Dear Sirs,
I am about to invest in an Archimedes 410/1, but I am a little confused about all the different types of monitor which can be used. Can you clarify the situation for me?
Michael Taylor
The new 400/1 series can use a number of monitors. The cheapest is a standard monochrome type, but this hardly does justice to such an advanced system, and for this reason Acorn no longer offer a monochrome monitor. If you do want to follow this course, you can expect to pay about £80 for the monitor, and your Archimedes will also need a link changed inside it - this is described in the User Guide.
The next level of monitor is a standard resolution colour one, such as the Acorn-badged unit (which is actually made by Philips). These monitors, which cost between £200 and £300, provide adequate quality for most uses, but have a limited vertical resolution. This means that the display can appear rather 'liney' in the horizontal direction, and certain high resolution modes cannot be displayed.
The creme de la creme of monitors is the multisync. These effectively double the vertical resolution of the picture, allowing higher resolution modes, and also making the picture look clearer and more solid. This type of monitor is highly desirable if you plan to use your Archimedes for Desktop Publishing, because fancy-fonts appear much crisper than with a standard monitor. The drawback is that a multisync monitor will set you back over £500, about twice the cost of the standard type.
Another type of monitor, which is only suitable for the 400/1 series and the old A440, is the very high resolution monochrome monitor. These offer 1152 by 896 pixels on the screen, but only in monochrome. Such monitors are really only for very specialised activities, especially when you consider that they cost well over £1000. A final type of monitor which can be used with the Archimedes is a PC VGA monitor. However, this greatly restricts the available screen modes, and is not really worth considering.
The best advice we can give is to suggest that you visit your local Acorn dealer, and have a look at all the types of monitor for yourself.
David Spencer
Dear Sir,
I understand that the configuration settings of my Archimedes A3000 could be corrupted by certain applications, and if so I would have to configure it all by hand. Is this so, and is there a better way?
Jane Fairchild
Yes, this is certainly true. The configurations of all Archimedes computers are stored in battery-backed RAM. Poorly-written applications are capable of leaving your machine reconfigured.
It is however, easy to save your current configurations to disc, and then reload them whenever necessary. We featured a short program to perform this feat some time ago in RISC User. In Volume 1 Issue 5 page 34 there is a hint entitled "Save and Load Configuration Data". This hint contains all you need to know.
Incidentally, you will find that ArcScan is particularly good at turning up this kind of information. In this case, if you had entered "Configuration" and "Load", and performed a keyword search with "AND" logic, you would have come up with the reference given here (in fact that is how I found it myself).
Lee Calcraft