The ARM hacking folks around here might find this article interesting...

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
#5196, counting days untill return from vacation

Another interesting link from slashdot today:

Compaq's Ipaq which has a very similar processor to the empeg, and runs Linux & X.

I want my car stereo, wristwatch, PDA and toaster to all have ARM chips in them, I just wish I'd bought some ARM shares a while ago!

Philb

I want my car stereo, wristwatch, PDA and toaster to all have ARM chips in them, I just wish I'd bought some ARM shares a while ago!

Yes, and few years ago it looked as if the architecture were dead.

BTW, who owns it? Did Intel buy the whole architecture or just some chips? Is that company down the road from empeg Intel subsidiary?

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
#5196, counting days untill return from vacation

ARM own themselves, though Apple still has a largish stake from when it was formed in the late 80's by Acorn, Apple, and VLSI.

Intel just licence the ARM architecture, add their own froody bits, and make the StrongARM. Intel are (in theory) no more important than other architecture licencees (as opposed to core licencees, which just take the core as-is and put peripherals around it - like cirrus, ti, motorola, etc).

Hugo

Ah, that sounds good!

BTW, hasn't Digital (R.I.P, more or less, but who knows) played a role in ARM history?

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
#5196, counting days untill return from vacation

Digital developed the StrongARM - Intel bought it from them a year or two ago, along with most of their IC development and FAB operations.

It's nice to see the ARM processor having achieved near global domination of its core markets (embedded and low power applications). Hugo and myself have been advocates of the processor for many years (since 1987 and 1989 respectively) and I always thought it deserved to grow far beyond the scope of the small British computer manufacturer (Acorn) that developed it. Acorn are history now, but offloading ARM in partnership with Apple and VLSI was the best decision they ever made.

We have a close relationship with ARM, not least because Hugo has worked closely with many of the people there throughout the last decade. As it happens, the maths guru behind ARM's audio CODEC libraries (with which we are soon to replace X-Audio in the car player) had his first commercial program - a game involving a ball, a track, lots of physics and some strategy - published by Hugo in, erm, 1992-ish. I was project manager, but that isn't much to boast about as it didn't sell very well, despite being utterly froody! Another programmer who contributed to that project is one Toby Duckworth.

Small world innit?

Rob

Digital is still around, aka Compaq. I am going to be working in one of there larger facilities, and theres still tons of Digital stuff around, and many of the people are still there. Compaq really didn't change much beyond names of products and such.

I want my car stereo, wristwatch, PDA and toaster to all have ARM chips in them, I just wish I'd bought some ARM shares a while ago!

Actually, when I mentioned the ARM processor in my HP Jornada 820, Hugo said that it had the exact same processor as the empeg, except the empeg's was 30 MHz faster! Now that impresses me guys.

In order to give you an idea of how good that is, I was able to play a port of DOOM on my little Windows CE device with no problem whatsoever. I can't believe the power they are able to put into such small devices these days. Wow.

DiGNAN
13653

What about some small Doom replica on the empeg? Or some other games like Tetris or something like this. (I can remember that something like this was posted already - but what was the result?)

TeeMcBee
Go my Mk2! # 080000143

Well, in the newsletters there was a small section on cool ideas for the serial and ir ports, but Rob thought the section was dumb so he took it out

Anyway, there had been thoughts of being able to put mini versions of tertis or nibbles on there and you could control it with an ir or serial joystick. I'm sure this is possible, but whether or not anyone does this is another story.

DiGNAN
13653

By the way, Rob. Why'd you take the old newsletters off the site?

DiGNAN
13653

Well - it wouldn't really matter. The unit itself is cool enough. But it would be a nice feature. Maybe it wouldn't be taken too serious if you could play games with it... But think about the time you always spend to waiting for your girlfriends.. (We already talked about...)

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

> Why'd you take the old newsletters off the site?

I didn't - they're right there in the news section.

Rob

sorry, I'm dumb

dope-slap, anyone?

DiGNAN
13653

Which game was that then?
Just curious... =)

Jazz
(List 112, Mk2 12 gig #40. Mk1 4 gig #30. Mk3 1.6 16v)

It was called Phaethon. Didn't sell many copies as another "steering a ball along a track" game came out at around the same time. Ours was much better, but theirs had a slightly larger ball.

It seems size is everything.

Rob

Didn't sell many copies as another "steering a ball along a track" game came out at around the same time.

You wouldn't happen to be referring to my favorite all-time game, Atari's Marble Madness, would you?

___________
Tony Fabris

No, these are Acorn Archimedes games - we didn't get many mainstream titles! Marble Madness was also one of my favourite games, although I can't remember which platform I played it on - probably the Spectrum.

Rob

Marble Madness was also one of my favourite games, although I can't remember which platform I played it on - probably the Spectrum.

Bah! Platform schmatform, the only REAL Marble Madness was the original arcade version. Every port I've seen stank. Of course, most of those were from 10 years ago when home hardware wasn't up to snuff. But even the one I just got for my kid's GameBoy Color is a POS.

I'm told there's a port for some of the newer game consoles like N64. I wonder if those are any good... anyone seen them?

___________
Tony Fabris

Phaethon has apparently been released from the bonds of copy restriction, and is available at http://www.acornarcade.com/features/freegames/

- Sean

Maybe someone should tell Hugo, after all he does own the copyright :-)

I doubt he'll be too upset, though - it's not like anyone actually sells Acorn software any more.

Update: I see the site says that Hugo did give permission for the game to be distributed. Oooooh, and they have Phaethon screen shots, that takes me back!

Rob

Edited by rob on 15/8/00 02:25 AM.

Yep, they asked me & I asked Paul & everyone was happy. Nothing better than a game actually being played!

Hugo