Introduce Yourself • It's been a while... but hello

Hello everybody.

I used Acorns through the late 80s and 90s, and my father used them a while longer. I've been clearing his attic and found:

A slew of RiscPCs:

1. Mine: a double slice with a SCSI module and drive(s), StrongARM, 2MB VRAM; it's not been booted for at least 20 years. If I remember correctly I upgraded to RiscOS 4 and then stopped using it shortly after.
2. Dad's: similar to above, except it's got some sort of extra gfx card in it (he was using his well into the 00s); likely (far) more RAM and drive space than mine
3. "Working": a single slice, it has an Acorn SCSI card, an ethernet with a BNC, 1MB VRAM, and I think something like an 800MB drive (and looks like an ARM7). I imagine this and the next were adopted from a school somewhere.
4. "Spares": a single slice with an ethernet card, power supply is unplugged at the motherboard so I imagine it's got some sort of issue

There are several extras like PC cards, random RAM chips, RiscOS ROMs, an ARM710 board, a genlock, 10MBit ethernet cards (with a BNC and an RJ45). I have a couple of mice, and a keyboard that might fit (it's not an Acorn one but looks to have the right connector). At one point I had an A3000 with an Arm3 (and hard drive) and sadly that's gone (as are my Amigas, SNES, Megadrive ). There's a lot of 3 1/2 inch floppies and quite a few CDs of public domain and purchased software.

BBC:

1. A pair of BBC Masters
2. A couple of co-processors
3. An Acorn Electron with an expansion card
4. Random other expansions/circuits/etc that I have yet to identify

Unfortunately there seems to be no hard disk drive (we had, I believe a 20Mb Winchester), no 5 1/4 floppy drive, and no usable monitor. I know less about the BBCs because I was relatively young when we had them, so will likely have to take the lids off to identify what exactly they are, and how standard they are or aren't.

There's also a UK101 which definitely needs a lot of TLC, and also seems to have no display unit.

As for me, I was an am a software geek that did rather a lot of Basic and Arm assembly on the Archimedes/RiscPC, and a few other random devices (Compaq iPAQ, poked at the Gameboy Advance and GP2X), and more recently I'm messing with the Pi Pico boards and chips. I also work in software development, but none of that crosses over to the Acorn, I'd imagine. I have no formal electronics training but have produced a few boards with things like Bluetooth chips for "fun".

What I'll likely do is work from the worst (the RiscPC "spares") machine "upwards" to build confidence, and see where I get. I'm hoping you guys have guides for testing and whatever battery/capacitor replacements might be required, and recommendations for how to hook them up/configure them for a modern monitor, etc, that'd be useful (or do I have to go find a CRT?).

Anyway, thanks for letting me in, looking forward to getting these things booting again.

Statistics: Posted by refractor — Thu Dec 04, 2025 6:29 pm

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