5 ms·
Having gone from The Acorn Electron to the Spectrum to the Amiga and always keeping up with the nerdy magazines of the time, I remember it being about price poi
by detritus 6y ago
Having gone from The Acorn Electron to the Spectrum to the Amiga and always keeping up with the nerdy magazines of the time, I remember it being about price point and 'cool factor'.
The older I got, the more I appreciated how cool the Archimedes could be (especially after seeing Zarch which I think was more technically impressive than anything on the Amiga 500 at the time - I might be exaggerating), but it was a rare and strange beast mostly seen in school IT departments, and the teachers even then tended to be quite protective of the expensive machines.
Being as it was a relative of the BBC Microcomputer, it would always have been an uphill struggle to win the hearts of school kids wearing their parents' wallets down at Christmas time, and was anyway a lot more expensive.
Everyone had Amigas because there was a very healthy Euro/Global trade in pirated games from crackers on BBS' - Amiga had an ecosystem useful to schoolkids, Archimedes did not.
That said - I too would love to have a peek at an alternate timeline! I distinctly remember sitting as an UnMin in Gatwick airport reading some Acorn computer magazine heralding the new age of the Archimedes and getting quite excited. Oh well.
- ed
additionally - I think the demo scene tended to be very tightly wrapped into the cracker/pirate scene, ie. they were pretty much one and the same.
- the-dude 6y agoWasn't the Amiga perhaps also popular because the C64 was such a hit? ( in the EU at least )
- detritus 6y agoI'm sure that helped, but as a Spectrum owner, I'd be breaking code - decades old as it might be - to suggest that anything positive could arise from the existence of that machine. . Looking back now, the C64 was clearly a better machine than the Speccie, haha.
- marktangotango 6y agoAs a c-64 owner I envied the more featureful basic of of every other machine of the time!
- jacquesm 6y agoC64 BASIC was terrible but better BASIC interpreters were available for it. For instance, this one was excellent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFA_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFA_BASIC
- cheerlessbog 6y agoZarch blew me away at the time (in my high school computer room) as well as Conqueror, built on the same engine. Most home computer games at the time were inferior to arcade games : it was only years later that arcade games were surpassed at home, at least where I grew up in the UK.
- sys_64738 6y agoWritten in BASIC Too.
- cheerlessbog 6y agoSource? Surely not.
- jacquesm 6y agoI had the demo version of Zarch many months before it was released and a pre-production Archimedes to play around with. The power of that box compared to anything that I'd been using up to then was unbelievable to me. It wasn't just a quantitative difference, it was an entirely different realm of possibilities.