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Comment by markb139 | Hacker News Reader

What a fantastic machine the Archimedes was. If your BASIC programs needed more performance, you just used the BASIC's built in assembler.

In about '94 my Archie could out perform a modern(ish) 486DX PC despite it being an origonal '87 model

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Not just on the Arc either - the inline assembler was also available in BBC BASIC on its predecessor, the BBC Micro. I remember you had to put the asm code in a FOR loop so the interpreter could do two passes - one to locate all the labels and one to assemble the result, I believe.

That BASIC also had proper functions and procedures as well as special fast integer variables in zero page, it offered easy access to the whole machine from graphics to sound to ADCs and tape or disk IO. It was also very fast for the time, and the manuals that came with the machine were excellent.

The BBC micro user manual section on the inline assembler is available here for anyone interested in how it worked: http://central.kaserver5.org/Kasoft/Typeset/BBC/Ch43.html

One of the most famous games on the Micro was Repton, which the 16-year old Tim Tyler wrote mostly in BASIC, and then gradually optimised into inline assembly.

The inline assembler was also available on the predecessor to the BBC micro, the Acorn Atom. (I'm proud to say I still have mine even if I haven't fired it up in years).

I think one of the big features was the amount of stuff built into the ROM- full IDE, word processor, paint, OS and GUI etc. That gives such a freedom akin to the 8bit machines to encourage coding as the baseline is always there, it's unbrickable, fast and more reliable than a hard drive.

Speed wise it could run rings around a low-end 486 for computation, but it had hardware scrolling, timers for interrupts, 800x600 with 256 chunky colours, 8channel DMA sound and so could do perfect Amiga ports.

Checkout starfighter 3000, XC or Darkwood for what it could do

https://youtu.be/-j-1vxPmksM https://youtu.be/fevJ6jzgvGs https://youtu.be/_Bx_m8xXr60

Got to add Zarch to the list, we had one in the 'computer lab' surrounded by BBC micro's, I only touched on a little of it's potential, but this game was mind blowing! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNXypBxNGMo

> full IDE, word processor

Neither of these. Just a very basic text editor.

There was also ARMBE, an embedded Basic code editor. It sucked, though.

Something else that was introduced, that we all take for granted these days, was anti-aliased fonts. At the time it was a huge leap (for me at least)

Real-time spellcheck, as you type, was a feature it had /years/ earlier than MS.

Don't forget vector graphics editor, meaning vector graphics were a native format for RISC OS

I remember getting an issue of "The Micro User" magazine at the beach with Lemmings in the cover and found out it was a kind of machine that I never heard of with a _really_ strange OS that looked like Amiga graphics.

Fast forward 20 years and the processor that powered this machine evolved to something that's on every mobile phone / smart appliance I can see.

More like fast forward 10 years. By ‘97 most mobile devices ( the ones I came across at least) had started to use ARM. Even Palm devices eventually used ARM CPUs

Windows CE devices were also big users of MIPS and SuperH.

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