How to emulate the Acorn Archimedes
Credit: http://b-em.bbcmicro.com/arculator
The names Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser are forever linked to Acorn computers, the BBC Micro and the fun BBC TV movie Micro Men, which documents an important era in the home computer wars. But they, and many others, are also linked to a chip that’s in our pockets, TVs and our Raspberry Pis.
There was a time when Arm, the CPU platform that powers our world, was a gamble. Launched in 1987, the Acorn Archimedes range of computers were powered by the Arm CPU. Arm stood for Acorn RISC Machine (later changed to Advanced RISC Machines Ltd), and were a departure from CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing) CPUs common in many machines of the era.
The Acorn 300 series ran on an Arm 2 CPU, which performed better than Intel’s 80286, and with much lower power consumption. The honour of the first Arm CPU goes to the second processor addon for the BBC Micro. Costing £800 (over £2,000 in 2022) the Archimedes range came in multiple configurations, including the A305 and A310 which even saw BBC branding continuing on from Acorn’s successful BBC Micro range. This was something that led to a brief issue between Research Machines and a Microsoft-led industry group claiming that machines should be “business standard”.
No matter what Archimedes you had they
