10 May
2012
10 May
'12
10:27 a.m.
On 05/09/2012 01:30 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
I thought the R260 was an A540 with RSICix installed, the hardware was
the same. Whereas the A680 is tolly differnt from any other Acorn ARM
machine.
Correct, although genuine R260 machines were branded as such. The R260 was
an 8MB machine, too, whereas by default the A540 was only 4MB - based on
experiences of trying to get 8MB A540s up and running for RISCiX, the
hardware is *very* picky about which memory it will work with (I suspect
some timing somewhere is rather marginal), so I assume that Acorn had some
fun and games mixing and matching memory for any released R260's.
Was it? What about the A680? (No, I don't have
one. I have narrowly
missed getting one twice :-()
Like the M4, I don't think the A680 was ever commercially released; it was
just an in-house dev platform for RISCiX.
There was the R260 which made it out into the wild though, and which ran I am pretty sure some A680s got out to universities
(and I don't just
mean Cambridge).
Like most Acorn 'alpha' stuff, I expect a few (I'd estimate there are
perhaps 20 or so still in existence) leaked out into the wild, although as
far as I know, they weren't ever actually sold. Like you, I've had a couple
of "near misses" when it came to acquiring one!
cheers
Jules