My new Acorn Electron has arrived

Acorn Electron

Searching for a cable to get it run on a tv screen (scart) or anything else.

Cleaning the machine now.

The pcb says 1982. the machine has excellent quality i have to admit. Much better then a commodore C64.
The keyboard, the material of the key cabs, the plastic of the case, the pcb, IMO a very good value for the money.

I disassembled everything and cleaned it with a brush and the keys and case parts with water and soap.

My intuition is that you're going to have to buy something to connect it to a modern TV.

I know you can't beat the sensation of playing the original machine, but don't forget that it's cheap and convenient to use emulators!

https://www.google.com/search?q=acorn+electron+emulator

Having said that, look after the new toy: it will only increase in value!

I ordered a cable for scart, i still have enough small lcd TVs with scart and vga input.

I guess this will do the job.

You have seen the chess prg on tape ?!
Maybe there are more tape chess programs. I will try them out.

Concerning quality. The keyboard is on a metal base. Much better then the plastic shit that comes with the c64 or the membrane shit that is used in a sinclair zx spectrum.

I will not retrobrite the case. Its now a little yellowed and greyed, as we are all are doing.

Hey the machine is 39 years old.

One stunning feature is also, that it is so much smaller then e.g. the C64.

Today with new cable and sunshine on the balcony the experiment


begins

A 1983 machine.... Everything works.
I had disassembled the Plastik, keyboard caps and the dust and dirt from 1983 until 2021 is now gone.
Marvelous. Now I am considering: who did this engine and what means this passage:

This means 1,3,5,7... Is full width while 2,4,6... Is selective search ??

One funny thing with the electron version of colossus chess…. The electron has only 32 kb ram and some gets away for the operating system.

Colossus therefore uses the bottom area of the screen as memory. It writes data in the screen ram to have more then 32 kb.

Mclane wrote:

One funny thing with the electron version of colossus chess…. The electron has only 32 kb ram and some gets away for the operating system.

Colossus therefore uses the bottom area of the screen as memory. It writes data in the screen ram to have more then 32 kb.

Typical trick of the era. When the Sinclair ZX80 was launched in 1980, we were all stunned that suddenly it was possible to buy a computer for £100 (£438.53 in 2020 according to the Bank Of England inflation calculator). But at lot of compromises were made to hit that price point:

* 1k RAM
* membrane keyboard
* because of the way programs were entered, the word "let" was mandatory (let x = x + 1 instead of x = x + 1)
* Z80 CPU had to draw the screen (actual computing (running the user's program) only happened between one redraw completing and the next one starting)

etc.

The ultimate use of the screen for memory was the Manchester Baby (1948), which used a cathode ray tube as RAM (link)!

Yes bit you can see the search because it writes on the screen.

Whatever. I now try out acornsoft chess. Plays surprisingly  decent so far.



Never heard about these people.


Here, interesting… :
Interview with programmers