Talk:Acorn Atom
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Removed trivia section
editPerhaps this info can be integrated in the article sometime. - The kits of the Atom could be problematic for Acorn if the customer didn't have the relevant assembly skills - according to this article [1] one customer assembled his Atom with glue, logic dictating that the heat from the soldering iron would damage the kit. However, inadequate expertise is equally problematic for any other electronic kit.
Another reputed problem was the big chips falling out of their upside down sockets, using the keyboard shook them loose. A fix was to spot solder the two corner legs of each chip to their socket. In practice sockets are strong enough to hold chips 'upside down', unless weakened by many removals and insertions. It was more of a problem when sockets were used to hold items heavier than a chip, such as expansion boards. The BBC BASIC expansion board is an example of such a board.
Mahjongg 13:25, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
That's a very interesting interview with Sophie Wilson, the designer of the Acorn Atom. I think it should at least be included in external links. --Tony Sidaway 13:35, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
WikiProject RISC OS
edit| WikiProject RISC OS topic coordination | We're attempting to coordinate a few pages together, including RISC OS and Acorn Atom. Feel free to discuss this at Talk:RISC OS. |
"Commercial BBC Micro cassettes could not have been loaded anyway, as ... the Atom's cassette interface only supported 300 baud."
editIs this really true? I'm no expert but a quick look at the hardware documentation I could find suggested that tape input and output is processor-generated, with a reference 2.4 kHz clock available for doing so. So in what sense does the cassette interface support only 300 baud?
This is in the section discussing an Atom with installation of additional ROMs so an argument that it should be interpreted as merely a statement of what the provided software does isn't really sustainable.
Obviously there are a thousand reasons why 99.99% of commercial BBC cassettes wouldn't work even if the Atom's version of BBC BASIC could load files originating from a BBC Micro, but this one feels false?