Duration: 2:33

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REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE. Here is a demonstration of how the game Ixion (by Tom Cooper & Barry Clarkson) runs on an ARM3 processor with cache both enabled (rabbit icon) and disabled (turtle icon). Disabling the cache makes the ARM3 run roughly at the same speed as an ARM2 8Mhz CPU, but not exactly the same. Still, it runs well enough that ARM2 optimized demos and games with smooth scrolling in them still run smoothly.

ABOUT 'IXION':
This is a really cool forward-thinking first-person shooter (FPS) game where you are dropped into a "sandbox" or "open world", if you will, where your goals are not made clear (as far as I know, as I don't have the manual for the game) and it's up to you to explore places, talk to people and use your wits and inventory of items to make progress. The game is controlled exclusively with the mouse (or at least that's what I assume as I have tried every key on the keyboard and none of them move or turn your character around, nor do I have access to a joystick so I can't tell if that works).

The footage has been captured from the analog RGB output of the Archimedes, digitized and scaled using the OSSC (Open Source Scan Converter) and captured using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1s PCI-Express capture card. The capture was then resized (upscaled) further to 2700x2160 pixels in VirtualDub2. Final compression was performed using HandBrake.

Specifications on the Acorn Archimedes computer:
- original Archimedes 440/1 motherboard (manufactured around mid-1989)
- ARM3 35Mhz processor (manufactured week 51 1989) on an upgrade board
- 4MBs of RAM
- The sound output has not been modified to remove the low-pass filter

0:00 - Starting Game
0:23 - Cache Enabled
0:57 - Cache Disabled ("ARM2 Mode")
1:36 - Cache Enabled (Again)
2:08 - Cache Disabled (Again)

#acornarchimedes #riscos #arm3 #ossc #visionrgb