Re: What specs would your Apple ][ clone have today?

["sicklittlemonkey" <Nick.Westgate@gmail.com>]

On Apr 3, 4:59 am, aiiad...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Apple's actions prompted me to make the switch - to Acorn.
>
>   Where did you research Acorn?  Where was the first place you saw an
> advertisement?

Sorry Rich - I missed this post.

It was a fairly random encounter. I remember when I first got into the
Apple II in 1982 there were ads for the BBC around. It sounded cool,
but my parents went for an Apple then.

In 1991 a friend and I were hired to port educational software from
the BBC to the Apple II. (The former being popular in English schools,
and the latter in NZ.) Acorn still had a reasonable educational (& a
bit of DTP) market presence in NZ though, so I was exposed to the
Archimedes and was offered a contract to work on it.

Those were good times, with the Archimedes well outperforming the 386
systems around, and RISC OS has some of the best user interface ideas
I've used. But x86 performance improvements and (more importantly)
price drops were relentless. We actually switched to 386s to port an
Archimedes game that we wrote, and that was the end.

You can see screenshots from the game (or download the DOS image to
play) here:
http://www.abandonia.com/games/865/download/CrystalMaze.htm

It's practically identical to our Archimedes version.

Cheers,
Nick.