News - RISC OS for Raspberry Pi - Archimedes reborn

[HEXUS]

The OS designed for ARM systems 25 years ago is now available for your little RasPi.

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[Jimbo75]

Yep I remember we had an Archimedes at school - it was a very powerful machine easily capable of taking on the ST and Amiga.

[alpha channel]

The most I remember about using the Archimedes (two full suites of them) at school was at the end of term and the games came out, most notably Virus and my personal fave Conqueror... ah good memories.

[Jimbo75]

Yep those are the games I remember as well.

[TheAnimus]

No love for starfighter 3000?

[Agent]

Psh. Crystal Rainforest!

[TheAnimus]

Actually does anyone else remember the Crystal Maze game.... Awesome.

[davesom555]

Haha I remember virus. I remember having no clue about what I was doing it in. Cool 3D game for the time though!

[Bagpuss]

Like the BBC model B, it's what the posh kids got bought for them by snooty patents, not realising all little Charles wanted, was to be able to play Amiga games like the rest of the playground peasants.

[Irien]

To be absolutely pernickity, the Archimedes original was called Zarch, and there was a free version bundled with RISC OS 2 called Lander. Virus was the name given to the Amiga/PC port.

A desktop patch was later released called WimpZarch, which also addressed some compatibility issues. I seem to recall someone had updated WimpZarch to cover newer ARM architectures (last year, maybe) but forget the details. There are moves afoot to update a number of old things, as the RISC OS community has embraced newer (ARMv7 architecture - cortex A8/A9) boards, and so Pi compatibility (Armv6) comes at the same time (why break compatibility when updating if you don't have to).

The high profile of the Pi has also given the RISC OS community some new blood, which also goes a long way to ensuring that developers do their best to make software compatible with a broad range of modern ARM architectures and setups.

There's also a free legacy-Arch emulator (which should work on RISC OS pi) called ArcEm which will run images of most old games without modification.

[abaxas]

Chocks away. 2 player arcadey flight sim.

Damn you Fokker Eindecker

[BobF64]

No love for starfighter 3000?

Starfighter 3000 and Stuntracer 2000 were 2 of the best, although the music is what I found to be best.

[TheAnimus]

Starfighter 3000 and Stuntracer 2000 were 2 of the best, although the music is what I found to be best.

I met the dev behind starfighter 3000 once at a Acorn User Show. 9 year old me told him quite how awesome his game was

[shaithis]

While I never gamed on an archimedes/RiscOS.....I did use a paint program on it which was far superior to Amiga Paint at the time!

[wasabi]

Can they convert Amiga Magic Desktop over too? Apart from a few edu proggies the Archimedes was a techno marvel with poo software / GUI.