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Advantage Six A9home

[Advantage 6] [After Acorn ]

Introduction

The A9Home is the first RISC OS desktop computer running on a ARM9 CPU, and the only new ARM based desktop computer since the Iyonix was launched in October 2002. It was pre-launched (in beta) to experience users in 2005 at the Wakefield RISC OS Show. In 2006 CJE Micros, also at Wakefield, started selling it to the general public.

The A9Home runs a new 32bit version of RISC OS Ltd's RISC OS Adjust called Adjust32. The version on this computer is still a prerelease (pre8), but it seems stable and almost everything I have tried has worked (except using a Belkin USB KVM instead of the supplied mouse, keyboard and Monitor).

As of March 2010 the final version of the A9Home's operating system has not be released. Some users have reported persistent problems particularly with disc corruptions, loss of network configurations and software incompatabilities. Others seem to be relatively trouble free. I suspect that the delays are because of the lack of expereinced RISC OS developers and the conflicting demands on their time. Hopeful the final version of RISC OS for the A9Home will be available soon.

Manuals and documents

Here is the A9home specification.

A9Home

Advantage Six A9home with keyboard and monitor

This picture shows the A9Home (the little blue box on the right) being dwarved by the AFK60 monitor and keyboard. The A9home is displaying a promotional JPEG from Advantage 6.

A9Home front

Advantage Six A9home (front)

This picture shows the front of the A9home with 2 USB ports and the speaker sockets. The red button to the left is the power on/off/shutdown/restart button.

A9home back

Advantage Six A9home (back)

This picture shows the back of the A9Home with serial port and mouse socket on the top row and the power in, 2 more USB connectors, monitor, network and keyboard connectors on the bottom.

Specification:

Serial No.	D1795820G
Unique Identity	0000008E0600
Motherboard part no.	note 1
Motherboard serial no.	note 1
CPU Type	ARM9
CPU Model	Samsung
CPU Clock	400 MHz
Memory Controller	note 1
Memory	128MB SDRAM 8MB VRAM
Memory clock	note 1
Graphics processor	SM501
Floppy Disc Drive	none
Podules	none
Network	10/100 BaseT
other upgrades	none
OS	RISC OS Adjust32 4.42 pre8
OS Date	16 Mar 2006
Benchmarks	note 2

Notes

The A9Home is a sealed unit, opening the unit voids the warrentee, which I have decided not to do yet.
Neither !SICK nor ARMSi are 32bit compatible so I can't run benchmarks.