#riscpc — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #riscpc, aggregated by home.social.
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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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This is wonderful insanity...
When your ARM powered Acorn RISC PC can have a second 486 DX4 100MHz CPU and run Windows 95 in its own window.
Retro computing is so exciting dabbling with these things it truly is!
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"Wormholes" 256 bytes intro for #riscos / #riscpc released at NOVA 2025
Write-up : https://www.onirom.fr/wiki/codegolf/wormholes/
Works on A7000, also high end Acorn Archimedes when adapted for mode 13. (320x256)
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Kurzer Abbinder zur Wiederbelebung eines Acorn RiscPC600 mit ausgelaufenem Akku.
#retrocomputing #acorn #RiscPC #RiscPC600 #batterydamage #ARM
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Working on an Acorn RISC PC600 which had battery damage.
Looking like this without VRAM module ... so the error must be around the onboard VRAM or it's logic.
Any hints where to start? -
"Archimedean Echoes" 256 bytes for RISC PC+ / #riscos 3MB+ for #lovebyte2025
Multilayered "Appolonian Net" with horizontal parallax scrolling, patterns are produced with the HAKMEM 149 algorithm. (All integers)
Write-up (with sources): https://www.onirom.fr/wiki/codegolf/archimedean_echoes/
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Front door is latching again. 🙂 Also, the case looks super nice after having given it a good clean.
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More fixes: the latching mechanism of the front door seems to always break on these, and this one was no exception. Melted a nail into the plastic as the new mounting point for the spring and burried it in epoxy. That's not going to ever break again. 😀
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First card freed from battery-leak damage. This Podule backplane had some very corroded contacts, but they are nice any shiny again. 🙂
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I am trying to get my #Acorn #RISCPC #PCCard working again. The latest version of !PCPro can be found on the internet but as i don't have a working floppy drive i'm currently unable to install anything on it ....... #retrocomputing #riscos
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> Base:
> - StrongARM 228MHZ Processor.
> - 586 100MHZ PC Card.
> - 64MB Main RAM + 2MB Video RAM.
> Slice 1:
> - 8 Speed Atapi CD-ROM.
> - 3.5" Floppy Drive.
> Slice 7:
> - Pizza Oven.
> Slices 8-10:
> - Stainless Steel Sink.