This is gloriously bonkers.

I don't think many people realize how far ahead the Archimedes was at the time.

I got to borrow one from school for the entire summer holidays - a friend and I manhandled the beast to my house - and I spent six glorious weeks with it.

I'd love to find one but I expect they're hard to find.

It looks like there's an fpga implementation as part of the mister project. It could scratch the itch if the real hardware is out of reach.

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Archie_MiSTer

You could get any Raspberry Pi (even a Zero) and run RISC-OS on it.

Even emulation is worthwhile (I use RPCEmu)

Set up a saved search on eBay so you get emails if one is listed.

They come up fairly regularly.

Be cautious of any that aren't shown to be working, especially if they don't include photographs of the area around the CMOS battery. These could leak after 15+ years and damage the board.

I disabled it last week - I'll just do stuff by hand. At least if I mess it up I know who to blame.

Please, stop using the word British for the English. Welshmen are not English, the English are not Scottish.

English politeness is not necessarily a feature of our Celtic brother and sister's national character.

I'm not a greenie by any stretch of the imagination but I'm a strong believer in Repair, Re-use, Recycle.

I'm writing this comment on a Lenovo Yoga I bought for $10 and fixed up. It's a quad core with 4GB of soldered RAM and a 128GB SSD but I slapped CachyOS on it and it works for nearly anything I want to do when I'm out and about. The battery lasts me about 3 1/2 hours. I've picked up CRT monitors for virtually nothing and they work just fine.

We throw things away too easily.

There's also a subreddit for international pen friends for adults. It jives with their fountain pen subreddit pretty well.

I don't think that word means what Anthropic thinks it means.

Gaming is more than viable on a Linux PC these days.

I'm using CachyOS with a PS2 controller or mouse and keyboard. I had to do virtually zero tinkering.

Let me know how rainvow 6 runs for you :)

I wish you were right, though

yes games with kernel anticheat won't work.

And those games are easily ignored, as they should be.

>yes games with kernel anticheat won't work.

*unless the developers explicitly enabled linux userspace support which some do

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

> linux userspace support

Note that this is a much less robust form of anti-cheat, which is why many developers do not enable it.

yes because its not a rootkit. it a lot less invasive and more secure for the client device.

I'm someone who hasn't used Windows for gaming in years, and has been enjoying Proton since 2019.

But, especially for children, a lot of these games are a big part of their social lives. Paragraphs could be expended on the vices of these games, but I disagree with considering them easily ignored.

As others have noted though, a surprising lot of these games with anticheat do work on Linux. It's not even rareOverwatch, Halo, and Helldivers to name a few.

Plenty of games without anticheat won't work either. It's far from the Windows situation of installing whatever you want and expecting it to work out of the box. And the "gold" rating on ProtonDB/WineHQ means nothing, you have to check the comments.

Sure Linux also works with a lot of games nowadays, and you can ignore whatever doesn't. I use a Mac and accept that it'll run even fewer games. Not my priority.

We're entering a world where developers are going to need to start implementing anti cheat that works on Linux. It's clearly possible, and as we break past 5% it's no longer economically viable to ignore Linux. Especially once the GabeCube comes out...

The goal of kernel mode anticheat is to prevent other kernel-mode modules from tampering with the game's memory. This can kind of be done on Windows, as there's a pretty short list of kernel binaries, and all device drivers are signed.

This is out of the question on Linux, where there's probably 100,000 distro kernel binaries floating around, plus the ability to build your own with whatever modules you wish.

The only plausible solution is to force everyone to use the same kernel image. "To run Valorant, please apt install linux-vanguard-botnet-bin!"

Unfortunately this is a plausable enough outcome, and those games are so absurdly popular, that people will do it, especially given that having support for these games will likely drive new users to Linux.

If enough people do it, this opens the door for other software to latch onto it and start requiring a "verified kernel", so I'd rather just never see these games on Linux.

I think, it's not unreasonable to see basically a verifiable reference single-purpose gaming OS everyone has to use in competitive esports games. Steam and Linux are probably positioned well there.

Would be hilarious, if all gaming ultimately settles on a hardware independent console platform running on a locked-down linux! This would really please and piss off every faction at the same time. But honestly, not the worst compromise IMO.

We probably could run Linux distros under hypervisor (just like default Windows install those days runs not on bare metal, but under Hyper-V).

And then games that wish for anticheat start a separate VM in hypervisor with complete secure boot chain of trust. Would require GPUs to support SR-IOV though.

Maybe something using AI could be implemented - does a screenshot of your game e.g. every second and if it detects anything that would suggest cheating then it informs some central system and sends it a movie of you playing for the final verdict.

Of course this all is based on the assumption that the local AI can do this fast enough with enough precision.

That runs on client side, so can easily be tampered with (assuming you're suggesting that instead of secure boot chain).

Also cheat HUD elements can be simply rendered outside of game window (or even on another device like smartphone).

Well my suggestion is that the local part (which could analyze everything that is happening locally, not only the screen) would be the initial filter and if it detects any hint it takes some data package and sends it to some centralized online system that would provide a final verdict (and ban if needed).

But as you say if it is local then you can essentially run anything on the computer and modify what is ran on it. That basically means it is impossible to make an anti-cheat that is 100% bulletproof aside from something strange like buying a locked-in camera which you need to place behind you as it records everything you do on the PC and then the AI thing happens as I explained.

Maybe for pro play and tournaments that would be acceptable but not for the average player.

I played the shit outta this on the Atari ST. Happy times.

My first was when I was arguing with the IT guy about local shells on their big iron at Uni.

I told him it was a risk to let dumbasses like us have a shell on his server. He said we couldn't do anything, that they were unprivileged accounts.

"Watch this", says I, as his machine froze.

I got in so much trouble for that. I hope you can't do that kind of thing any more.