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First of all, my main machine is a Risc PC 600 with StrongARM@200Mhz, 24Mb DRAM,
2Mb VRAM, two IDE HDs (3.2Gb Quantum Fireball ST and 1Gb Seagate), an unused Morley SCSI card,
an Atomwide Ethernet card and an Acorn AKF85 monitor (17").
I also had an A410 but I sold it in June '96.
Although this may not please many Acorn users who are reading this page, I am soon going to buy a PC... there are things that you simply can't do on an Acorn machine, not even on the RiscPC II that I hope Acorn will manage to sell sooner or later...
I use my computer mainly for programming, in fact I have some projects
on the road!
I usually program in C, eventually mixed with ARM Assembler. As every good Acorn programmer I know a bit
of BASIC but I don't like it and I only use it for testing purpose (including BASIC Assembler).
I know (knew?) Modula-2 because I had to learn it during a Universitary course but I only wrote my
exam project with it, mainly because of the lack of a Modula-2 compiler for RISC OS...
I don't know C++ but I'll probably study it when I'll have a proper C++ compiler for RISC OS.
I don't play much with my computer, mainly because I haven't yet found a good game for
Risc PC... Usually when I have a new game I play a lot with it but then I soon reach the end of the
game or a level where I get bored, and I stop playing with it...
The last game on which I spent a lot of time has been Angband:
it is a 'dungeon-like' game, very similar to Moria. It is a game
born on Unix, it is 'character-based' (ie. no fancy graphic) but it is really
good to play! As I said, I played a lot with it until I finished it, now it
is still on my HD, maybe one day I'll start a new character...
Anyway, I played a lot with my Commodore 64: it had a lot of addictive games, I still remember them
as great games, regardless their age! My preferred ones where Hawkeye (platform), M.U.L.E. (commercial
simulator on a planet to colonise), Elite (no comment needed!)... there were so many good games, MatchPoint,
Terra Cresta, Up'N'Down, Who Dares Wins, Wizball, StarWars, Rally Speedway, Impossible Mission, Space Station,
Microprose Soccer, The Sentinel, Boulderdash, R-Type, GP Circuit, Ikari Warriors, Buggy Boy, BombJack,
Gauntlet, Aliens, Arkanoid, Bruce Lee, Rambo... and a lot of other ones that I don't even remember!
I like to go back in time with my mind, sometimes... RUNSTOP-RESTORE, back to the present!
Although I like RISC OS graphic interface I don't really like the standard, boring, Acorn icons, so I designed an alternative set of icons (and I collected some good icon from someone else): you can find some example of them on my icons page and download the whole set from there.
Apart from RISC OS I like Unix... I installed both RiscBSD and ARM Linux on my RiscPC but I am not very satisfied by any of them, having only 24Mb of RAM doesn't help but I also fear that both haven't been developed enough and that the RiscPC is not powerful enough to run a decent Unix...