Best Acorn Archimedes Game

For the purposes of my computer game commentary I refer to the Archimedes of 1987 as a Western computer game machine. The Archimedes is also known as "The Archie."

The Archimedes is powered by a 32-bit ARM RISC-based CPU clocked at 8-40 MHz. RAM on the Acorn Archimedes ranges from 512 kbytes to 16 mbytes.

The best Acorn Archimedes game is David Braben's Zarch of 1987.

The best Acorn Archimedes port is Elite of 1991 by Hybrid Technology of Cambridge, which runs on an unexpanded A310 or A3000. Programmed by Warren Burch and Clive Gringras.

The Archimedes' stock-standard 32-bit ARM RISC-based microprocessor was clocked at 8 MHz and came in at 4½ MIPS, which is five times the computational power of the ST, Amiga and Mac's Motorola 68k.

And when it came to polygon-pushing and sprite-scaling, this showed. Bigtime.

However, the Archimedes could handle 2D sprite- shifting and -scaling with ease as well; it could easily handle the best Amiga games, but not many Amiga games were ported to it. The only thing the Archie would have had problems replicating 1:1 is Amiga plasmas, but its 256-color Mode 13 could have pulled off similar effects, anyway.

Falcon was an amazing flight sim in 1987 on the bloody Atari ST. Imagine what a native Archimedes version would have been like... remember, five times the computational power of the 68000s. Probably more with Falcon.

Name any 3D computer game from 1987-90... it would have been better on the Archie. Carrier Command, M1 Tank Platoon, MechWarrior etc. The Archie could have hosted Doom of 1993 much earlier than it in fact did.

The Archimedes did not take off as a computer-game machine. If it did we'd be looking at a different computer-game landscape in the late 80s and early 90s; perhaps an even more inventive computer-game industry during that period; perhaps without the overwhelming Doom / Quake FPS dominance of the North Americans. Not that Doom / Quake lacked inventiveness; they had that in spades: I'm talking about inventiveness as it pertains to different genre as well as new-genre birth.

The Acorn Archimedes: Polygon-pushing Powerhouse

Back in the late 80s and early 90s of Western computer-game history, there existed a microcomputer that was quite a bit more powerful (and expensive) than other micros of the era, but the other micros were more popular and therefore had a more extensive computer-game catalogue; that is, they got more exclusives and more ports.

Owners of these "lesser" micros kept an eagle eye on this more powerful micro, which astonished them with its raw processing power that allowed it to smoothly and quickly scale 2D images as well as push around polygons at high framerates, and in high fidelity.

This micro hosted David Braben's Zarch of 1987, which is one of the greatest computer games of all-time. About a year later Zarch was ported to ST/Amiga under the name of Virus. And while ST/Amiga Virus stand as great ports of the original, in comparison to Zarch they run like my Aunt May after she's had too much sherry to drink.

Thus did this powerful micro became legendary via Zarch alone, to say nothing of its other 3D games. [1]

This powerful micro, of course, was the RISC-based powerhouse known as the Acorn Archimedes.

It was a beast.

[1] Elite, Apocalypse and Star Fighter 3000.

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