Hardware & Technical Acorn Electron Trash to Treasure

rootsrat

Volunteer Moderator
rootsrat
I have recently discovered this YouTube channel when I stumbled across this guy's Trash To Treasure for Amiga 500.

The episodes here are about Acorn Electron - no doubt a trip down the memory lane for many of the Commanders :) I personally never had one, they were not available in Poland in the 80s... I started off with Atari 65 XE in 1987. Still, it was a pleasure to watch. Hope you'll enjoy it!

Part 1:
[video=youtube;6LnF2oM4qKo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LnF2oM4qKo[/video]

Part 2:
[video=youtube;cwiFKpk3s20]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwiFKpk3s20[/video]
 

ajg74

ajg74
First time I played Elite was on my older brothers Acorn Electron, I think it's still kicking about somewhere.

I then moved on to a ZX Spectrum of my own! :cool:
 

Asp Explorer

Asp Explorer
Pre-testing any vintage board before power-on is almost always a good idea :D

Some of those PCB's have traces so thin that it doesn't take much to vaporise them, and then you wreck the rest of the board trying to fix it.
 

d8veh

d8veh
I had its big brother, the Acorn BBC. I got every single upgrade for it: speech chip, disc controller, two flopy drives, the case with two drive bays, sideways memory board, second processor, Bitstick controller. I had just about every game and every ROM for it. There was a massive club where I worked after the company did a group purchase scheme. The guys in the computer dept made a big database of all the software, and they provided it on floppy discs with menus. It was gaming nirvana in those days.

Elite was a new game, so I actually bought it (pre-ordered IIRC). As soon as I got it, it was a race to become the first Elite pilot. I got the badge (see left) and the certificate, but not the prize. It was a massive advantage to have an analogue joystick then to play the game as they weren't so common.

When I moved house, I sold the whole lot for £30. It must have cost about £1500 in total. IIRC, the first 100k floppy drive was £400. I wish I had kept it all now.

Other fond memories were typing out four pages of code from a magazine to get a program into it, then when you typed "run" (*run? - all operating system commands began with a *), you got error codes, so you had to search through, character by character until you found the error. After typing in a few games, you got to learn how the code worked until you write your own code and change variables to get god life and superpower, etc.
 

rootsrat

Volunteer Moderator
rootsrat
d8veh said:
I had its big brother, the Acorn BBC. I got every single upgrade for it: speech chip, disc controller, two flopy drives, the case with two drive bays, sideways memory board, second processor, Bitstick controller. I had just about every game and every ROM for it. There was a massive club where I worked after the company did a group purchase scheme. The guys in the computer dept made a big database of all the software, and they provided it on floppy discs with menus. It was gaming nirvana in those days.

Elite was a new game, so I actually bought it (pre-ordered IIRC). As soon as I got it, it was a race to become the first Elite pilot. I got the badge (see left) and the certificate, but not the prize. It was a massive advantage to have an analogue joystick then to play the game as they weren't so common.

When I moved house, I sold the whole lot for £30. It must have cost about £1500 in total. IIRC, the first 100k floppy drive was £400. I wish I had kept it all now.

Other fond memories were typing out four pages of code from a magazine to get a program into it, then when you typed "run" (*run? - all operating system commands began with a *), you got error codes, so you had to search through, character by character until you found the error. After typing in a few games, you got to learn how the code worked until you write your own code and change variables to get god life and superpower, etc.
Click to expand...

Nice. We've also had this type of magazine call Bajtek (which translates to "A little byte") which had a section with code to type in for Atari computers (Basic language). There was also a program at midnight in Scouts Radio (yup, the scouts had their own radio station in Poland back in the 80s!) that broadcasted the games to record on tape - you know, the buzzing sound that games on tapes were playing as. You could record that from the radio and bang - you had a game on tape. Not sure how legal that was though :D

Good old times!
 

Patrick_68000

Patrick_68000
I did not have Acorn but I remember the worldwide reputation of the Acorn Archimedes. I had an Atari ST at the time and I remember that Acorn had a RISC processor. I was fascinated

:)
 
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d8veh

d8veh
Yes, I know that sound. It used to be the sound of the internet. In the beginning you had to get a cassette tape recorder to save your programs on the BBC, and you could buy games on audio cassettes, but within a year, floppy drives started to take over. Many of my friends had the dreaded Sinclair ZX81. It didn't have enough memory for the programs, so you had to add the memory extension, which was attached by an edge connector. You got half-way through typing in your program on the rather strange multi-function buttons, but then you pressed too hard and broke the connection to the edge connector, so you had to start again from the beginning.
 

starman

starman
The Acorn Electron escape key was placed is such a position that resulted in the games shutting down since you pressed it.

It was a nerved BBC just like was Dells do.

Also it was beige.

I was a reviewer of AE software mainly because I was the only person the Weekly mag found have owned one . I was still at school at the time.

The Version of Elite had no sun monochrome poor sound. . Its just like the mac version..

Chuckee egg was probs the best game.
 
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