Thanks for this Colin. I've got a Pi that's emulating various arcade games. I would like to emulate home computers on it, but the sticking point is the keyboard, especially for things like the ZX Spectrum with all it's special key combinations. How do you map the keyboard the BeemEm? Just the default layout, or do you use a special layout? If a special layout, is there a way of making BeemEm default to it on startup? Playing games like Planetoids is annoying with the default setup, or maybe I'm doing it wrong.
Unfortunately the B-Em build for the Pi doesn't have a keyboard layout customisation option, so it's just the default keyboard layout in this case. Possibly you could define a custom layout within Raspberry Pi OS itself, but I've not yet looked into that. I agree the game that use the Caps Lock button as a direction are quite frustrating on a modern layout keyboard!
Works great on my Pi 3 😊 When did all this Beeb software become open source? I remember Kevin Edwards went to great lengths to prevent his games being copied and distributed.
For the most part, the copyrights are no longer enforced. There are a few exceptions (like 4Mation, who made Granny's Garden) but not many. The wonderful thing about Kevin is that despite his reputation in the copy protection scene back in the 1980s, he's actually one of the most generous when it comes to his own games - not only are the games themselves all available to play for free, but he's even shared the source code via GitHub.
Okay, saw the thumbnail and I thought "interesting". Saw the keyboard and I thought "want". Or rather, would love to have a keyboard like that with the original Archimedes keyboard layout. And a Raspberry Pi inside it like the Pi 400.
It's made by a company called Elesar. If you do a search for "Elesar keyboard" you should be able to find it (YT won't let me post direct links in comments!)
This is definitely possible, I believe there's a config file for Raspbian that lets you specify a launch-on-startup... not 100% sure if it lets you maximise the window as well (plus you'd have to pick... Micro or Master? 🤔😁)
Great walk through Colin. However, I was unable to get this to work on my Raspberry Pi 4, but it works very well on my Raspberry Pi 2B. On your website, there are some spelling mistake in the dependency list, can you fix these as it is useful for copying them into the command line. Thanks.
Thank you for pointing that out! My website uses an API to pull in the video description from UA-cam but it looks like a few hyphens got dropped along the way. I've fixed that now for all the commands I could see were affected, thanks again. Interesting that this didn't work on a Pi4 given the original tutorial was written for a Pico 4... I wonder if it's a missing dependency somewhere?
Hi. Just wanted to say thanks for making this and all your other videos. I found your channel today and subscribed. I'm looking forward to enjoying your back catalogue of videos.
Thank you Colin, a perfect use for our old Pi (plural of Pi: Pi or Pis?). Love the keyboard too, I suspect it is much hardier than the logi/ms stuff that is mostly available. Does the Elesar keyboards Break key map too?
The keyboard really is nice, and it has very satisfying, clicky mechanical keys, which appeals to me! Sadly by default the Break button doesn't behave as Break when inside the B-Em emulator, so I have to use the F12 key instead (same as BeebEm when I'm running that inside Windows).
Thanks 😁 That's a very good question! I only recently came across MMFS via my ElkSD cartridge (which supports .mmb files) and it's definitely a more convenient way of managing potentially hundreds of disc images... I don't believe it's supported for this particular emulator, though, as Ashley's article only refers to .ssd and .dsd disc images.
Excellent tutorial Colin. Watched it on my iPad, have to watch it again on a larger screen and then try to copy the instructions. I do have one question: is LSR a brand of keyboard, or a type of construction? I haven’t heard the term before.
Glad you enjoyed it! The keyboard is made by a company called Elesar, so it's the brand/manufacturer that I was referring to (if you search for "Elesar keyboard" on Google you should be able to find it! 😄)
Nice job, Colin and well explained. I've got a BBC Micro emulator running in RetroPie, which took a fair bit of messing about to achieve. It can work full-screen (no window lines or banner) but it doesn't have a proper Bedstead Mode 7 font, so it never feels right to me. Can you go fullscreen in the method you're using?
Thank you! Yes, I too have had my fair share of RetroPie monkeying around and I never managed to get it working to a level I was happy with. This method is much simpler, so I'm pleased with it. It does also run in full screen mode, yes - it's just that when I was using the SimpleScreenRecorder utility in Raspbian, it lagged terribly in full screen mode so I had to use it in windowed mode to get a non-laggy video recording 😅
One more question@@ColinHoad - does the speech stuff work on the Raspsberry Pi version for blind users, do you know? If you turn it on from the BeebEm menu (Sound > Text to Speech on - then hold INSERT+number pad 1 to turn speaking the whole - then use any MODE 7 game, such as The Archers!). Hope it does.
@@OneSwitch Hi there! I'm not sure if it would be supported, given the B-Em emulator running on the Pi is quite slimmed down and hasn't got a menu outside of what you see when pressing F11. The text-to-speech feature of BeebEm is, I believe specific to that emulator, unfortunately.
Hi Colin. Well done on an excellent tutorial. In the past, I got the B-em emulator running very well on both the Raspberry Pi 4 and the Pi 400, but I cannot get it to work on the new Raspberry Pi 5 . . . the compiler (make) throws up lots of spurious warnings and returns with Error 1 and Error 2. I'm not sure if there are incompatibilities with the RPi 5 hardware (architecture) and/or with the new Bookworm OS. Do you (or anyone on the channel) have any ideas where the issue might be with RPi5 and have any suggestions on how to resolve the problem?
Update: I have also got a different BBC Micro emulator (BeebEm) running on the Pi 4, but I cannot get it to compile on the Pi 5 either. Not sure where the issue is in getting these emulators to run on the RPi5.
Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm sad to hear that RPi5 seems to no longer work with B-em... I don't know Graham Sanderson personally, but it sounds like an update may be needed to the source code in order to support RPi5.
@@ColinHoad Hi Colin. I messaged Graham Sanderson on Github and explained the issue I had compiling B-em on the Raspberry Pi 5. He responded and pushed a "few tweaks" to the software on Github, which I downloaded and re-installed on the RPi 5. The build with these tweaks completed for me without any errors and the B-em emulator is now working on my RPi 5 !!
My mind due to age, is a little bit hazy. But.. If anyone knows, it will be people watching this video 😁. I recall a game being released on a multi platform "Flexi Disc" on a gaming magazine, where you would record your given track and "Hopefully" listen to your Beeb swallow up the bits in real audio terms. I was so excited that a Beeb version had been included! pretty sure the game was pants, but... Am I dreaming or was this a real thing and, WTF was the game. 🙃
I don't want to rain on your parade, far from it. I have done beeb emulators on the Pi and even on the Pi Pico with the VGA board and it works ok. I found the online guides prior to this but it missed some stuff out and was a bit of a hassle. However..... it's very easy to get a potato pc to get B2 emulator working on Ubuntu with Snap and it works very well indeed with one click and it will save much command line work.
I'm sure it is, I've had fun getting various emulators to run on all kinds of hardware and OS combinations 😀 This was my first attempt on a Pi, however - the enjoyment comes from getting it to run, for me.
What I really like about this process is its user friendliness and idiot proofness.
I still managed to fluff it a few times, but that was due to typos 😅
I have bee looking for years for a stable BBC Micro emulator on the Raspberry Pi. I now know what to spend my upcomming weekend on - thanks Colin 😊
That's great to hear! I hope you have fun with it 😀
Might be worth creating a risc os image, and use a bbc emulator from there...
Exactly what i have been looking for.
That's great to hear, I hope it helped!
Thanks for this Colin. I've got a Pi that's emulating various arcade games. I would like to emulate home computers on it, but the sticking point is the keyboard, especially for things like the ZX Spectrum with all it's special key combinations. How do you map the keyboard the BeemEm? Just the default layout, or do you use a special layout? If a special layout, is there a way of making BeemEm default to it on startup? Playing games like Planetoids is annoying with the default setup, or maybe I'm doing it wrong.
Unfortunately the B-Em build for the Pi doesn't have a keyboard layout customisation option, so it's just the default keyboard layout in this case. Possibly you could define a custom layout within Raspberry Pi OS itself, but I've not yet looked into that. I agree the game that use the Caps Lock button as a direction are quite frustrating on a modern layout keyboard!
Works great on my Pi 3 😊
When did all this Beeb software become open source? I remember Kevin Edwards went to great lengths to prevent his games being copied and distributed.
For the most part, the copyrights are no longer enforced. There are a few exceptions (like 4Mation, who made Granny's Garden) but not many. The wonderful thing about Kevin is that despite his reputation in the copy protection scene back in the 1980s, he's actually one of the most generous when it comes to his own games - not only are the games themselves all available to play for free, but he's even shared the source code via GitHub.
Okay, saw the thumbnail and I thought "interesting". Saw the keyboard and I thought "want". Or rather, would love to have a keyboard like that with the original Archimedes keyboard layout. And a Raspberry Pi inside it like the Pi 400.
The keyboard really is very lovely! 😁
@@ColinHoad Where (or how) to get such an amazing keyboard with the red function keys? - would love one ❤Brand?
It's made by a company called Elesar. If you do a search for "Elesar keyboard" you should be able to find it (YT won't let me post direct links in comments!)
Fabulous job :) ... all we need now is a linux guru to show us how to make it auto boot straight to a Beeb!
This is definitely possible, I believe there's a config file for Raspbian that lets you specify a launch-on-startup... not 100% sure if it lets you maximise the window as well (plus you'd have to pick... Micro or Master? 🤔😁)
Great walk through Colin. However, I was unable to get this to work on my Raspberry Pi 4, but it works very well on my Raspberry Pi 2B. On your website, there are some spelling mistake in the dependency list, can you fix these as it is useful for copying them into the command line. Thanks.
Thank you for pointing that out! My website uses an API to pull in the video description from UA-cam but it looks like a few hyphens got dropped along the way. I've fixed that now for all the commands I could see were affected, thanks again. Interesting that this didn't work on a Pi4 given the original tutorial was written for a Pico 4... I wonder if it's a missing dependency somewhere?
Hi. Just wanted to say thanks for making this and all your other videos. I found your channel today and subscribed. I'm looking forward to enjoying your back catalogue of videos.
You're very welcome, thank you for subscribing! I hope you enjoy the other videos, too 😀
Thank you Colin, a perfect use for our old Pi (plural of Pi: Pi or Pis?). Love the keyboard too, I suspect it is much hardier than the logi/ms stuff that is mostly available. Does the Elesar keyboards Break key map too?
The keyboard really is nice, and it has very satisfying, clicky mechanical keys, which appeals to me! Sadly by default the Break button doesn't behave as Break when inside the B-Em emulator, so I have to use the F12 key instead (same as BeebEm when I'm running that inside Windows).
Thanks, great video.
I just curious if they have MMFS also instead of all those disks!!
Thanks 😁 That's a very good question! I only recently came across MMFS via my ElkSD cartridge (which supports .mmb files) and it's definitely a more convenient way of managing potentially hundreds of disc images... I don't believe it's supported for this particular emulator, though, as Ashley's article only refers to .ssd and .dsd disc images.
Excellent tutorial Colin. Watched it on my iPad, have to watch it again on a larger screen and then try to copy the instructions. I do have one question: is LSR a brand of keyboard, or a type of construction? I haven’t heard the term before.
Glad you enjoyed it! The keyboard is made by a company called Elesar, so it's the brand/manufacturer that I was referring to (if you search for "Elesar keyboard" on Google you should be able to find it! 😄)
@@ColinHoad THANKS ❤
Nice job, Colin and well explained. I've got a BBC Micro emulator running in RetroPie, which took a fair bit of messing about to achieve. It can work full-screen (no window lines or banner) but it doesn't have a proper Bedstead Mode 7 font, so it never feels right to me. Can you go fullscreen in the method you're using?
Thank you! Yes, I too have had my fair share of RetroPie monkeying around and I never managed to get it working to a level I was happy with. This method is much simpler, so I'm pleased with it. It does also run in full screen mode, yes - it's just that when I was using the SimpleScreenRecorder utility in Raspbian, it lagged terribly in full screen mode so I had to use it in windowed mode to get a non-laggy video recording 😅
One more question@@ColinHoad - does the speech stuff work on the Raspsberry Pi version for blind users, do you know? If you turn it on from the BeebEm menu (Sound > Text to Speech on - then hold INSERT+number pad 1 to turn speaking the whole - then use any MODE 7 game, such as The Archers!). Hope it does.
@@OneSwitch Hi there! I'm not sure if it would be supported, given the B-Em emulator running on the Pi is quite slimmed down and hasn't got a menu outside of what you see when pressing F11. The text-to-speech feature of BeebEm is, I believe specific to that emulator, unfortunately.
Thanks Colin. Helpful to know. That's saved me a heap of time.@@ColinHoad
You know you've married the right woman when she gives you a Pi-based kit for your birthday. Job done. She's worth keeping.
I certainly think so! 😁
Hi Colin. Well done on an excellent tutorial.
In the past, I got the B-em emulator running very well on both the Raspberry Pi 4 and the Pi 400, but I cannot get it to work on the new Raspberry Pi 5 . . . the compiler (make) throws up lots of spurious warnings and returns with Error 1 and Error 2. I'm not sure if there are incompatibilities with the RPi 5 hardware (architecture) and/or with the new Bookworm OS.
Do you (or anyone on the channel) have any ideas where the issue might be with RPi5 and have any suggestions on how to resolve the problem?
Update: I have also got a different BBC Micro emulator (BeebEm) running on the Pi 4, but I cannot get it to compile on the Pi 5 either. Not sure where the issue is in getting these emulators to run on the RPi5.
Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm sad to hear that RPi5 seems to no longer work with B-em... I don't know Graham Sanderson personally, but it sounds like an update may be needed to the source code in order to support RPi5.
@@ColinHoad Hi Colin. I messaged Graham Sanderson on Github and explained the issue I had compiling B-em on the Raspberry Pi 5. He responded and pushed a "few tweaks" to the software on Github, which I downloaded and re-installed on the RPi 5. The build with these tweaks completed for me without any errors and the B-em emulator is now working on my RPi 5 !!
@dundrum_k That's wonderful! And this is why I love the open source community so much 😀
All we really want is an image to download that just boots straight into a bbc b or bbc master...
Yeah, I'm with you there - I'd love that!
My mind due to age, is a little bit hazy.
But.. If anyone knows, it will be people watching this video 😁.
I recall a game being released on a multi platform "Flexi Disc" on a gaming magazine, where you would record your given track and "Hopefully" listen to your Beeb swallow up the bits in real audio terms.
I was so excited that a Beeb version had been included!
pretty sure the game was pants, but...
Am I dreaming or was this a real thing and, WTF was the game. 🙃
Ooh, you've got me there - not one I remember, I'm afraid! Hopefully someone else might do, though 🤞
I don't want to rain on your parade, far from it. I have done beeb emulators on the Pi and even on the Pi Pico with the VGA board and it works ok.
I found the online guides prior to this but it missed some stuff out and was a bit of a hassle.
However..... it's very easy to get a potato pc to get B2 emulator working on Ubuntu with Snap and it works very well indeed with one click and it will save much command line work.
I'm sure it is, I've had fun getting various emulators to run on all kinds of hardware and OS combinations 😀 This was my first attempt on a Pi, however - the enjoyment comes from getting it to run, for me.