#acorn-electron — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #acorn-electron, aggregated by home.social.
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Tested various micros running this FLOATING POINT program. It derives Pi to 20 decimal places. Interesting stats.
1 N=20: L=INT(10*N/3): DIM A(255): Z$="000000":T$="999999"
2 FOR I=1 TO L: A(I)=2: NEXT I: M=0: P=0: FOR J=1 TO N: Q=0: K=2*L+1
3 FOR I=L TO 1 STEP -1: K=K-2: X=10*A(I)+Q*I: Q=INT(X/K): A(I)=X-Q*K: NEXT I
4 Y =INT(Q/10): A(1)=Q-10*Y: Q=Y: IF Q=9 THEN LET M=M+1: GOTO 7
5 IF Q=10 THEN PRINT STR$(P+1);LEFT$(Z$,M);: P=0: M=0: GOTO 7
6 PRINT STR$(P);LEFT$(T$,M);: P=Q: M=0
7 NEXT J:PRINT STR$(P)#RC2014 : 14 (thank you JonV)
#BBCMicro : 19
#AmstradCPC : 22 (thank you Devlin)
#AmstradPCW : 23 (thank you Pete)
#AcornElectron : 25
#C128 : 27 (fast mode - thank you Jonas H)
#LuxorABC80 : 29 (thank you Erik)
#SharpMZ700 : 32 (thank you Tim Holyoake)
#VIC20 : 36
#AcornAtom : 37
#AppleII : 38 (thank you Jeroen)
#TRS80CoCo : 42 (thank you Chip)
#Atari800 : 42 (thank you Mark Elliott)
#CBMPET : 43
#C64 : 43
#Dragon32 : 44
#SharpMZ80K : 45 (thank you Tim Holyoake)
#C16 : 46
#Altair8800 : 52
#MSX : 53 (thank you Pixel Purrito)
#C128 : 56 (default "mode")
#ZX80 : 57
#ZXSpectrum : 68 (thank you Adam)
#SharpPC1500A : 167 (thank you Karttu)
#ZX81 : 213 (native slow mode)
#SharpPC1245 : 405 (thank you Karttu)Edit: now ordered (seconds)
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Mistodon: One final silly April Fool's screen, mashing up a little #Easter into the heady mix, this #AcornElectron high resolution graphics screen was drawn by The Elk and included in the MIST0418 artpack collection released 8 years ago this month.
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Who else writes their own programming utilities?
Here's my UDG designer for the #AcornElectron and #BBCMIcro
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Fedora Hat plot using 160 column TEXT on the #BBCMicro / #AcornElectron
Plotted with random alphanumerics
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"Red Phosphor Faulty Land-Rovers; Smite Thee!!"
Probably the longest name for a game.
Nice little game I made in 2019 for the #AcornElectron
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Leonid Afremov inspired rain animation on my #AcornElectron
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Well, that's 2 of my brand new 1,000 screws used up.
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#BBCMicro and its sibling #AcornElectron running a couple of animation demos by yours truly.
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Probably the rarest add-on for the #AcornElectron computer. A Teletext/MODE7 adapter!!!! And it's here on fleaBay!
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I may(???) be the first to do this...
I've added rear ports to the #AcornElectron for RGB video and power. This means when it's tucked under my Microvitec CUB monitor, ZERO wires are visible!
The side sockets are still connected and functional.
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"Adventure" from 1977, converted to the #BBCMicro, but running on my #AcornElectron in 80 columns.
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I made a Perspex monitor stand for the #AcornElectron where the computer tucks underneath by about an inch.
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There’s an exhibition of retro / classic home computing machines this week (Aug 21-28 2025) at Kingston University, so I had to drop in.
It was fun to see some old favourites again, and it was nice to see some youngsters engaging with the games I used to play. Turrican, Hunchback, Mario, Puzzle Bobble, Lemmings!
The Townhouse building at Kingston University has been open for several years already and I drive, walk or bus past it regularly, but never had a reason to pop in until now! It has the university library on the upper floors, and a cafe and event space on the ground floor. For the duration of this week, the Archive of Retro Computing has taken over the event space with this display.
It is nicely put together, with some machines set aside for coding, some for gaming; information about each system displayed alongside; some meta-history on topics like the British computing scene (Acorn vs Sinclair), Commodore and Amstrad, and the US elements. The back section is dedicated to vintage home gaming systems, from the 1977 Binatone Pong game, through Atari / Nintendo / Sega, up to the Super Nintendo and Jaguar.
There are also some super “deep cuts” in the collection, including the Tatung Einstein, which I don’t remember ever seeing or hearing about before…
From my personal history, the Binatone Pong game on display is I think slightly older than the simple dial paddle controllers than we had hooked up to the TV at home when I was young. No sign of the metal-clad Commodore PET that I remember tinkering with at primary school, but a range of other Commodore machines are on show, including the classic Commodore 64 (I have one of these, from a former Twitter coworker!), and several other models I’m less familar with.
My first home computer, the Acorn Electron, is right there, running Arcadians, a Space Invaders clone I must have spent hours on back in the day. My own Electron ended as a hand-modded machine featuring switchable headphone or regular speaker output. I’m still quite proud of that relatively low-tech little hardware hack from back then.
Next along in my own line would have been the Amstrad CPC (with 3″ disk drive) that my uncle had, and pointed me towards on most visits to his house. I have memories of Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner on that one. The little info card here tells the story of how Alan Sugar did a deal on the disk drives such that Hitachi ended up having to keep making them, at a loss, even though the 3″ disk format was otherwise dead in the water.
My school had a very well-equipped computer room with (I think) about 30 BBC Master and Micro computers, so I was very much an Acorn boy and learned BBC BASIC as my first proper coding language (along with a tiny bit of 6502 assembler). Later on, the school computer room was upgraded with several Acorn Archimedes. My brother had an A3000 in his bedroom… I had an Acorn Risc PC with a StrongARM processor, way faster than the x86 PCs available at the time! The BBC Master and A3000 are present and correct in the exhibition (there’s a BBC Micro as well, alongside the Electron).
We also had a Super Nintendo, which is one of the last of the home gaming consoles in the exhibition (I overheard someone say that the Playstation, our next games console as a family, was where gaming all went wrong and 3D and got boring… I can sometimes understand that point of view!).
As an aside, I had a quick go on Wolfenstein 3D on the Jaguar in the corner there, and the controller for the Jaguar was bonkers! Chunky and not very friendly to use. The graphics seemed decent, with some kind of interpolation at distance? I don’t remember ever actually playing on a Jaguar when they were current…
Pretty much all of the machines had some kind of modification, both to output graphics to the LCD monitors in use, and/or to replace disk drives with some form of USB-floppy emulation, often with a Pi or something else doing the interfacing.
A fun trip down memory lane!
https://andypiper.co.uk/2025/08/25/retro-tastic/
#Acorn #AcornElectron #Amiga #Amstrad #archimedes #bbcMaster #BBCMicro #commodore #Computing #exhibition #gaming #nintendo #retro #riscOs #RiscPC #Technology #zxSpectrum
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Micros experts make predictions for the future regarding market developments.
#yourcomputer report, 1983
#zxspectrum #commodore64 #msx #acornelectron #bbcmicrocomputer #retrogaming
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Another "early" #AcornElectron programming effort of mine after decades of not programming. 2019... "Post Brexit Forklift Races"
It really is cr@p, but it amused me at the time.
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After a 30+ year gap of programming my #AcornElectron, in 2019 I made this simple game.
The premise is basically what would happen if God was in charge of Land-Rover quality control.
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40 years ago, C&VG magazine produced a listings issue with a selection of games to type into your computer.
#Commodore64 #C64 #ZXSpectrum #VIC20 #Dragon32 #BBCMicro #AcornElectron #TexasTI99A -
Name the game that inspired me to draw this on my #AcornElectron vector editor program...
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Pretty amazing that the #NES, #AppleII, #BBCMaster, and #BBCMasterCompact versions of the seminal 3-D space trading and combat video game #Elite all fundamentally base their source code from the #Commodore64 port. (All pre-dated by the #BBCMicro and #AcornElectron versions, of course.)
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Enjoying a great new game... Airline Boss, for the #AcornElectron
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Mistodon: for no particular reason, here's a #pixelart personal statement by The Elk: No Room For Nazism On Earth... likely drawn on an #AcornElectron, originally included in the MIST1120 artpack collection released five years ago.
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I wanted to get Imogen on to my #AcornElectron SD interface but only had tape version. The disc images I got from Acorn Electron World DVD wasn't compatible with my interface.
So I used a coooooool program from Electron User magazine (but off StarDot forums) to automate the conversion. Especially handy as Imogen is a MAHOOSIVE multi-loader.
It worked!!!! I had to configure the boot file for the new disc image but that was trivial. 😃
Thank you to @thebritishibm for reminding me about this absolute banger of a classic game (made famous by the #BBCMicro version)
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Doing some minor surgery to my #AcornElectron's power input socket (which was fatiguing loose) and I noticed how amazingly huge the ULA chip is!
