Excellent video! I've got quite a few BBCs, but I started off with the Electron which I ended up despising quite a bit at the time. I've had an Electron sit unused on a shelf for a long, long time, until recently. I bought an Advanced Plus 5 cart that gives Tube, 1MHz Bus and 2x User Ports. I've hooked up a 6502 Second Processor wedge, so I can play the adapted Second Processor version of Elite on the Electron!
Very interesting and thorough explanation of the differences between the 3 models, very much appreciated, thank you for all your efforts. Merry Christmas and New Year
I learnt to program on a BBC Model B using the Pascal ROMs (and a copy of Findlay and Watts book on Pascal). Thanks to that machine (and book), I've been a professional software developer for past 35 years.
Nice video (apart from the blatant misspelling of RISC in ARM) but I was hoping to see the 3 machines connected together via Econet. I can only hope you have plans to that on your to do list, or if not then please consider this a respectful suggestion.
With limited memory in mind, you might think that with bankswitching along with modern alternatives, that should be a way to get around the 32akB limit, right?. About the cheapest bbc a corn computer, they should,ve be a shame to cheap many things out including faster ram🙁
Well "sideways ram" was Acorn speak for bank switching. The cpu addressing limit was 64k (16 bits). Sideways ram, either built into the Master or added to a standard BBC or as an Electron cartridge, would give you more than 32k by using part of the space originally allocated to the 32k rom to switch in/out banks of ram (or other roms) to give you a total of over 64k of available memory (even though the cpu can only access 64k at any one time).
On machines with Disc or Econet, Paging was also a thing, with the likes of Elite loading in text, and new galaxy data, through several several Word processors, that could edit more than a 20k document, only playing with data in a limited number of pages, while new data was loaded into others, one KB at a time.
Looking back at the market.......the acorn 8bit platform was 70s technology ,graphically acorn were not the best....they were good for 81......but commodore and atari had custom chips that was more advanced than acorn........acorn won a guaranteed market because it was a real looking computer with quality its main priority......the majorty of chips in a bbc were manufactured by mos.......when commodore owned it............the master has a mos 65sc12 cpu
I think that's fair comment. In hardware terms the individual components (particularly referring to the original BBC) were not right at the cutting edge but the overall package was very solid.
On the other hand, the C64 was shipped with a BASIC version from the 70's (Commodore used the same licence as they had for their PET machines). So it wasn't exactly easy to program compared to newer machines. So despite all the nice custom chips, without knowledge of assembly code you couldn't do much with it. The Atari had playyer missle graphics from the 70's which worked more complicated than 'sprites' from more modern computers.
@xXTheoLinuxXx the programming was far easier on acorns than commodore 1 thing the commodore didn't reference in their user manuals was definable graphics where it was a whole chapter in acorns manual
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Apologies for spelling RISC (Reduced instruction set computer) as Risk - just stupid brain failure! 😖
Excellent video! I've got quite a few BBCs, but I started off with the Electron which I ended up despising quite a bit at the time. I've had an Electron sit unused on a shelf for a long, long time, until recently. I bought an Advanced Plus 5 cart that gives Tube, 1MHz Bus and 2x User Ports. I've hooked up a 6502 Second Processor wedge, so I can play the adapted Second Processor version of Elite on the Electron!
That's dedication to the Electron cause. I'd like to try that co-pro idea. In theory I should be able to attach a pi co pro too. 🤔
Very interesting and thorough explanation of the differences between the 3 models, very much appreciated, thank you for all your efforts. Merry Christmas and New Year
You're very welcome. Merry Christmas to you too! 👍
Great video and great soundtrack!
Thanks! Music is Last Move by White Bones (available on www.epidemicsound.com)
I learnt to program on a BBC Model B using the Pascal ROMs (and a copy of Findlay and Watts book on Pascal). Thanks to that machine (and book), I've been a professional software developer for past 35 years.
You know I used Modula-2 (Pascal like) for CC101 at university and did most of my prep for it on my BBC with Pascal ROMS too.
Merry Christmas me!
That’s Acorn RISC Machine, not Acorn Risk Machine! (Not clear whether or not this was a joke… but for the uninitiated…)
No, me being stupid. Hands up, you got me. 😳
Nice video (apart from the blatant misspelling of RISC in ARM) but I was hoping to see the 3 machines connected together via Econet. I can only hope you have plans to that on your to do list, or if not then please consider this a respectful suggestion.
OMG! I can't believe I did that! Sorry, don't know what I was thinking. Minor brain failure on my part. 😖
With limited memory in mind, you might think that with bankswitching along with modern alternatives, that should be a way to get around the 32akB limit, right?.
About the cheapest bbc a corn computer, they should,ve be a shame to cheap many things out including faster ram🙁
Well "sideways ram" was Acorn speak for bank switching. The cpu addressing limit was 64k (16 bits). Sideways ram, either built into the Master or added to a standard BBC or as an Electron cartridge, would give you more than 32k by using part of the space originally allocated to the 32k rom to switch in/out banks of ram (or other roms) to give you a total of over 64k of available memory (even though the cpu can only access 64k at any one time).
On machines with Disc or Econet, Paging was also a thing, with the likes of Elite loading in text, and new galaxy data, through several several Word processors, that could edit more than a 20k document, only playing with data in a limited number of pages, while new data was loaded into others, one KB at a time.
Looking back at the market.......the acorn 8bit platform was 70s technology ,graphically acorn were not the best....they were good for 81......but commodore and atari had custom chips that was more advanced than acorn........acorn won a guaranteed market because it was a real looking computer with quality its main priority......the majorty of chips in a bbc were manufactured by mos.......when commodore owned it............the master has a mos 65sc12 cpu
I think that's fair comment. In hardware terms the individual components (particularly referring to the original BBC) were not right at the cutting edge but the overall package was very solid.
On the other hand, the C64 was shipped with a BASIC version from the 70's (Commodore used the same licence as they had for their PET machines). So it wasn't exactly easy to program compared to newer machines. So despite all the nice custom chips, without knowledge of assembly code you couldn't do much with it. The Atari had playyer missle graphics from the 70's which worked more complicated than 'sprites' from more modern computers.
@xXTheoLinuxXx the programming was far easier on acorns than commodore
1 thing the commodore didn't reference in their user manuals was definable graphics
where it was a whole chapter in acorns manual