A3010

Funkier upgrade to the A3000

Published , updated by Richard GoodwinFiled under Computers

This is the A3010, which came out at the same time as the A4000 series to replace the aging A3000. Note the green keys, lighter colour (despite some discolouration on this machine) and slightly rounder design.

Sold as a home use machine, this includes as standard TV out, a 9 pin digital joystick port, and was sold with various software - a games pack with a rather nice converted platform game called Zool for instance.

 

With the case off you can see the power supply (left) and high density floppy drive (right). In the centre is a network card upgrade, and between that and the power supply you can see the small metal box containing the TV modulator.

 

Stripped back a little more, there's, well, not a great deal to see. There's no external upgrade slot (which means this particular machine has to boot off the floppy drive, get the network stack up, and draw resources over the network). Although the A3010 was designed to take advantage of the ARM2500, which was basically an ARM2 with lots of controlling hardware for things like memory handling already built in which allowed it a speed boost from 8MHz to 12.5Mhz, this particular version came with a mezzanine board (a development board) with a socketed processor. However, on standard production models having everything built into the processor meant that this, too, couldn't be upgraded, although faster memory could speed the machine up a little. Okay for playing games, but not really suitable for serious work.