 |
RiscStation R7500 Lite Reviewed[ Home | RISC OS Systems | About ROUGOL ] |
|
|
RiscStation R7500 Lite Reviewed[ Home | RISC OS Systems | About ROUGOL ] |
ust before Christmas 1999, I [Andrew Davis] received my RiscStation and, although a little later than I had expected I was happy to see it arrive. I had ordered a machine without a monitor so it all came in one box, which was fairly light. Opening the box I found all the things you would expect: The machine itself, a keyboard, mouse, speakers and some software CDs. I had built a shelf in my sons room and was planning to use my old AKF60 as a monitor so these were all ready. I had already purchased a 2 metre network cable so it could join my LAN as soon as possible. Upon getting the machine out of the box, the first thing that struck me was that the case rattled, but more of this later. I was also disappointed to notice that the free speakers looked nothing like the pictures in the adverts I had seen, and looked to be worth what I had paid for them.
I set the machine up and started it. The letter that arrived with it said to press "Fn-Power" to start the machine, but this didn't work, so I fell back on the trusty power switch on the front of the case. I was rewarded with a familiar twin beep reminiscent from my old BBC Micro and the desktop was presented very quickly.
The computer I'm comparing it with (as it's the only other RISC OS machine I have used) is my StrongARM'd RiscPC, the full specs of which are at the end of this review.
I played with the RiscStation for a while and was fairly pleased with it. I installed Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and found that it runs at a perfectly respectable speed. It was three days to Christmas, so I now left it alone waiting for my seven year old son, Stephen, to start to play with it so we could do a little exploration together.
Stephen was as pleased to have a computer in his room as I was to get my RiscPC back all to myself. However any thoughts of mine that I might be able to see what the machine was like were dashed as Stephen wanted to play HoMM2. Then he wanted to play HoMM2. After I dragged him off of it for lunch he returned to play HoMM2.
I did manage, during the week after Christmas, to show him Frak, Mars Quake and show him how to set up a new background for the pinboard, but that was about it.
HoMM2 runs rather well, although it fails to play the music from the CD when the CD is in the CD Drive. After speaking with CTA, HoMM2 apparently tries to access the CD Drive in an unusual way. Since then I have spoken to Andrew Rawnsley with his RComp hat on and he said it is Simtec's fault. I just hope this isn't going to be bouncing back and forth between them both. For those who are familiar with HoMM2 it runs at "gallop" at about the same speed as or perhaps a little faster than my RiscPC does at "Walk". For those who aren't familiar with HoMM2, you should be. I've also got Doom, Destiny and Exodus. I'll get round to trying those out one of these days, although I don't expect much from Doom. (I think it needs a StrongARM.)
Today I have opened up the case and it's a very neat board. It comes with RISC OS 4.03. It has an EIDE interface on the motherboard. Although there are no mount points for any more HDD's, there is a space for another CD Drive. The 145W power supply is just ticking over with 140W to spare apparently, so we need some suggestions for that spare power. The power supply does have two spare drive connections so expansion will be easy enough. On the back of the machine everything is fairly well labelled apart from the fact that you need to plug the monitor into a port which is labelled as a serial port and the network connection goes into a USB labelled port. Although having said that I had absolutely no problems plugging everything in. The Rattle was a loose screw, which seemed to be an extra as there were no obvious ones missing.
I am now typing this on the RiscStation and the keyboard is actually quite nice to use. The keys are fairly springy but that seems to suit the way I type. As I mentioned earlier on, the speakers also seemed cheap but they sound fine. The games sound as good as ever and the CD I'm currently listening to is more than acceptable. Having just moved the CD into Stephen's portable CD player it becomes noticeable that the supplied speakers lack a certain depth. Let's face it, if you want to listen to CD's you should go and buy a CD Player. I initially clicked on the CD Icon to play the CD, and when I clicked on Dismount the CD kept on playing. It doesn't do that on my RiscPC. I then went to the supplied utility !DigitalCD. That gave me control over the CD and is a fairly good utility. It comes with a small database of CD's which, for some reason, doesn't contain "The Disney Collection Volume 3" that I'm listening to :-).
The other software that the Risc Station come with is quite extensive:
and a whole bunch of Demo Software which I shan't go through here. It's mostly games though.
Finally there are the supplied utilities:
and the system tools you would expect (!MemNow, !SaveCMOS etc.). I've just tried a 56K PDF file on both of my machines and I would say the RiscPC is 3 or perhaps 4 times faster than the RiscStation but this was subjective, I didn't actually time it I just counted.
I have been running the display at 800x600x256 and it feels fairly quick. Changing up to 32k colours and you begin to see it slow down. Select 16m colours or 1024x768x32k and it becomes noticeable. The other thing is that with my AKF60 it can only manage 56Hz, so the screen is struggling anyway.
Overall I am really happy with the machine. It's perfect for word processing, and as it can save in MS-Word format it's easily interchangeable with the rest of the world. It plays the games I have really well and Stephen is more than happy with that. Once I've got the network drivers I'll be adding it to my LAN and I'll have internet access via Ant's Server Suite so I'll be able to report on that as well as the other games I have here. I need to sit down and actually use the two spreadsheet products, as I've not used a spreadsheet on RISC OS before.
One other thing about the speed, it spell checked this document in less than a second, I don't have a large document to do any real timings on.
The other software I've tried (apart from HoMM2) is the StrongGames CD, and no I've not been through them all yet. I've played about 15 or 20 of the 140 odd games and they've all worked so far. I've also got the Reptons and Repton 1 does work. I've been told that Repton 2 won't, but that's an issue with RO4, not the RiscStation.
I can be reached on Andrew@burleyhill.u-net.com if anyone would like to ask questions about the RiscStation or getting it working on a LAN.
After many emails have gone backwards and forwards between CTA, Cannon computing and myself I have finally got the networking working. The problem was that the TCP/IP Protocol suite had been set up with an IP address of 1.<something> and the rest of the network was all set up with 10.<something>. What was confusing me was that nothing was talking to the RiscStation and even !Ping would not acknowledge any of the other machines on my network. The only final thing is that the HDD will not stay shared when I reboot the machine. Roy of CTA has told me how to get around this so I've just got to look it up and set it to rights.
The next thing I'll be doing is sharing the printer connected to my RiscPC and then installing the Ant Server Suite(Client) onto this machine to give this machine access to the network via my RiscPC. This is so that I can control the list of sites that my two sons may access. I'm sure if Michael pays me enough I might give him access to the Arsenal site :-).
I'll also be installing !OmniClient to check access to Windows, but now that the LAN is working I don't think there'll be too many problems.
| RISC OS User Group Of London | APH, 22 February 2000 |