Author: Croccy22

Back in my old school, we had a mixture of Acorn BBCs, RM Nimbus PCs, Amstrad PCW Word Processors and even an Amiga. But down in our Design and Technology department, there was also another curious device sitting in the corner that seemed to have no purpose other than to play a 3D spaceship game titled “Lander”.

This device was an Acorn Archimedes A3000. I have always been curious about these devices as I didn’t get much time to play with it back then and have never come across one in person since.

It’s been on my list of computers to add to my collection for a while, but they have one pretty big issue, A little battery sat inside them on the main PCB. The years have not been kind to these batteries and they have pretty much all leaked, destroying various components and PCB traces along the way. If ever you see one of these devices for sale on eBay sold as “Untested”, you can be pretty sure that it has been tested and it’s very much broken. The price difference between a fully tested unit and a broken one is pretty substantial so of course, the seller has spent a few minutes plugging it in to see if he can make a few hundred extra pounds!

The only question left is how badly the board is destroyed and how much work will be needed to repair them.

Well, luckily I came across a sale on a Facebook group for an Archimedes A3020 (Which was the version normally sold to schools). This unit tested as far as it booting up to the desktop so there was a pretty good chance the damage wasn’t too bad.

After collecting the computer, the first thing I did was removed the old battery and neutralised the alkaline gunk on the board using lemon juice (No white vinegar in stock at our local supermarket and I was too impatient to wait!). Once this was done, I then wiped down the area with IPA and finally gave it all a good wash with distilled water.

One component was damaged next to the battery but it was just a resistor so I replaced that one. Also, I later found the floppy drive was intermittent and found a trace on the bottom of the board that was broken, so I replaced this with a thin wire. Apart from that the computer all boots up, the floppy drive works and it all seems happy!

So my plans moving forwards? I have already given it a good clean and retro-brighted the keys as they had yellowed a bit. I have also put a Gotek drive in it so I can use disk images from a USB pen. I am now currently designing a mount to hold an OLED display and buttons to navigate the disk images. This is being designed to also conveniently hide the security markings etched into the top of the case. I also want to look at an internal hard drive solution since this version has the onboard IDE port.

So, here it is! Ladies and Gentlemen, the Acorn Archimedes A3020!

I was offered this device untested for a price I couldn’t refuse. From a photo, I could see the TV part would power on but nothing else was displayed.

Having picked up the computer, I got it home and started testing, first I plugged the PC part into another monitor and apart from the CMOS battery is dead, it looked good. Then after a bit of research, I found you could switch the inputs by pushing the two volume buttons at the same time. Everything sprang into life and it all works!

These devices seem pretty rare these days, I can only find a few brief mentions of them on the internet. The device is from 1995 and was sold exclusively in Toys ‘r’ us. It’s basically a 486 DX2-66 based PC with a TV/Monitor built in and a TV Tuner on board.

The only issue I have is it didn’t come with a remote control, so currently, I am unable to switch the video input to the Scart or composite inputs on the back. On initial investigation, these seem to be controlled via a DOS executable on the PC combined with a Windows DLL file that sends commands internally via the I2C protocol. Maybe one day soon I’ll dig a little deeper and see if I can call some of the DLL routines without relying on the remote control to trigger them.

This is going to be a fun one to mess around with!

So whilst decorating, the Psion Series 3 decided it wasn’t getting enough attention and jumped off a shelf onto the new laminate flooring. Sad to say, resusitation was not succesfull after breaking several body parts.

So I decided to take a look around for a replacement and came up with two options. Either a Series 3a which was the same computer but with a larger screen or a series 5 which was bigger in size, had a better keyboard and was more powerful.

I chose both of them 🙂 So say hello the Series 3a and Series 5!

This is another computer I’ve actually had for a little while now, but when I purchased it, it had a missing key. I was planning on 3D printing a replacement, which I got as far as designing the model and printing the prototype using my resin printer. But then I came across a unit being sold as spares or repairs so decided to grab that and fit the original key to this machine. So now it’s fully functional and looks in great condition. I’ve added the spares or repairs machine to my repair pile to fix up one day in the future 🙂

The plus series of the 464 had the advantage of having a cartridge slot on the side for loading the cartridge-based games including the games that play on the GX4000 console. I actually prefer the styling on the plus machines too.

I’ve moved the M4 board over to this machine now so I can load games from SD card or over WiFi, which is a lot more convenient than waiting for the tapes to load 🙂

I’ve had this machine for about a week now and am still enjoying tinkering with it. This luggable computer was the first IBM compatible portable PC made by Amstrad. It comes with it’s own backpack to carry it in, and if you want to use it on the go it will quite happily eat 10x C cell batteries in about an hour!

It has it’s own built-in green screen LCD but also has an external CGA monitor output on the back for that high-end gaming experience 🙂

The computer doesn’t have a hard drive but does have two Double Density floppy drives on the side. This is pretty useful since most of the time you will want the DOS boot disk in the primary drive. I have already swapped out drive A: with a Gotek drive to make booting the machine and loading old software a bit easier than constantly transferring stuff onto floppy disks.

I was actually planning on replacing the green screen LCD with a 9inch colour panel, but after using it for a bit I really feel it would spoil the charm of this machine, and the screen is in perfect working order. So instead, as a side project, I am currently building a mini 8 inch CGA External monitor to sit alongside it (Keep an eye on my blog for updates).

I will do a full write up of my experience using this machine once I’ve had a bit more chance to play around with it. I’ve already connected a WiFi modem up to it and trawled around some BBSs 🙂