Are you interested in coding on RISC OS? Want to learn more? Join our friendly fireside chat on Zoom—DM for credentials (unchanged). If you are a developer, come and connect. The event is this Saturday, 9th August, at 7:30 pm (GMT+1). #OpenSource #RISCOS #Community #Code4Fun #Zoom #ARM

Getting back to nerd stuff now;

I ran into a bit of an issue a while ago with my Acorn Archimedes A310; the floppy drive had been left alone for 30 years with no disc in it, as a result the upper read head spring had, well, lost it's springyness and did not descend when a disc is inserted

To compound this issue the A310 is designed as such that the front face of the disc drive forms apart of the case itself, so unfortunately I can't just use any drive, and to further compound it, the drive (Sony MFD-63W-00D) is unusual that the eject button and activity LED are on the same side, so a compatible drive is gonna be very tricky indeed

Luckily, this isn't the only thing that Acorn used this particular drive in, earlier Acorn released a version of the BBC Master called the Master Compact, this put most of the computer itself in a wedge style keyboard, with an external pizza box style "drive unit" with a power supply and drive; I was able to acquire a known working one of these, and to sweeten the deal, these drive units don't use the monolithic drive case case front face design so I can easily throw in any old 3.5 inch drive and I don't need to destroy a piece of hardware

One quick transplant later, my A310 now has a working floppy drive! I'll now probably use my leftover Master drive unit for my Greaseweazle since it provides power to the drives and overall just keeps things nice and clean

Are you interested in coding on RISC OS? Want to learn more? Join our friendly fireside chat on Zoom—DM for credentials (unchanged). If you are a developer, come and connect. The event is this Saturday, 5th July, at 7:30 pm (GMT+1). #OpenSource #RISCOS #Community #Code4Fun #Zoom #ARM #RasperryPi

Zarch vs. Virus - David Braben classics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjVeZ9c9fLM

If you are interested in RISC OS and would like to learn more about the history of the operating system and how it works, take a look at my article in the LOAD magazine (in German).

https://drive.switch.ch/index.php/s/96NdT0Y8yRrHQ4v

Are you a RISC user?

(MC68010 for scale)

More Acorn goodness tonight, this time with the A7000+ - Simon the Sorcerer talkie version on CD, good ol' Chris Barrie!

Today I had cause to get out my old #Acorn #RISCOS 3 Style Guide to demonstrate that the fundamentals of good #UX can date back well over 30 years - same with the #Apple #HIG.

I need to find a modern equivalent that clearly shows the basics for an "intro to usability" post. Most #designSystems seem overly focused on their components, rather than the principles of a good WIMP system.

In RISC OS 4.39, I really want my green Acorn logo back!

After using RISC OS 3.1 on my Acorn A3010 for so many years, using this newer version on the RISC PC 700 feels wrong without that lovely green iconic erm... Icon.

Looking after my latest Acorn acquisition...

The RISC PC 700 originally released in 1995, this one with plenty of installed extras for me to dabble with.

As always, like to give retro tech a good clean, especially keyboards! Much better now.

Fun times ahead! New to RISC PCs so tips welcome... #retrogaming #retrocomputing #riscos

Oh man ROTFL!

So, a while back I found an actual FOCAL program on the net and downloaded it, lunarlander.foc. I'm pretty sure I mentioned it here but I can't find my post.

Anyway it doesn't run in my version of the Conway/ Kida FOCAL interpreter and I just realized why.

Because this is ALL UPPERCASE source and this FOCAL only knows function names in lower case!

And I never noticed!

This FOCAL does accept uppercase keywords, but not functions.

My Simon the Sorcerer collection for the Acorn Archimedes...

- Floppy disk version (9 of them!)
- CD-ROM talkie version

The Acorn A3010 was the platform where I first discovered the delights of Simon the Sorcerer.

https://www.pixelrefresh.com/simon-the-sorcerer-remembering-my-first-point-and-click-adventure/

Articles are never truly complete...

My experience of the legendary Acorn Archimedes A3010 I wrote last year lacked the catalogue listing that inspired me to ask for it in Christmas 1994.

With help, we found the catalogue and page!

Enjoy the update...
https://www.pixelrefresh.com/the-acorn-archimedes-a3010-kid-battling-with-amiga-atari-st/

#RISC_OS I've put together a presentation page for #ProjectMerlin, which also includes a real-time progress update widget. This is to help answer questions I've received from various people. Please note: I am doign this for fun, I am NOT trying to save #riscos .

https://riscoscommunity.org/projects/risc-os-merlin/

Anyone here able to help me get an Acorn A7000 working with a SD card "hard drive"?

I have used !HForm (v2.1 I think) to format the disk on the machine, which seems to work. I can copy stuff to the drive and restart the machine and it still works.

But if I power off and on, the machine seems to then think the drive is unformatted

Is there some *configure thing I need to do to make it "stick"?

(Also any docs about this would.be appreciated!)