Q: How "collectable" is a Iyonix Risc PC?

Ever once in a while I see these pop up on eBay. Never have had a Archie back in the early 90’ths I have to admit I am curious on one. But the nice ones go for crazy money, the Iyonix seems a bit less sought after, so I was thinking of trying to get one?

But are they collectables, or just a obscure oddity?

I used to be a small collector of Atari St Gear, But now I try to build a wider collection in my garage. Call it yet another midlife crisis.. Its cheaper than a Harley and a tatt I try to tell myself.. 😁

Cheers

Kent Johansson

I personally wouldn’t put them in the “sought after” category, where you’d find A540’s for example. As one of the first machines that had to comply with RoHS, they have some quality issues.

They are certainly not for all. The build quality of the board is not great and some of the components aren’t long-term reliable. Some common faults I’ve dealt with are the onboard NIC failing, the ROM Flash degrading, issues with the graphics card – which is hardcoded into the OS at the point it’s flashed for some stupid reason, which make replacing it a real problem; and faulty USB cards.

It’s certainly not a machine I would recommend to anyone other than a collector and more as a curiosity. That said, when they’re working they’re good machines, but I’d still point people at a Pi instead, which is more reliable, cheaper and faster.

They’re certainly not worth paying inflated prices for, unless you’re desperate for one for testing code. The CPU in it is unique and not used anywhere else, so can introduce some challenges around erratum if you’re coding at very low level. I have two for this very purpose, both of which have now failed due to Flash issues.

When the Flash fails, they’re bricked for good as the code isn’t publicly available to reprogram them via JTAG and due to the graphics card being baked in at the time it’s flashed, you also can’t reflash with a ROM image from this site.

Is there anyone who specifically repairs Iyonix’s computers – IFEL in Plymouth used to do RPC etc – but at last count went on to build his Aeroplane.

As a note – 8Mb Arcs were a lot more usable :-)
[Edit]
Looking in a A7000 series – it’s a pity the new Podule backplanes weren’t two seaters – even if one socket was tucked away that would take a Disc upgrade.

I had an Iyonix for nine years. I bought it new (for over £1000!) in May 2005 and used it daily until it was replaced by a Raspberry Pi 1 in 2014, which offered more or less the same performance at 1/40th of the cost! That said, the Iyonix was reliable during that time and I had no issues either with the graphics card or the ROM (I regularly reflashed the latter as new versions of RO 5 were released). It would occasionally refuse to boot on first startup, but that never became a problem as far as I can remember. Performance-wise it felt (and was) considerably faster than the S/Arm RISC PC and the graphics were unsurprisingly much better in resolution and colour depth. It’s the only legacy machine still capable of an acceptable performance in daily RO use IMHO. And of course, without it we wouldn’t have RISC OS 5….

Both my wife and I sold our Iyonix PC’s last year on ebay for far more than we expected.

My experience of the Iyonix was similar to George. I used have it connected to a 22" Iiyama CRT at 2048×1536, but I was surprised to find it could drive my 27" AOC at 2560×1440 over VGA without problems, which after years of fuzzy CRT, poked your eyes out with LCD sharpness.

Any Raspberry Pi has better CPU and graphics performance, but the the main advantage of the Iyonix is storage, it has 4 fast IDE channels which still perform better than a USB attached drive on a Pi 4 (which is still USB2 speeds), only the Mini.m with its eSATA interface beats it. It also is the last machine to feature a floppy drive which can read all RISC OS disc formats.

My classic Iyonix had a backplane and two podule slots, but I never got around to making either my SCSI card or 24i16 digitiser 32 bit, the former because I had no SCSI devices left, and the latter because I put a PCi TV card in the Iyonix to watch video on the desktop.

Thanks for the background.

I’ve seen them priced on eBay around £500-550 and from what you guys says it feels like a lot for a system thats “fragile by design”..

Regarding the rom-issues, can one do a dump it when it works, to have for later needs?

Cheers

When you flash the ROM it automatically saves a backup of the current contents, which you can restore from.

The issue is that if the flashing fails, you need a programming tool to unbrick the machine.

£500-£550 is expensive in my opinion. £200 perhaps, but some people are willing to pay silly money at the moment.

Two games that are probably worth around £15 went for over £150 last week – now is not the time to be buying retro stuff!

you need a programming tool to unbrick the machine

Someone needs to politely ask Mr Balance for the tools. I’ve tried and failed twice!