I Built The Near Ultimate Acorn RiscPC!

this video is awesome, its cool to see a cool old computer like this becoming the best it can be! subscribed!

I presented my GCSE coursework on a RiscPC, albeit one the x86 module. I built a demonstration database system for a stock and retail system on my home computer, but it was the only way to demonstrate it on the schools Acorn estate 😂

Hi what did you do with the dead motherboard you removed from the Risc PC 700 ? It's usually corrosion caused by the clock/cmos battery leaking, but they can be repaired.

We had some of these at secondary school back in the late 90's.

Canonically, the “Ultimate” RiscPC would have to have a toaster oven! ;)

This is a great build and it’s great to see it all come together. Thanks for sharing! I miss my StrongARM RiscPC but take solace in the Mac mini I’m using now having that same ARM architecture at heart.

A computer I've never heard of being upgraded by a guy in a fuzzy wizard's robe. Not sure how I ended up here, but I enjoyed the video!

I grew up with BBC micros and Acorn Archimedes in school (ZX Spectrum and Amiga at home) and have much love for them all - but the RiscPC passed me completely by.. they pop up on eBay every now and then and it's tempting to pick one up, so thanks for all the information in this video! (Still.. Archimedes first..)

is it just me or is bro speaking in the UwU language??

The black optical drive looked like a Sony drive, probably a rebadged Lite-On model. (Sony made very few of their drives themselves.) If you would like to use it, these drives were very common and it should be easy to find a beige rebadged Lite-On drive (or possibly just the front) with a compatible front you can swap over if you ever wish to use that drive. The same shape & drive mechanism was used for succesive models. But they did change a few times, check the led & eject hole positions.
Nice to see these machines still being used and loved. We rarely got to use the Acorn Archimedes computers at school and I used a PC at home. But I could appreciate some of the Archimedes' finer points - it was certainly far nicer than the contempary Atari ST & Amiga. And the CAD performance of the school's early A3xx was very impressive (tradgically it was never used), even compared to my 386 at home.

As for the black DVD drive… you could remove the face plate and button swap them out for beige ones or paint them

What’s wrong with your voice? Not trolling, serious question.

Is that wallpaper on the steam deck from the community connect software that schools have. Takes me back to secondary school.

Great setup and video! Instant subscribe :)

The OG ARM desktop

We used Acron computers at the Tafe Colleges,in Liverpool Australia.Using dBASE 3 plus.

The Quake benchmark comparison is informative, and it is surprising that the machine holds up so well against the other systems, even though the 5x86 is effectively a 486 with ramped up clock. DEC considered the StrongARM's performance to be only somewhat comparable to the Pentium, whose frequency was steadily being pushed upwards by Intel.

As noted, the memory bandwidth was a big problem, leading to those Kinetic cards with on-board memory to attempt to mitigate the issue. It seems that the A7000+ actually had greater memory bandwidth, but it obviously had a slower CPU, albeit with hardware floating-point support which the StrongARM lacked.

Hm, you think it's worth copying those flaky ROM chips to new chips? Just standard EPROM or EEPROM ought to do it, unless Acorns do something weird with them.

Funny how you can remove the top deck and there's basically nothing in there! Just giving headroom to the stuff beneath. Is there any chance you could take a modern ARM CPU and put it in there? You'd have to get one that isn't a SOC, but a pure CPU with the full bus exposed. But you could get 20x the performance, even just with a single core! You might even find a chip with RAM built-in so running much faster than the FPM 70 or 80ns RAM you seem to have there, modern SDRAM is something like 5 or 6ns. If it has the RAM mounted on-chip to the CPU then there's no interface hassle.

Then again you get to a point where you'd be better just with a Raspberry Pi or one of it's siblings from other companies. Emulate all the I/O over USB. Although yes it's not the same, just depends how far you want to go. AFAIK they've ported RISC OS to the Pi, right? You could see how far you get in remembering the good ol' days while still being able to do usefull stuff on the Internet, using an alternate OS just for it's own sake, which has value these days in the monoculture we're all living in.

That was so cool! I only ever saw these in magazines in Canada. Thank you!

It was an acorn don’t shoot!

Sounds like the computers from Alien (1979).

i used rics machines through out the 90's due to work and loved it , of course like most things our hardware in the building services industry switched to windows and we phased out the rics machines
i recently got an SBC that runs risc V and im in love with it again , so much so im in the process of building a daily driver to run in risc
i too was going down the vintage route , but im looking more at a build using ever improving SBC boards with various add ons as a cheaper way and who knows when on e bay a good example comes along at the right price i will get a vintage unit and bring it back to life

This has my blessing ❤

It's a beautiful setup. Acorn has never been available where I'm from, but we did have our share of weird architectures, including Palm PDP-compatible microcomputers.

Hoping you have many happy years with it :) I have to admit, as an old IT person, I wince whenever I see someone working on a machine without ESD.

Amazing video! I remember these at secondary school, i used to play the 3d het game to kill time and doodle on the paint program

What about the Hydra card - for multi cpu?

I have an A4/10 waiting for me to fix it up, and some riscos 3.1 roms.. I love the archimedes. We had them at school and I always wanted one but they were too expensive!

You get a like for the Amiga shoutout 🙂

Can you still get that USB adapter podule? I guess i kinda missed out on that.

What a lovely setup. Technology moved forward so quickly back then, and like many others, Acorn couldn't keep up. It's such a shame they didn't release the Phoebe before leaving the market. My only experience of RiscOS is on the Raspberry Pi, and it's very different to Amiga Workbench or Windows 3 that I used back then. In the early and mid 1980s, the school I went to had a very limited number of computers. I don't recall them even having a BBC Micro, but a ZX81, a Tandy TRS80 or two and a Research Machines, Z80 based monstrosity... but we had no computer studies classes. 😂

I think you are the first one who has shown one of these that I have seen. I didn't know they made a desktop PC like that with all those expansion options or much past the BBC micro style of computers of everything built into the keyboard . Going to look at the wiki it seems they made a laptop and a pocket pc too that I didn't know about. To be fair they were not really a thing in the states but I kinda want to get my hands on one to see where it all started with the Arm platform. It's on the list after replacing the Amigas I lost to time.

Oh lord please don't wear something with dangly sleeves when working inside computers, that gave me palpitations! Otherwise great video 😂

As someone who went to school in the UK in the 80-90s, I grew up with acorns, and eventually, in Year 9, our school had a RiscPC! The Teacher managed to get it with the 486 card, allowing PC software to also run on it. Amazing machine! Thank you for this trip into the past!

everything about it is super cool
but damn, that case is super neat!

Well done! Peak Acorn

What a great video. I think the two slice RISC Pc is the best looking of all the possible versions out there. The single slice is just two small, while anything over two, seems too bulky.

I am sure you will have many years enjoying the pinnacle of Acorn computers and RISC OS.