
name doesn't matter, by the way.
Having been all chuffed with the pun in the page title, I was
horrified to find that lots of people actually use it as a
spelling for 'archaeology'. Go check on
Google.