Acorn hardware DIY upgrade kits

Well the size of, for example, the Risc PC, is of course to hold standard components like hard drives, CD and floppy, power supplies and podules.

The Risc PC case is quite wasteful compared to standard cases. And it has an incredibly weak power supply that is most probably broken by now anyway. The fan in the PSU did its best to cool everything but the important components.

Or think about the A3000. I love my A3000. Everything works, but the PSU broke down. You could certainly add a Pi mounted on a mini podule inside the case, but it is unlikely to be adequately powered by the A3000’s PSU even if intact – well, unless you don’t want to also power your A3000 of course. So I agree with Jeffrey – what is the point???

To this day I still love the slice approach to expansion.

Many people who had multiple SCSI devices in slices will disagree with you. I had 2 HDs, one CD-ROM and one SyQuest drive in a 2 slicer. It was a cabling nightmare. And the completely broken idea of having to use a knife to open up the drive bays.

Its meaning is clear, and it’s been used at least once. Good enough for me.

Good enough for me too… but can we spell it with an ‘s’? ;-)

Good enough for me too… but can we spell it with an ‘s’? ;-)

If you want to. I felt like using the Oxford spelling today. I tend to vary. :D

The Risc PC case is quite wasteful compared to standard cases. And it has an incredibly weak power supply that is most probably broken by now anyway. The fan in the PSU did its best to cool everything but the important components.

Yeah sacrilege of sacrileges, my Risc PC is running off an old ATX power supply at present (with a paper clip inserted between two of the connectors to keep it switched on).

Many people who had multiple SCSI devices in slices will disagree with you. I had 2 HDs, one CD-ROM and one SyQuest drive in a 2 slicer. It was a cabling nightmare. And the completely broken idea of having to use a knife to open up the drive bays.

I’ll grant you that dismantling it and yes routing the cabling can get very tiresome, especially when you have multiple slices and need to carefully unplug every component to remove them because you need to get to the motherboard. To be truly modular it would be nice if each slice had some kind of robust plug on it that extended IDE, SCSI, power and backplanes but I think that would be asking for electrical problems due to poor or corroded connections. I still consider the case design a work of art though. It’s a thing of beauty.

can we spell it with an ‘s’? ;-)

Since about 1965 you may if you wish, but some of us are traditionalists… 8~)

It is no secret now Stephen Leary has completed creating various accelerator boards for the Amiga (and some other add ons, for the CD32) there are 2 Acorn machines on his list of machines for which he intends to develop an accelerator (with RAM) …

Wow. I think paraphrasing an earlier comment is the real answer. “Because I can”.

It also seems as though people here come from many different backgrounds. Imagine that.

I built a stripboard IDE drive controller and PS/2 keyboard adapter for my Amiga 500, because I could. Same goes for the 4MB expansion for my Apple IIgs, which also has a (purchased) IDE / CF adapter card. It uses an AT power supply. My Apple IIe uses a home modified uATX PS.

The PC I used for a few years was made of discarded parts. A decent portion found on the side of the road. One of the edge connectors was split open, and the IDE controller didn’t work but I got it up and running with an ISA SCSI controller and a 4GB Seagate Barracuda I got hold of. At the time 100GB+ hard drives were normal.
…What was I saying? People have their reasons for doing things to hardware. Sometimes necessity, sometimes to keep something running.

The BBC Micro point was an interesting one. I don’t think it’s entirely silly either. Is there a reason maybe a Pi couldn’t be added to the cartridge port via a buffered interface and a boot ROM on the fictional cartridge? The Commodore 64 did a lot of neat tricks that way. For the life of me I can’t think of much of a use for it, but I’m sure someone could.

On disposal / recycling of electronics. It’s been a very rare occasion that I’ve thrown out anything still functional. Partially because electronics die prematurely here, and also because if something still works it’s still as useful as the day it was made.
When something does break, I trip it of all useful components and materials before disposal. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t stand a chance of keeping anything operational around here.

I’m on the fence when it comes to accelerator boards. I’d love an accelerator for my IIgs, however they are essentially a SoC making most of the board pointless, which kind of bugs me.
Things become obsolete. They Usually don’t become less useful though, unless it’s comms equipment.

On the subject of power. One of the reasons I like the RPi is the power consumption. Power is expensive here. I’ve been using the PC recently which is very naughty of me. I have to go back to the Pi. It’s not as bad as some other regions though. I was reading that it’s way higher in another part of Australia. There’s a business running a diesel generator because it’s less expensive than being on the grid.
At some point I have to commit to one of the solar scams. Most businesses and farms, and a large proportion of houses now have solar arrays. “Retrocomputing” Is a hobby that now has real considerations that never existed before like power. I hate to say it but old hardware should be left to be enjoyed mostly as-is, with extra quality of life additions like storage technology upgrades. If you want a newer system, just run a Pi or something.

I’m going to go now, but leave you with a thought. How much did it cost you to type your reply? I figure mine was worth about 30c in power.

and of course we lack a recent MAME port for RISC OS

Does each build need to be ported individually? I would have thought something like MAME, given its widespread existence, might have been a front-end that does UI stuff, and a backend that does the emulation; thus keeping machine-specific parts in one place?

I ask, because version 0.186 supports emulating Minitel… https://www.mamedev.org/?p=443

I that that these days MAME has SDL and Qt renderers. Don’t we have both of those on RISC OS?

I’m very late to this party, but I have on occasion considered various hybrid projects. For instance, circa 1997 I got some way into designing a replacement ARM7500 motherboard for the A4. Probably for the best I didn’t finish it, since the result would have depended on the availability of donor A4 chassis, and still be lumbered with the 640×480 mono screen and lack of pointing device.

More recently I looked at the OpenBus on the RPC and wondered what could be fitted in there. The answer is quite a lot, but the question should instead be why? What do you get from shoving a Raspberry Pi, or an i7, or whatever it might be, in that slot that you don’t get with just a Raspberry Pi, PC or whatever and forget the RPC? The RPC brings a small amount of very slow memory (almost to GPIO speeds nowadays), and some podules for interfaces that nobody cares about any more (SCSI, Laserdirect) or can be done trivially with USB (IDE, RS232).

Now if there was some super interesting hardware that couldn’t be driven from a modern machine (if there was a million pound MRI scanner with a podule interface, say), or some classic game that couldn’t be emulated, then maybe. But I don’t think there was anything interesting about Acorn hardware that lasted much beyond the era it was produced in.

For the Amiga scene, I can see there’s a case for people who want to run their 68K apps faster, or maybe their PPC apps. But there is no Raspberry Pi (or iMX6 or whatever) in the Amiga scene, because their processors have both gone deep into the embedded sphere – and you wouldn’t want to install Workbench on your engine management system. So DIY upgrades are the only game in town.

Meanwhile we’re embarrassed by riches of all the ARM boards out there, but it means that a £200-500 upgrade to an Acorn-era machine is a really hard sell.

What do you get from shoving a Raspberry Pi, or an i7, or whatever it might be, in that slot that you don’t get with just a Raspberry Pi, PC or whatever and forget the RPC?

A monitor stand.

I’m very late to this party, but I have on occasion considered various hybrid projects. For instance, circa 1997 I got some way into designing a replacement ARM7500 motherboard for the A4. Probably for the best I didn’t finish it, since the result would have depended on the availability of donor A4 chassis, and still be lumbered with the 640×480 mono screen and lack of pointing device.

Weren’t you acquiring LCD screens for that purpose in the early 2000s or was that for something else?

More recently I looked at the OpenBus on the RPC and wondered what could be fitted in there. The answer is quite a lot, but the question should instead be why?

Some people just like the aesthetic of certain Acorn machines or are intrigued by the idea of expanding them with unusual hardware. The OpenBus is an intriguing system that maybe didn’t fulfil its potential, so perhaps there might be people who would be interested in an upgrade for that if the upgrade is interesting or peculiar enough.

Perhaps it’s less interesting to use the OpenBus for that if it makes it difficult to interface the guest hardware to other things, like graphics cards or USB peripherals. In that case a classic podule expansion might be a better way to go.