After altogether too much deliberation I settled on a Psion-themed December Adventure (with room for an occasional peripherally related side-quest). Since I’ve collected many different Psion-related projects over the last 25-or-so years, I anticpate this being a bit of a random-walk, but hopefully things will start pulling together as the month progresses.

Starting off slowly today, I set about writing up the Psion emulation options in MAME and packaging things up to make them easier for others to use (building on top of my journey into Linux desktop entries a few days ago). That write-up is still in progress, but I was able to start getting to grips with all the ROMs the community has collected over the years and made my first pull request to the explit7/Psion-ROM GitHub repository. This repo is rapidly becoming the authorative resource for Psion images and my change adds the Psion Series 3a variant ROMs from the MAME project in the hope that they’ll be a little easier for others to find.

My understanding is that the MAME ROM set represents everything that’s been dumped to-date. It contains the following device variants:

Device RAM Version Language Filename
Psion Series 3a 1MB 3.22f English s3a_v3.22f_eng.bin
Acorn Pocket Book II 1MB 1.30f English (ACN) pb2_v1.30f_acn.bin
Psion Series 3a 2MB 3.40f English s3a_v3.40f_eng.bin
Psion Series 3a 2MB 3.40f Italian s3a_v3.40f_ita.bin
Psion Series 3a 2MB 3.40f USA s3a_v3.40f_usa.bin
Psion Series 3a 2MB 3.41f German s3a_v3.41f_deu.bin
Psion Series 3a 2MB 3.43f Russian s3a_v3.43f_rus.bin

The significant bump in version number between the 1MB and 2MB is fascinating to me—it turns out the 2MB version came with two additional programs (Spell and Patience) which I had always assumed were limited to the Series 3c and 3mx models.

Spell and Patience were introduced in the 2MB Series 3a

We’re still looking for Belgian and Dutch ROMs so if anyone out there has one, please drop me an email or join us on the Psion Discord.