0085 Vintage goodies for the BBC Micro Model B and BBC Master 128
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- Опубліковано 18 чер 2024
- It’s time to return to opening up mail call packages that I’ve been accumulating in the basement. Here we have a package that I’ve had for a long time, but it has some cool items for the BBC Micro Model B.
-- Video Links
Adrian's Digital Basement Merch store:
my-store-c82bd2-2.creator-spr...
Support the channel on Patreon:
/ adriansdigitalbasement
Adrian's Digital Basement (Main Channel)
/ @adriansdigitalbasement
My GitHub repository:
github.com/misterblack1?tab=r...
-- Tools
Deoxit D5:
amzn.to/2VvOKy1
store.caig.com/s.nl/it.A/id.16...
O-Ring Pick Set: (I use these to lift chips off boards)
amzn.to/3a9x54J
Elenco Electronics LP-560 Logic Probe:
amzn.to/2VrT5lW
Hakko FR301 Desoldering Iron:
amzn.to/2ye6xC0
Rigol DS1054Z Four Channel Oscilloscope:
www.rigolna.com/products/digi...
Head Worn Magnifying Goggles / Dual Lens Flip-In Head Magnifier:
amzn.to/3adRbuy
TL866II Plus Chip Tester and EPROM programmer: (The MiniPro)
amzn.to/2wG4tlP
www.aliexpress.com/item/33000...
TS100 Soldering Iron:
amzn.to/2K36dJ5
www.ebay.com/itm/TS100-65W-MI...
EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter:
www.eevblog.com/product/121gw/
DSLogic Basic Logic Analyzer:
amzn.to/2RDSDQw
www.ebay.com/itm/USB-Logic-DS...
Magnetic Screw Holder:
amzn.to/3b8LOhG
www.harborfreight.com/4-inch-...
Universal ZIP sockets: (clones, used on my ZIF-64 test machine)
www.ebay.com/itm/14-16-18-20-...
RetroTink 2X Upconverter: (to hook up something like a C64 to HDMI)
www.retrotink.com/
Plato (Clone) Side Cutters: (order five)
www.ebay.com/itm/1-2-5-10PCS-...
Heat Sinks:
www.aliexpress.com/item/32537...
Little squeezy bottles: (available elsewhere too)
amzn.to/3b8LOOI
--- Instructional videos
My video on damage-free chip removal:
• How to remove chips wi...
--- Music
Intro music and other tracks by:
Nathan Divino
@itsnathandivino - Наука та технологія
Future Patron sends package of items fresh from store. They become "new old stock" in Adrian's waiting box. Keep up the great videos, these are fun to see!
The Master 512 is a Master 128 with a 80186 copro with 512 kb ram. The copro can run DOS Plus. DOS Plus is mostly able to run programs written for either CP/M-86 or MS-DOS 2.11, but a Master 512 can't run MS-DOS. It can run 8-bit guy's Planet X3, even with a mouse if you install the right driver. And it can run GEM, but no MS Windows.
Bit of a surprise to see one of my local computer shops get a mention. Solidisk are still going.
Indeed. I work there 👍
That landlord and tenants analogy is soooooo British haha.
English ;) but yes. And "room for shops" instead of saying "commercial real estate"! Haha
Replay worked really well. I have one in my childhood model b lucky enough to still have it. Sign of the times that it was sold as a copy system or game save utility. We won't mention who's games we were saving.
The video really highlights the inovation that went on round the bbc project. So many clever people and the inovation was encouraged. I even remember computer meetings at the local village hall! Imagine lugging a bbc model b, tape deck, disk drive and crt monitor to play games and compare setups for a couple of hours (thanks dad)
To find an acorn mouse documentation, you need a secret squirrel! ^-^
And maybe even a morocco mole!
I would expect there to be a ROM to accompany the mouse. The AMX mouse was I believe the most popular for the BBC micro, that came with AMX paint. "Image" by Cambridge micro software was another paint program. The AMX mouse operated the cursor keys and the buttons were programmable so would work with a lot of existing software.
There would also be second processors apps that the mouse could likely be used with so it could be used with GEM. And nowadays there is the Pi tube which can emulate a range of processors.
There were quite a few AMX software titles including AMX Stop Press and AMX Publisher. AMX had its own GUI and was compatible with the AMX mouse.
Flaxcottage is the repository for educational software for the BBC series machines and a lot of other software, manuals and information on the Stardot forums.
As I remember, you could load rom images into sideways ram and run them as if they were roms.
Some pretty handy stuff there, Adrian.
I only recall the mouse coming out sparingly for one of the apps used at high school.
That said, our school's Master Elites were fitted with the 'official' speech synthesis chip. This had similar constraints to the one you received w.r.t. having to replace parts of prose with specific phonemes to get the annunciation of the chip to sound correct.
Installing the Solidisk Technology Sideways RAM Extension card is a lot of work for little gain. There are period correct solderless Sideways ROM/RAM extension cards that give you more ROM and RAM. Even period correct DIY can give you more ROM and RAM. The Solidisk Technology Sideways RAM Extension card is only worth it if you can find a Solidisk 128K Sideways Extension RAM Upgrade, but those are very rare.
The MOS of the BBC B can use the same number of sideways RAM/ROM as a BBC Master but the necessary sockets were not on the motherboard.
The Vine Replay reset switch looks interesting - it's the one thing I really missed when I started playing with old Acorn gear as opposed to my C64s - the lack of cartridges with a reset button allowing easy exploration of system's memory while it was running code. Not sure you can quite do that with this bit of kit - but just having a reset switch and dump ram to disk file is cool.
Literally in the last 5minutes, I spoke to the gentleman that designed that sideways RAM board, and he said that that particualr one was one of the earliest ones, and that with later versions, all the wires disappeared.
It would be great if the "old timers" wrote up a bit about what they got up to. Solidisk was a prolific maker of expansions for the Beeb, stretching its lifespan out quite a bit, and there were some intriguing products from the company towards the end of their involvement with the Acorn 8-bit platform. As an Electron user, my own recollection of Solidisk was the disk interface with the sideways RAM that promised "megagames", but later advertising indicates one reason why those megagames never arrived: the RAM is described as "unreliable".
It seems that Solidisk were committed quite heavily towards the 80186 co-processor that Acorn made for the Master 512, this having some relation to the mouse Adrian was given, and the company was also doing a nice business in refurbished Beebs, too. But it seems that when Acorn introduced the Archimedes, Solidisk either had to commit to that, as various competitors (Watford Electronics, Technomatic) did, or gradually move on to opportunities elsewhere, which I guess is mostly what happened.
There are many types of RAM on Acorn computers. Sideways RAM is in the same memory spaces as the Sideways ROMs. Another type of RAM expansion is Shadow RAM and this allows the video frame buffer to overlay into the main memory (first 32k) and thus allow large programs with a large frame buffer at the same time.
At school we had a BBC machine (can't remember if it was a Model B or Master) that ran a CAD package. The machine had an enormous analogue joystick that worked well with the CAD package, but I suspect the mouse that you have would be a good match for it as well. There was a plotter with three different coloured pens that was also connected to the machine, and it was a very cool setup for the time - the closest equivalent was something called Anvil 1000MD, which ran on an IBM PC, a setup that costs thousands more.
We had that package as well (just the one copy, and i remember it also had a hardware licence dongle so it was probably very expensive). The joystick had a dial on the top to make it '3d'. It could also be used to play a couple of games - I think Elite was one. I seem to remember one of the really detailed example files that came with it was a drawing of a RS Cosworth that would take forever to plot. We also had an actual small desktop CNC lathe that connected to the BBC and the CAD package could generate G code and then send that to the lathe to cut actual metal although it was so expensive it mostly sat unused as the teachers didn't want the students to break it. Being a class full of teenagers of course everything seemed to turn out rather phallic.
@@ThePoxun Can you remember what the CAD package was called? I'd love to see if I can find a copy to run in an emulator.
@@chriswareham I don't think it actually had a name beyond CAD as far as I remember 😏 I do now remember the joystick was the Bitstik so the CAD package may not be usable without an actual joystick. It also apparently needed a second processor (not sure if this was needed for the joystick or just the CAD software) and while I can find the support rom for the joystick and an article talking about it I can't find any trace of a disk image for the software 🙁.
@@ThePoxun Just Googled the Bitstik and yes, that's it! Our woodworking teacher built an elaborate trolley that the entire setup of computer, monitor and plotter was mounted on, quite a neat bit of metalworking. I spent many lunchtimes using it, since I was in that teachers "technical design" class.
Regarding 2x different "Replays" Something you read out mentioned Replay Mk1 and Mk2 and 8271. Later BBCs had a different disc controller. This was because in their wisdom Acorn chose an obsolete disc controller (8271) that soon after became unavailable. To be fair BBC Micro was wonderful, 8271 debacle was a rare error. There are compatibility issues (don't work) between discs created by the two different controllers. I think all Masters have the later controller. Low level format (bits) of Master disks are the same as PC.
The Sweet Talker sounds the same as the Currah μSpeetch for the Spectrum and possibly the C64. In fact, you have to write the same H(ee)ll(ow) string. Must be the same chip.
Desperately trying to find you the BBC's successor, the Archimedes in good shape and another UK Weirdy, the Sam Coupe
An A7000 might be the interesting option if you can find one cheap, yes it's the last machine Acorn made but it handily uses PS/2 keyboards and mice. I had about three at one time that I got from school but they all seemed to fail on me.
Good luck on the Sam Coupé, they are rare and hideously expensive.
I owned a SAM Coupe for quite a while when I managed to kill my 128k Toast Rack. Swapped it for a 128k+2A eventually, because at the time it just felt like an overly complicated Spectrum 48K. I had bugger all SAM software, not like there was much on the market anyway
@@dglcomputers1498 The A7000+ followed on from the A7000 and provided quite a few advantages, such as a faster memory bus and a floating-point arithmetic unit (for the few applications that used it, ports from other systems, and maybe Linux or NetBSD if you can get them working, perhaps also Inferno, too), despite being superficially similar to the A7000.
The replay module with the ic socket on the flying lead was designed to push over one of the 74ls chips, it doesn’t replace the chip
I've been reading PDF's of BBC magazines and the AMX mouse had graphical programs to work with it.
There is software available for the RPi that emulate most of the co-processors that were made for the BBC Series, and you run the emulation core on the RPi and connect it to your Beeb. Software images of the original discs supplied with most of co-processors are available and have been collated on various BBC Micro retro computing sites. I believe Stardot forums will have information on the RPi based co-processor software and either host the original copro software discs and manuals or have links to them. They have a forum area for BBC Hardware projects and the materials for the Rpi copros would be there or in one of the lists of BBC resource websites they keep on the forum.
The BBC Micro etc was part of a BBC project called the "Computer Literacy Project" = there were lots of educational TV programmes shown on TV in the 80's, based around the BBC micro, they sold them cheap to schools (even gave them to many) and along with the programmes were used for educational purposes in a push to get the country "IT ready" effectively... partly getting people and children used to using a computer, and creating the future programmers etc, but also for those tweakers and hackers at home to play with, so it was kinda designed (or at least part marketed) that way on purpose.
Acorn won the contract to make the computer, and was however based on one of their prototypes (can't remember which)
It was also relatively popular as a home computer here in the UK too, due to its focus on accessibility and education, and the fact many schools had them... There was a total of 9 models produced over it's lifetime.
The ROM carts. Yeah, from what I've seen with software on BBC... They're literally built for use at a school, so software was often distributed on a ROM, so it could be installed inside the computer, then executed when you run a command to launch that software.
A cartridge that you can plug ROMs into would be useful if the school only purchased 1 or 2 copies of the software, then they can just plug it into a computer when they want to use it.
Think of it like this. Most 8 bit micros of the age ran on cassette tape. Some like the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and even BBC had disk drive options. Commodore 64 also had Cartridges.
In line with this, the BBC also had ROM chips. So having a Cartridge that can hold those ROMs does make a little more sense than making a Cartridge version of the software too, just plug the ROM chip, or EPROM in a cartridge.
The Master 128 (and derivatives such as the 512) had virtually the same cartridge ports as the Electron Plus 1, and Acorn made a number of titles available on cartridge for the Electron, notably the View and ViewSheet productivity software, a few languages, and various games. You could actually use these cartridges on the Master, although the key mappings might have been awkward for things like View due to the different keyboard layouts between the Electron and BBC Micro/Master range.
Cartridges with ROM sockets were also made for the Electron, both back in the day and also in recent times, which gave people the option of fitting their own ROMs and then having the convenience of using them in cartridges. I imagine that Acorn saw that this was desirable in educational environments where people didn't feel comfortable popping the lid off the machines and bending or breaking pins on chips.
Since Beeb users were used to the chips themselves and had plenty of ROM-based software, providing support for such cartridges allowed them to re-use all that software on newer machines. So, I guess that is how the Master 128 ended up with cartridge slots. On the Electron, they were also used to add other functionality, and you can actually do that with the Master as well if you work around the narrower cartridge slots in the casing.
Fun video, but I still want Coleco Adam content! 🙂
Dang, heard about the VCF in Dallas and we’re going to be in Dallas today. But the dates say June 14-16 so we missed it 😢
On allowing modifications... The main focus was education so not only did they want to teach people about software and programming, they also wanted to encourage understanding of the hardware and how it worked. They also wanted to keep the system as flexible and accessible as possible so teachers in smaller schools and general lab techs in larger schools so they could maintain and update them to fit the educational goals of the classroom. The user and printer ports for instance can be addressed directly from any programming language (i think with a *out command) and used in exactly the same way GPIO on a Raspberry Pi is these days which allowed for computer control of motors, switches etc and there were even off the shelf products in a similar way you get hats for the Pi to make that even easier. With a little bit of work you could even use the printer port as effectively a 10 bit (8 bits + 2 control lines) address bus to connect to a huge number of devices.
I knew that about the user port, but not about the printer! How cool!
This sparked a memory of a 'Celebration Day' (day of fun stuff around Christmas, but in a very mix faith primary school) where we used the GPIO type functionality and some very Basic code to make lights (possibly LEDs) flash in patterns then poked the lights into card Christmas Trees we had decorated. I think this would have been about 90 or 91. I seem to remember there was a breakout box that we connected the pre wired lights into. In the 5 years or so that the BBCs were the school computers, that was the only time we used that functionality.
Your pronunciation of Berkshire shows how tricky British English (especially county names) can be for North Americans. Can you try Worcestershire and Leicestershire next please? 😊
That's just English in general whatever variant you speak
Keep up the good videos. I love them. I always felt there was something Canadian about you. Certain mannerisms and speech patterns usually give it away. Thanks for confirming it.
When I was in JR. High, in 1983, I took a programing class. the school I went to had two computers (They called it a state of the art computer lab.). One was a TRS-80 model III. The other was an Acorn. There were 30 kids in the class. That made it interesting to get computer time. So the teacher (Who was actually technically savvy.) Focused mostly on logic and flow charting. The prime language we did the logic on was LOGOS. This was on the Acorn system. LOGOS is basically a turtle that moved about the screen painting a line. You can turn the line on, or off. You can turn the turtle right or left, and it can move forward. I can't remember if it would move backwards or not. The other thing you could do was change the color of the line. If I recall it was only the primary colors plus black. The other thing that was unique was it used a mouse. The first time I ever saw one. I don't remember to much about it, because I spent more time playing with the TRS-80.
I remember thinking "hey, someone who says 'the mains' for electricity in the USA!", and then he mentioned being Canadian haha
Hello from Canada
"Must be the Canadian in me", eh!
Acornsoft View and ViewSheet were probably the most common ROM softwares to have in your Beeb. I have the Commstar 2.40 ROM in my model B for use with a wifi modem emulator so I can connect to the TELSTAR viewdata service & get news and weather updates.
Hello from the UK!
It was quite common for some hardware or software to come with supporting roms. For instance the AMX Art/Mouse package had a specific rom, as did the Turtle, a CAD package and thats just what I remember from my School and not including language roms such as COMAL. As these were often quite expensive putting the roms in a cartrage allowed schools to swap them in and out as needed without opening the computer as well as to not tie the software to a specific computer/classroom. On the BBC model B it was a fairly common mod to install a zif socket to the left of the keyboard to allow swapping roms and the cartridge slot on the Master was effectively an evolution of that.
Extremely British to compare the OS to a landlord & his tenants.
The ROMs were usually things like utilities that added new STAR commands - e.g. things like a machine code monitor, support for additional hardware, etc. Language ROMs were also a thing, e.g. Lisp, COMAL, or applications like View (word processor), ViewSheet, Interword (my fave), Wordwise. A couple of games used ROMs like the Dr Who game (something about ‘mines of doom’ IIRC), but only really the Electron ever had any games on ROM but these were more marketed as cartridges than ROMs. These were all switched into $8000-$BFFF by poking the bank number into $FE30. The MOS has a mechanism to offer commands to each ROM to implement. The master and election mapped two 16k ROMs into each cartridge slot. There were some ROMs that could pack more than 16k in by layering on their own bank switching on top on a carrier board. Examples were Interword (32k) and there was a spell checker that was 128k.
Some nice goodies for the Beebs. I hope that at some point we see them in action.
the solidisk sideways ram expansion was the first of its kind...very good value as they bundled a huge amount of software with the kits...15 floppy disks worth
however they were always very unreliable as they were anchored largely by that rom socket adapter, that over time would work itself loose, hence many bbcs don't have screwed on top cases, as the owners were forever having to push down on the adapter to make contact
there are modern day replacements that are cheap and reliable, and implement via EEPROMs or battery backed up large RAM chips
the original solidisk is as you have a 32K model, but could be upgraded with a daughter card to take it to a whopping 128K, later solidisk designs had 64K ram as their base capacity 2x 41464 (64k by 4 bits)
if I remember correctly the solidisk bank switching had some compatibility issues as they used addresses normally associated with the user port
yeah, we had one of those Solidisk boards. It sucked, big time. These days I wouldn't recommend anything other than ctorwy31's EEPROM / battery-backed RAM card.
@@RayBellis yeah, ctorwy31's expansion cards are one of the best, if not the best
Great haul. The Cheetah Sweet Talker was also available for the ZX Spectrum. Although it was'nt as popular as the Currah μSpeech interface.
That mouse, plugged in to the user port, is almost certainly compatible with the AMX Mouse system which I used back in the day and my children still use on our BBC Micro to this day. There is an AMX mouse support ROM which provides basic driver functionality and some API functions and *commands for building GUI applications. The most popular application is probably AMX Art or Super Art, which work pretty much like Mac Paint or similar. There was also the AMX Pagemaker desktop publishing package which I used for a lot of my school work. All this runs natively on the BBC Micro and doesn't need the Master 512/80186 co-pro.
The 27513 is a bank selected 27512. IIRC it divides the prom into 4 pages which are selected by writing to the prom (it has a WR input) to select a page number.
With sideways ram you could actually save/create/load rom images from disk within the BBC so you could use a language rom on a machine without a physical rom. You could even copy a physical rom into sideways ram and modify it resulting in some fun (for a 14 year old) things like renaming commands or language keywords to rude words. There was one game... Repton Infinity that was the last release of the Repton series that came with a level and game script editor and most of the game engine was loaded into 4 banks of sideways ram leaving most of the main ram for the actual levels and scripts and the game was started with a rom star command *REPTON (iirc... it has been 35 years).
Hope you get a PiTube + can use that to run the DOS software such as GEM on it, as well as emulate many other based Tube hardware straight in the Beeb.
I had a mouse for my Sinclair spectrum … came with a paint program, and a programmers guide to write your own software. You had to peek and poke the memory locations.
I understand that one of the BBC's requirements was for easy repairs so units didn't always have to go back for repair, it's why they originally specified a linear supply over a switch-mode one.
I saved up my pocket money and bought a Solidisk 32K sideways RAM module for my BBC. It provides two 16K ROM banks which happen to be writable, so you can load your choice of ROM images in to them. I used to load Wordwise Plus, for example, in order to do word processing. A portion, I think 64K, of the Master 128's RAM, is allocated the same way, for loading ROM images into. The Master also has "shadow RAM" to duplicate the video RAM and free up the rest of the 32K of "regular" RAM at the bottom of the memory map for use by applications. It also provides workspace for filesystems and the OS in this RAM, again to free up main RAM. The Solidlisk board doesn't implement either shadow RAM or workspace.
There is a difference in how the Solidlisk RAM is selected for writing: you have to write the bank number (14 or 15 for each of the banks) on to the user port pins to select the bank to write to, then load the ROM image at address &8000. Most other Sideways RAM systems, including that on the Master, use the OS-provided API for writing to the sideways RAM, which is in practice a bit slower but doesn't clash with anything on the user port.
These days I wouldn't use the Solidisk board. The connectors are horribly unstable and unreliable, and it's much easier to put a 62256 static RAM chip in one ROM socket and hand-wire the write enable and extra address pin to get two 16K banks of sideways RAM. It's much simpler, more standard and more reliable.
27513 is basically an 27512 with 27128 pinout, but an internal bank switching latch. The !PGM Pin is a !WE pin there, and then Bit 0 and Bit 1 select 1 of 4 banks.
Was meant to give existing 27128 systems more ROM with minimal changes which is exactly what was done here. All you need was a bodgewire from a nearby RAM !WE to Pin 27.
Cool, I thought that’s an 64k EPROM with an CRC checksum error 😂 nice 👍
I remember the Cheetah sweet talker well, I had the Sinclair Spectrum version. Cheetah made a few other peripheral for both machines and others.
[13:20] - Oh, yeah, I've got one of the those in one of my BBCs. It's an interface board to fit extra sideways ram via the rom ports. All the wires hanging off it get soldered onto to various legs of the CPU power rails and other chips. All very bodge-like. The ram card doesn't fit the case properly and is prone to working itself out of that less than appropriate edge connector socket. Made by a co. called Solidisk, IIRC. [edit] Ah - you RTFM'd it :-)
I had a 128K Solidisk board, but I don't remember it having any bodge wires when I used it in my BBC model B. [Edit] Correction: yes, there were bodge wires, but no soldering involved. The wiring is on page 39 of the Solidisk manual.
Hey, I have a 512k card for my 800XL that came from Poland. Now I play Prince Of Persia.
maybe "FPROMS" is EPROMS (ie, the E is worn off a bit)
I thought so, too
It could also be Field Programmable ROM, a more generic term which doesn't imply whether a PROM can be erased or is One Time Programmable.
Edit: I'm only offering a possible alternative, I also think the printing has rubbed off.
A few games use sram e.g. digitised speech samples in the game "Exile"
There was an AMX mouse back in the day, and there were loads of software packages for that, like a desktop publishing program, and graphics programs. Not sure whether the Acorn mouse worked with that, though (never had one of those, just the AMX one).
There's a software-only speech program for the Beeb, by Superior Software. That didn't need an add-on board, and was very easy to use - just a *SPEAK command.
The ROM cartridges were more for utilities/business stuff than games. You've already got a word processor and spreadsheet on the Master (View/Viewsheet), but you could also add something like Wordwise Plus, possibly InterWord/Sheet, and things like Advanced Disc Investigator (ADI) and Advanced Disc Toolkit (ADT).
AMX mouse was a 3 button mouse, this continues into Archimedes (Select, Menu, Adust). TBH I've not seen a 2 button BBC. mouse, so interesting!
@@helikevin I'm fairly certain that this two-button mouse was for the Master 512. You can see it, or something like it, in Acorn's Application Note 110 ("Open Up to the World of MS-DOS"). Maybe it was originally procured for the earlier, unreleased Acorn Business Computer models (the ABC 300 series) that were meant to run Concurrent DOS and GEM. The Master 512 was also meant to run Concurrent DOS, but ended up with DOS Plus.
ultimate 1MB on atari, looking forwards
Berkshire, definitely pronounced “bark-sha”, unless posh, in which case “bark-shire”. Not the only North American to do this, and obvious as to why.
I know that AMX Art uses a mouse. I spent many hours making pictures and printing them out on my dot matrix :)
GEM is a graphical shell
0:24 🎶Blame Canada…🎶
Nice you got some bits for the BBC - was wondering if it was worth suggesting you added a Pi to your Master's tube socket and get it running CP/M?
Makes me wonder when Acorn decided to use three-button mice, as those are the most common mouse type I recall from their later machines, though I will say I never used a Micro or Master with a mouse, first time I used a mouse was on a DOS PC...
I imagine that the work being done on ARX prior to the release of the Archimedes influenced the decision, given the prevalence of three-button mouse paradigms amongst workstation manufacturers and in the research community.
Maybe it is because I went from a clone 8086 to a 286 but I don't remember a 186 processor. Hmm, 16-bit chip was released a few months after the 8086, and support chips are not compatible with the 8086 or 80286 lines.
Of course the British would use a "landlord" analogy for microcomputers.
They just love to own everything don't they, little buggers.
Well, some of them do. I imagine that the ROMs just need to "know their place" in all of this!
hi adrian
given you are looking at bbc stuff these days, perhaps you could spare some time to help with a problem affecting the community
the bbc model b has two 6522 VIA ICs, referred to as the system via (mandatory, won't startup if faulty as it controls the keyboard) and the user via (optional and controls the user port )
whilst western design still manufacture modern 6522 (WD65C22N) that are supposed to be fully compatible, note the N post-fix
however, I've found that if a WD65C22N is used as the system via, although the machine starts, continuous spurious interrupts seem to occur and obviously slow it down as it keeps servicing these interrupts...the game acornsoft arcadians is majorly affected
the WD65C22N seems to work in the bbc master, either as system or user via
That replay font gave me a flashback of an 'action replay' c64 cartridge.
Google disagree as I can't find a picture of an action replay cartridge with a similar font.
I am pretty sure it had fastload routines built in.
You could freeze a game, disassemble games, change variables for unlimited life, save a copy of protected games, print a screen and more.
Just about any issue of Zzap! 64 or Commodore Format would've had ads for Datel's stuff, including the Action Replay.
Could you be thinking of one of the other freezer carts, like the Power Cartridge?
Hopefully you'll be able to source 2 more RAM chips for that 32K board & populate the empty spots. 👍
6:03 Amx super art?
Also an AMX Desktop Publishing software originally called "PageMaker" until they had to change the name.
This speech module was used in the DAS BOOT song by U96 in the 90s ua-cam.com/video/YVxXbTk-zsQ/v-deo.htmlsi=ExdJvwuPE2DqJh5B
This Centre for Computing History video with Tom Scott shows the BBC mouse in action: ua-cam.com/video/g80rnhK-cKo/v-deo.html
Your Atari board is presumably the U1MB which, as the name suggests, adds an additional 1MB of RAM bringing the total to 1088K. It also provides a host of other useful features - swapping to different OS and BASIC ROMs, patching IO routines, a realtime clock, support for PBI hard drive emulators, etc. Probably one of the most useful upgrades you can add to an 800XL; throw in an SIO2PC (or FujiNet or SDrive Max or other drive emulation solution), a stereo mod, and a SOPHIA 2 and you're golden.
Bank switching on unexpanded machines (e.g. the 130XE) is accomplished by writing to PORTB (0xD301) - on non XL/XE machines that address is actually one of the joystick ports which is one reason they dropped the third and fourth ports after the 400 and 800. The U1MB and other memory expansions use their own MMU, with the U1MB providing emulation of a few switching modes to provide compatibility with software written for memory expansions released back in the day, and there are some expansions that will push it to the max of 4MB (256x16K banks) but they're somewhat overkill!
That's the AMX mouse which is similar in that it connects to the user port, but it has three buttons. I'm not sure how compatible Acorn's mouse is with the Advanced Memory Systems products.
The speech synthesizer voice, reminds me of GORF the arcade game machine, which used to say "Ha Ha Humanoid" 🙂
I had that S/W in my BBC B back in the day, not the best implementation, a bit flakey, conflicts with the user port I seem to remember having to disable it to use a mouse connected there.
Maybe I'm being too harsh on it, I did use it to dabble in 6502 to create my own utilities ROM as well as shuffle in and out ROM images to the sideways RAM to do lots of cool things.
You try to chip away at the Mail Calls but you get distracted and they pile up again. Will Adrian ever clear the SMMC pile in his or my lifetime? 🤔
"discord messaging is such garbage" and I'm sick to death of devs and companies putting all their support in Discord leaving nothing behind that can be searched for by the next person with the problem (or, worse, in the future when the Discord itself no longer exists).
Honestly I used it for about a week and found pretty much all of Discord was garbage lol, no thanks
Only in England could you name a town after a woman's sex parts!
Hi Adrian. Here's a sincere advice: I think you should pause new mail calls. I'm concerned that these videos are taking a toll on you both physically and mentally. Also it benefits other, smaller retro channels like More Fun Making It that can really use some mail call videos. Ever since the 8-bit guy stopped taking donations, you are probably THE go to place for people to send their weird retro stuff. There's nothing wrong with this, but it did start to detract you a bit from your message of 'everyone can enjoy retro computers (and to a lesser extent, being successful on UA-cam by making retro content)'. It now feels like 'everyone can enjoy retro computers -if they have a huge following so that others would pay shipping to send their stuff over instead of having to buy them for hundreds of dollars from eBay like the rest of us.'
Idk if he needs to pause them but it would be cool if he started to collab with some of the smaller channels and pass along some of the stuff that he gets to them to work on and make videos out of after he previews them here
He does this full-time now though. So this is his job. No content means he's not working.
@@xp8969 That could be an idea. A collaboration. Some sort of cross promotion.
@@michaelallen1432yea, it would be great for the community, Adrian has one of the largest and most dedicated followings out of all of the smaller retrotech channels and there's a bunch of smaller channels run by cool people making good content and it would be awesome to see them collaborating with each other on projects
I do not think Adrian needs our advise on how to run his channel.