Any Acorn computer experts? I need help troubleshooting

[Pottsey]

We still have 3 Acorns (A7000's) for the more severe disabled children as they can do pretty much anything and until today never break it. One restart later and it all works.

Today Oxford reading tree level 5 starts giving an error message. Internal error no stack for trap handler. Illegal instruction PC=021446cc: Register at 0003A80C any ideas what this means or how to fix it? I tried reinstalling the program which is about all I can do on an Acorn. No luck.

[Oops_my_bad]

Good god! 8O

I've emailed some of our ICT teachers - a few of them are acorn nuts 8O Hopefully they will be able to help. Will post back here when I get something

[crc-ict]

I know nothing about Acorns really, but my guess (and it is a guess) would be a memory issue. Otherwise, do Acorn programs have anything similar to ini files or a registry? Maybe some support library or program not being started??

Sorry, not much help I know

[laserblazer]

try roger at niftysoftware.co.uk

undisputed king of A7000s

[markesmith]

Few things to try:

Check the CDFS settings...click the middle button over the CD icon > Configure > Buffers > set to 256K and Drives is set to 1.

The A7000 has 4Mb memory onboard and 1 72-pin EDO slot for additional memory. If this is populated (check at boot, top left of the screen for the amount of memory installed, anything more that 4MB and there's some additional EDO in there), remove it and see if ORT runs. Unfortunatly, you have to take the thing to bits to get at it, it's situated at the front of the motherboard under the floppy drive bay. If you get this far give the inside a clean as well. Clean and reseat the memory and see how it behaves.

Failing that, go for it and do a hard reset - power on with the delete key held down until you see the RISC OS 3 splash screen. This can be a bit drastic on some Acorn models but not the A7000 series, most of the default settings you revert to are fine. But you may lose the CD icon (depends on the type of CD drive) so double click on !Boot which launches the configuration panel > Discs > Set CD ROM drives to 1 > Set > OK (ignore the warning message). If there's anything else that doesn't seem right let after the reset let me know.
Best of luck.
Cheers

[Pottsey]

A hard reset with the del key changed the error message and now its all working. Thanks for that. You made one teacher very happy, she can keep her acorn a little longer. It’s a shame PC are not as hardy as the Acons.

[castlevarich]

Dear Mr Potts

Do you still have any working A7000s in your school ????

I've been doing some long distance technical support for
a Special Needs school "darn sarf" that still has a lot of Acorn
computers.

Also, you can still get a bit of educational software, like
Number Train and Number Plane, in RISC OS flavours from
Sherston, if you haven't already got them.

Jon Robinson (Leeds)