Inside the BBC Micro - Trash to Treasure (Pt2)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ม.ค. 2020
- ● Description
We continue exploring the BBC Micro computer. In part 1 we learned all about why this machine exists, today we look inside the machine and see what hardware is inside.
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● Episode Links (Patron Editions)
Pt1 - The British Micro that Shaped a Nation: • The British Micro that...
Pt2 - Inside the BBC Micro: This Video
Pt3 - Did Britain get Computer Literate? • BBC Micro - Did The UK...
🕹 SD Card reader: www.retroclinic.com/acorn/acor...
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●Music used in this series
Atomic Numbers 1 - August Wilhelmsson
Digital Sadness - August Wilhelmsson
Final Wave 1 - August Wilhelmsson
Forever Working - August Wilhelmsson
Isotopes - August Wilhelmsson
Just Another State of Mind - Colors of Illusion
Low Sun - Farrell Wooten
Santosha - Van Sandano
Stargazed 3 - August Wilhelmsson
All Around (Instrumental Version) - Particle House
Never Leave the Stream - Chaxti
Pinea - Curved Mirror
Rhythmania 2 - August Wilhelmsson
Would You Find Me - Chaxti
You Thought I Knew (Instrumental Version) - Particle House - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
i was 9 years old when my dad ordered one of the 1st BBC computers in Scotland. I will never forget the day we first turned it on. Since that day i have been a geek for tech. THANKS DAD!!
What might not totally surprise readers here is that we used BBC Micros at The BBC to create many of the Teletext pages, we also had a limited EcoNet network that ran around a few of the technical areas. But the best implementation was within the deepest darkest part of the building under very secure control, where, when the Beeb micros were turned on (via a room isolating switch) almost instantly after getting the power-up beep the auto-run ROM programs took over and dialled other regional control centres via dial-up modems to establish a pre-internet communications network. All very 1980s Heath Robinson.
What about the overlay clock that the BBC used to display using a BBC? Tom Scott mentions this on the Centre for Computing History. He said he's looked everywhere and can't find the software that run it because he said it appears to use a custom font.
Do you know of any documentaries or websites about that setup? I would love to learn more.
@@smd-tech I doubt it, you might find old episodes of the BBC computer programmes on which the BBC Microcomputer was based, but they were generally seen as work tools and nothing special. We used them as simple controllers for various automated test systems and engineering tasks. They probably ended up in retired staff lofts.
We know. It’s obvious
Something often forgotten today is that Acorn got into a spot of legal trouble very early on in the BBC Micro's life over some of its software.
Two of the earliest Acornsoft titles for the BBC Micro were extremely good conversions of Pacman and Defender. They really were about the closest you could get to the arcade originals on a home micro in 1982, and they were enormously impressive at the time, really showing off the power of the machine.
Unfortunately, as was common in those days, Acorn hadn't officially licensed them, it had just gone ahead and written its own versions. To make matters worse, although it had renamed Pacman to Snapper, Defender was called Defender.
The ensuing legal issues saw Defender being taken off sale, rewritten to change some of the graphics, and re-released as Planetoid, while Snapper also had to have its graphics changed, with the near-arcade-accurate Pacman and ghost characters replaced by creatures with arms and legs. The start-of-game music also had to be changed, as Acorn had copied the arcade tune almost exactly.
Acornsoft also released an excellent Scramble clone called Rocket Raid, but that seemed to escape legal problems, although again it was about as close to the arcade original as was possible to get on a home micro back then.
thank you RMC, I am from East Africa but studied in a British school in Southern Africa which employed the use of BBC Acorn microcomputers, I owe a debt of gratitude to the BBC micro which helped me step into a career in embedded systems engineering
Fred Harris! Who remembers him? :) (Right at the start) I remeber about 1980 My Mum who was a primary school teacher brought home the school computer to look after it for a term break, it was a bbc micro with cub screen and remember a program called "build" which was probably the earliest version of minecfraft!
I get so giddy at the sight of a BBC Micro, I remember taking mine apart back in the 80's when I was about 10 and just admiring the inside and wondering what chips done what, without the ability to look information up on the Internet, the UK computer boom was such an awesome time, everything is at your fingertips now.
If you worked in the electronics industry in the 1980s (or 1990s) the manufacturers sales reps were falling over themselves to give you free databooks. I bet the Hitachi rep with the Acorn account got a good bonus that year :-) Where I worked the status of an engineer was marked by how many databooks he had on his bookshelf.
Of course of no relevance to someone outside the industry, although I remember the Maplin Catalogue had loads of information on the chips they sold.
@@MrDuncl Still got some of those huge databooks on my shelf - not sure what to do with them really! Firewood maybe? ;-))
@@stepheneyles2198 There might be something of interest to an archive in them. When I was trying to fault find an Amiga Genlock I had great difficulty in finding any information on a Motorola IC in it as they didn't have any information online about their discontinued products.
Lovely video! The BBC Micro was such an influencial computer! Had a huge impact on me and is ultimately why I ended up in IT.
My friend had a dad who was a programmer and he bought a Micro to teach her how to program which she had no interest in. Meanwhile, I asked for a Casio keyboard but got a small guitar which I wasn't interested in. I'd say we had the wrong dads but programming dad was the definition of a nerd. He hated fun. He did have an optical mouse in 1987 though which needed a glass mat with a grid on it. She became a midwife and I became a coder.
_"... and is ultimately why I ended up in IT."_
WOW! Can you tell me how you managed to climb inside such a tiny space, and... is it comfortable in there? How do you spend your time?
Nice machines for that time period. In my country, former Yugoslavia, now Serbia, we have similar project, in the midle '80. our domestic electronic industry and ministry of education made a Z80 based computer called "Pecom 32" ("PErsonal Education COMputer"). There are two models, 32 and 64, based on how much is memory, in kilobytes, of course. I will like to find one of those, and may be make donations to RMC, nothing to promise but in next couple of months we will be in contact, if You are interested in it. Many thanks for great job you done with your videos and project, it is pleasure to watch!
The more powerfull and versatile, and much more used than Pecom, school computer in former Yugoslavia (at least in Serbia) were Tim 011. It was based on HD64180 (Toshiba advanced version of Z-80), had 256K and 512K RAM version and used ZCPR3 OS (variant of CP/M). Most high schools in Belgrade used Tim 011 for Computer Science classes.
It had networking abilites (for sharing files and printers) via Tim 020 "server". It was equiped with 3,5" 400/800 K FDD.
It was also avaliable in kit version for home users (motherboard and any custom chips).
@@GoranJakupovic U Beogradu sigurno, ali kod mene na jugu, u Vranju, sve osnovne i srednje skole su imale kabinete za informatiku, opremljene Pekomima. Imam rodjake u Zagrebu, znam da su i kod njih imali mešano, za divno čudo, Pekome, Orlove, čak i Galaksije, kao i Timove, naravno. Mada mislim da je ipak Pecom bio pandam BBS-u. Drago mi je da ovde sretnem zemljaka, zaljubljenika u stare računare. Planiram da posaljem Nilu i ekipi Pecom, kao sto sam napisao, video sam jesenas par njih na kupujem-prodajem, ali trenutno nisam trazio, verujem da ih ima. Svako dobro!
PS ala ce da radi Google prevodilac, da englezi protumače sta sam ti napisao. 😄
@@mikipank You took the words right out of my botty.
@@Ndlanding I speak to my countryman in our language, and your expression shows the level of your intellect.
@@mikipank Au contraire, M'sieur! This thread was started in English, and your countryman contributed in English. You, yourself, are the ignorant, disrespectful one.
BBC Micro was iconic and ahead of its time.
Ahh, lovely! Thanks for another great episode well done about a great computer.
Owning a Beeb is in a way like riding a horse: You can't call yourself a horse rider until you've fallen off, and you can't call yourself a Beeb owner until you've had a PSU go Bang!
I have to admit, possibly because I'm a bit weird, assuming a PSU is producing healthy voltages I never replace the 'naughty' caps until they go Bang! My most outstanding explosion was a Beeb I bought from eBay advertised as 'non-working'. It turned out to be in perfect working order and despite the PSU having not been fired up in a while (not good) it lasted a good couple of weeks before going off, which it did like a fire-cracker: Very loud Bang, some flames, and an impressive volume of nasty-smelling magic smoke.
...out with the PSU, opened, capacitor pieces duly removed and shiny new ones installed, and the machine was running like a champ again within 10 mins. It remains to this day my 'workhorse' BBC B and like all proper Beeb's has enough add-ons and mods to make the most jaded tinkerer cry. (Never mod a Model A or a really early revision Model B, they are too rare to butcher)
For anyone reading this and wondering if getting a Beeb is therefore a bad idea don't fear. Beeb's aren't just truly excellent machines they are generally bullet-proof and very reliable, they are also usually easy to repair if they do go wrong... Those filter caps in the PSU are really the only problem, are very easy to sort, and you can't blame a 30+ year old PSU for getting a bit grumpy.
PS
The owners of Beeb's tend to be a very friendly and helpful bunch, the stardot forum is well worth a visit.
PPS
Voltmace Joystick - lovely!
I worked for MicroPower in Leeds back in the day. I designed and built the eprom programmer that burned all the Mines Of Terror roms - it did them 8 at a time. I left before they went under, but I think it was Acorn's education business demise that did for them rather than the cost of the Dr. Who game.
Good to see Elite being justly celebrated on a new Royal Mail stamp!
Great series. The BBC brings back so many memories. In high school in George Town, Tasmania, Australia; we had a network of BBCs connected up to a Winchester hard drive (in it's own little room - on an anti-vibration table from memory). I still remember typing "*I am xxxxx" to log on ;-). There were a couple of Apple IIs in the back row of the computer lab as well.
Programming BBC BASIC was always a joy. Very efficient.
1984: The Spectrum got 3D Monster Maze. The BBC got Elite.
Atari got donkey kong
1984: the Spectrum also got Lords of Midnight, which the BBC never got. Not to mention that 3D Monster Maze was actually a ZX81 game from 3 years earlier...
Elite was actually on the Spectrum.
People complain that the BBC never had many games, but as it had Elite, Exile and Chuckie Egg, any other games would clearly have been superfluous.
Spectrum Elite was better, smoother and more missions. The lenslok was a pain though, ended up using a pirated version and selling my original copy as the bloody thing just didnt work on my telly.
Such a high quality product compared to most other home micros of the time.
My dad sold DFS newspaper advertising space in their very early days so nice memory of my late dad brought up whilst watching on of my favourite channels. Thanks for that.
Looking at the designs of the PCB's, they are so well made and vastly superior to most of the mass produced stuff from today. I miss the days where engineers actually properly designed electronics and took pride in their work.
I should imagine a better mod for Volume would be to remove the Volume pot from the PCB and put three wires to an external pot to contol the volume. That way it would work identically to the internal volume control, as designed, but be accessible on the back of the machine.
"I'll put the PSU to one side for you now and you'll be seeing a lot more of that shortly" oh Neil you tease!
Before my love of the Amiga, was the love of my BBC B, what a wonderful machine to learn about computers from.
The Tube (R) is apt. you are a 'Tuber after all! Love these videos. They remind me of many nights spent in front of a portable tv translating BBC micro code to run on my MSX. There wasn't much to it and it made me feel accomplished at the age of 9! God that was 30+ years ago! I feel old now!
I remember using these back in the early 90s! The laugh is one of my secondary schools, still had these on desks right up to the late 90s! in some classrooms. But they were never used.
Not mentioned on the features of BBC Basic that was not present in the Microsoft Basic of the day was that it supported proper user defined procedures and functions. That was revolutionary in the world of Basic and it was possible to write half decent structured coding. One of my little projects was to write a program that produced a cross-reference for any Basic program of all the variables, functions and procedures. Very easy to do as the manual specified how the Basic programs were stored.
PROC and FN were much better than relying on GOTO or GOSUB (and optional REM statements to document them)
@@rednammoc Absolutely.
I definitely learn a lot about retrocomputing with videos like yours. And I love that suit (it reminds me of Techmoan's style).
I cannot wait for part 3. Great job
This video has been so useful to me today after picking up the first Beeb I've laid hands on for nearly 40 years!
One of the main issues with the "Beeb" was it's 32k memory and remembering that Mode 2 (full colour - low graphics mode) was the most popular for game writing but it consumed 20k of system memory. This meant that you had less than 12k to write your game and this was before the floppy disk drive option was available to most users, so no streaming parts of your game in from a floppy disk drive, it had to be present in it's entirety in 12k because in the early days most users were using cassettes to load and store software. So 12k required some pretty nifty programming like using screen memory while loading and many other dirty tricks. Anyway, a good machine at the time.
PS Thanks for showing a bit of 3D Grand Prix at the end of your video. This was a game I produced at the time. I'm not sure I received any royalties when they included it in that ROM LOL.
Send those X capacitors to Big Clive. He will explode them for us!
My favorite memory of the BBC Micro is being at school playing the multi-player text adventure called CAVE by XOR Software. We had about 30 players all logged on via the school network, exploring all the games locations, picking up weapons, and trying to kill each other . Great times.
Another excellent video, cheers Neil. The Beeb was a truly cracking computer, I owned a couple until the mid-90's when my mum insisted I get rid of a load of stuff. Hence a heap of "plastic electronic crap" got thrown into the local dump, you name it, Spectrums, Apple IIs, an Archimedes, a PET or CBM of some description, various TV games, etc etc... along with my VL-Tone and an electric reed organ, all of which would be worth a bloody fortune these days! Didn't realise Sophie W wrote all the BASIC, it really was the best version of BASIC ever. The Doncaster DFS thing was also news to me!
I used to fix the BBC here in NZ.. Still have one
I always enjoy cracking open an old Beeb if only to discover all the weird and wonderful ROM's that might be socketed on the board. It's such a great machine.
Like nearly everyone in the UK this was the first personal computer I ever used, not long after we got a C64 at home but the BBC Micro was the first.
I remain impressed by it, it's a genuinely good design. In terms of features alone it stands out amongst 80's micros, that array of ports! Supremely well built as well, any idea what they actually cost? It just seems like it was built with a philosophy of not skimping on materials.
Nice to see Treguard make an appearance, I loved Knightmare as a kid, one of my favourite shows.
Being booorred and having a flu I had a "hate the world" -day lined up. But oh, there is a new RMC video! And it is a T2T, one of my favorite types!
Much less hate and boredom now, thank you :-)
Still hate the world...
This is such a nostalgic video for me... it’s brilliant. When I saw Repton I literally shouted out ‘oh man, Repton!’. My dad bought me Mines of Terror at the PCW Show (i think it was) at Olympia in London. I thought it was amazing that it half came on it’s own ROM, but I did wonder at the time how well it would sell. It’s funny as I had virtually every game shown on this episode. I even saw the golden Frak! box at the back on one of the shelves! That game was awesome. And of course Elite...nuff sed. :o)
But to be honest the Beeb was worth the money just to program BBC Basic...the games were a bonus.
Great video. Your editing and use of music is top notch!
14:30 ah, the infamous Rifa caps! One of them released its magic smoke in my ~1990 Studer A810 tape deck a few years ago. It would smell burnt newspaper in the room for a few hours... I decided to recap the whole deck shortly after.
So replacing them first thing is definitely good advice!
Thanks for the nicely made video (as usual).
Loving the content. I have bought many retro machines now watching your channel and many other retro computer channels.
Fantastic! Lots of fond memories of the Beeb from my primary school days (we only had one for the whole school!). Looking forward to Part 3 :-)
Aw yeah, SAA5050, now we're talking.
Diagonal half-pels time
Awesomely presented as ever Neil. For some reason I find your videos very soothing!
These were very much still in use at my high school in the early to mid nineties well over a decade after their introduction (alongside a couple of Acorn Archimedes and RM Nimbus branded 386 PCs running Windows 3.11). There was an interesting variant my school had in the library, the base computer was a BBC Master with a massive trackball controller and it was interfaced to a Laserdisc player and ran "The Domesday Project". It was like a really really early interactive multimedia encyclopedia, it blew my teenage Sega Genesis addled mind to see a computer play actual video (well now I'm much much older and have repaired AV equipment for a living for a while I know now it was actually analogue video recorded onto laserdisc with the BBC generated overlay genlocked onto the top). Nostalgia Nerd did a vid on one of these a while back if anyone is interested th-cam.com/video/FixpAY5YADc/w-d-xo.html
Edit: Yes I should have said “Sega Megadrive” but these days when I find myself discussing old games it’s usually with someone from America, plus I had quite a few imported games back in the day..
You mean like this www.domesday86.com/?page_id=61
Does anyone know if there is currently a working version of the Domesday project online ? A few years ago there was one of the BBC website, but it got transferred to the National Archives and broke. On the BBC Domesday site I even found a picture of the inside of my local supermarket back in 1986
Yes, in my school the IT suite was all PCs (yes RM) but the Design Technology department kept their Micros because of the I/O and accessories. We made them do way more practical things than the PCs ever did.
yay, was looking forward to this :) Hope you had a nice Christmas break
I did thank you, I hope you had a lovely break too
Yeah part 1 made me sub to this channel so I've been really anticipating this vid
What a fantastic video series, it's fantastic to see these machines after all this time still working.
I have my Beeb still from my teenage years and have replaced the caps twice in the last 20 years.
I have the acorn data recorder, a cumana drive and have the cub monitor.
All still working as they should and have recently added a dot matrix period printer that again worked straight off the bat.
I do fancy the SD card option you have shown.
All the best and again great video!
Further to this I have indeed added the sd card system and as this software came with 2nd processor Elite I have obtained an original acorn 2nd processor in the cheese wedge box to play it!
Do you have any info on where to get new belts for the Acorn cassette deck??
Remember using them in the classroom at secondary school and it always felt like the Beeb was a proper computer probably because of its build quality. They keyboard on them I always thought was excellent compared to my rather plastic C64 at home. When Elite came out for the Commodore I was very disappointed with the flickering mess it was! This seemed to put my Beeb owning class mates on a higher 'sniffy' pedestal than they already we're. Ha ha...…but our C64 version had 'Tribbles' was my only defence as I remember! Simpler times. Great vid as usual Neil, many thx.
It's always fun to me watching you and others like NostalgiaNerd talking about the BBC Micro since it was pretty much GB's exclusive 8bit computer that had quite a bit of momentum on itself.
Nice video 🤓
Ah, remember getting one for Christmas 85, complete with a Cumana disk drive. Problem was, the computer had no DFS. Took my Christmas money, via mums cheque book and got a Solidisk DFS, then carting the Beeb 2 miles on foot to school one morning for a very kind maths teacher to fit the board for me, well worth the effort though. Happy days.
Another excellent video, many thanks Neil! Looking forward to the third part.
Why are these videos so mesmerizing! Fantastic work on your channel, love the content.
Finally got around to watching this. I learned a lot about coding using BBC Basic emulated on the 90s RM Nimbus machines at school. A very powerful little language!
Although I must say, Boing Ball demo on any other system is essentially sacrilege!
Its not quite the same without the preemptive multitasking going on at the same time.
Plenty of systems can do it though, to varying degrees.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, given the design teams involved, one of the best 8 bit systems for showing up an Amiga with is an Atari 8 bit.
Granted some things are hard to replicate whithout nonstandard mods. (multitasking on 64k of memory or less is close to useless. Even some amigas were regarded as having too little ram for a multitasking OS to be worth it).
Anyway, Display lists and DLI's can replicate a fair fraction of Amiga Copper based effects.
Multiple graphics modes onscreen at once is a trivial feature of the atari.
Some advanced abuses of scanline effects have created approximations of 4096 colour modes (with fewer explicit restrictions than HAM, but much lower resolution and a bigger performance hit by far)
- helps to have a system that both supports 16 shades of a single colour per line, 16 different such colour sets (well 24 in some sense), and which performs a degree of colour blending between adjacent pixels/lines as a direct side effect of how TV of the era worked...
Muktitasking is the only main sticking point.
Prinarily, as I said, due to lack of RAM.
But then again 256k+ of RAM was a Common aftermarket modification for ataris even in the 80's and 90's.
(nowadays 1088k to 4 megabytes is common and 320k trivial)
Considering more dubious modern upgrades of course...
Rapidus + VBXE turn an atari 8 bit into a system that could outperform a stock Amiga 1200 for most purposes.
But that's rather unfair given the nature of such mods.
(then again Amigas got the absurd 'vampire' upgrades and the like, so maybe it's not so crazy after all.)
Not really. Atari Inc duplicated the bouncing Amiga Boing Ball and had it running on the 800XL in like the January 1984 CES.
@@KuraIthys the Atari 8-bit scene has a lot of impressive upgrades like the Ultimate 1MB upgrade, VBXE, stereo POKEYs, the UAV and the Sophia, but they aren't keeping up with Apple and some of the Commodore 64 upgrades. I don't think there's anything like a 16MB REU for the C64 on A8 outside of upgrading to a 65816; granted, RAM upgrades are far more common amongst A8 owners going all the way back to when the computers were new compared to with the C64. And there's a lot of popular 8MB RAM upgrade boards today for bone-stock Apple II computers without moving up to the IIgs. A8 seems to be content with 1MB. Mind you, I'd like to see a commonly accepted RAM upgrade for the 5200 in order to encourage more A8 game ports to the 5200 without having to rely upon exotic bankswitching techniques to make up for its standard 16K RAM. What I want is something that can plug into a socket like the extremely limited XBoard for the 7800 that plugs into the MARIA chip socket [assuming the particular 7800 has it socketed instead of soldered to the board] and provides a solid 128K of SRAM. But I digress.
Thoroughly enjoying this series, this level of production is the kind I would expect to find on prime time TV, ! Really awesome as always and great to see some tic given to that Beeb.
Thank you for the great shows.
Another great video! Huge thanks. 👍🏻
Great video Neil. Many happy memories of these.... Wheeling them round the primary school classrooms, being dragged out P4 classes when the tape wouldn't load and the teachers didn't know what to do. Had a great primary teacher (Master McIlroy), who let me stay after school, taught me LOGO, BASIC and then 6502 assembly, and showed me how to "clone" ROMS, solder in econet ports.... Needless to say, I've made electronics and software my career.
Where do you manage to source them?
This has been awesome! Have owned a Model B a few years to which I added an MMC SD solution. But have never carried out a maintenance check. Thanks for another great video manual.
all of those upgrades and dust in there you can tell this BBC was well loved for a long time!
I got my BBC about 6 months ago. Hadn't been switched on for about 30 years. The PSU made popping sounds and smoke. Switched off. Switched on again, more popping but it powered up just fine. I ordered the capacitors but till they arrived I used it normal without issue. They have now been replaced :)
Yes that's the usual symptom !
Another awesome video! So many memories on the BBC Micro but my weapon of choice is now the BBC Master when it comes to the Acorn machines.
During my "shopping spree" buying up many machines I bought one that came with some strange hardware. After much digging, a friend on FB recognised it as his CDT assignment at the school we both attended.
Someone mentioned by replace RIFA for RIFA and not use a modern capacitor? When I recap Beeb PSUs I like to recap like for like and mainly because Mark Haysman of RetroClinic uses them himself when servicing machines. Mark is reponsible for a lot of new hardware for the BBC Micros including the DataCentre so I think he's very qualified to use them :) I strongly recommend the DataCentre, I've got the external model and find it invaluable.
I watched the film Micro Men after you mentioned it in the last video. Made me definitely want to start collecting old 80s computers. They're a bit before my time, I was born in 89, but I always liked playing my cousin's C64 and I'm getting so interested in these old machines now. I could emulate them but that doesn't seem right, getting a small CRT to plug into and hunch over on the kitchen table seems the genuine way to play the games for these things. I would absolutely love an Amiga, I've played a lot of amiga games through ports to the mega drive, and they always had their own very unique style compared to American or Japanese games
That type of capacitor is well known for failure, often in quite spectacular ways.
It turns out that Acorn never entirely understood how the BBC Micro actually worked. This is proven by an attempt to substitute a chip. They were using on component from a single source, and one of their competitors tried to give them a better deal on what should have been a drop-in replacement. It didn't work, and Acorn could never figure out why it didn't work.
Nice series, always loved the Beeb from when I did computer studies at senior school from 1981 till 1986 it gave me my grounding in computer programming and as you stated, your BASIC programs could be replaced with more and more OS system calls resulting in a program that was pure BBC assembler. Ah nostalgia is a wonderful thing.
I'm at work, so not easy to watch a video while keyboard warrioring, however, just had to logon and listen.....soothing dulcet tones. The BBC, ahh the memories...school, BASIC, early day computer qualifications. Loved using BASIC, but was so glad to get home and game on the Speccy. I also still love hearing the key clicks.... :)
That assembly language inline with BASIC is a great idea. I never knew the BBC had this.
Yeah... Always a nice feature.
Many C compilers have this.
Atari basic has it too, but in a form so crude it's a pain to use. (have to write your routine as a string of bytes then call into it using a special function. Useful, but very clumsy)
Actual inline assembly though... That's an amazing feature to have...
Great video Neil, looking forward to part 3! Didn't realise things could be added to it and the sd card mod is just genius.
Yeah I think being able to add an SD card to the BBC Micro is a great developement. In addition I've now seen videos on TH-cam of DOOM running on the BBC Micro. Now that's Genius.
21:28 - BLASPHEMY : amiga boing ball on the BBC M. ? :D lovin it !
We had a version of that program at college that played Sweet Dreams by The Eurhythmics.... I interpreted this in two ways:
1. "Pah, Commodore, you're dreaming... Acorn will be the best for ever"
2. "I've only got this little 8-bit but in my dreams I could have a mighty 16-bit multi-tasking goliath."
Thanks RMC! Awesome as always
The operating system was great. In Basic, if you wrote a *command it didn't know, it would search the other ROMs for it. I designed and coded the Watford Electronics, BBC video digitiser. It would work from within Basic.
Thx for featuring the best Micro ever! I still have min and also got the SD card with all the goodies. Back in the 80s I bought Technomatic's double disk drive station that sat over and around the Beeb and was more than strong enough to support a monitor on top. Good times with hours of Aviator gaming.
Good video & cool music as well.
I didn’t realise it was such a great computer! Thanks for all the effort in making the video.
BBC BASIC is still usable today by any kid with a raspberry pi.
All you need is to install the RISC OS 5 operating system onto your SD card, boot the Pi into Risc OS and like on Acorn's later ARM based machines you can access BBC BASIC by pressing F12 on the desktop to pop up a command line, then type BASIC to launch into basic (press enter on a blank line to exit).
You can also use the Risc OS standard text editor to code BASIC programs which are able to then be given icons etc letting them act as any other program on Risc OS.
The BBC BASIC in Risc OS 5 on the Pi is a newer version than on the original BBC Micro. It also has an assembler for the Pi's ARM cpu letting you embed assembly into your BBC programs just like the original BBC micro.
It has full access to the Pi's GPIO pins and last time I checked BBC Basic on the Pi seemed to be the second fastest method of accessing the GPIO pins next to machine code.
And you can even run a "re-implementation" of BBC basic on Linux PC's by using "brandy" a BBC BASIC V interpreter.
BBC BASIC rules!
I had a C64 as a kid... I loved BASIC. I wish I had BBC BASIC back then OMG.
Mmmmm... The good old days of socketed chips and I learnt all my early days basic on a BBC B/Acorn Electron using INPUT magazines.
Fantasric Video. I would like to learn more about the BBC BASIC because as a USA Commodore 64 user I was always wishing we had a better BASIC and would love to see the features they put into the BBC. Of course at the time these were mostly unknown over here so it is nice to learn about them now. Thanks!
I loved my C64 but this machine looks to be much better for learning about computers and just much better thought out in general.
Thanks for this great series 🎉🥂
Yet another excellent video, hat's off to you.
Great follow up cant wait for episode 3
Blimey, I can see why the Beeb was so expensive! Commodore probably had the smartest choice of hardware for the money, but you've truly gotta respect Acorn's efforts here.
Yeah...
C64 seemed to be the best compromise.
Spectrum was stripped to the bone..
The BBC was clearly built to exacting standards.
Atari 8 bits are some of the most amazing machines in modern hands, but they were expensive and really unbalanced and so different from anything else that almost nobody knew what to do with it.
(if they wanted to take on the c64 they needed to replace GTIA. Better sprite handling in particular was sorely needed. Guess it's an unfortunate artifact of being 1979 design rather than 81/82.)
Historically in context?
C64 all the way.
For 'modern' use though? (as a hobbyist 'retro' programmer) 800XL with aftermarket '16 bit' upgrades.
The BBC micro is in a league of it's own.
That's both good and bad I guess. XD
you're welcome for the PSU check, mate!
22:00 - needed the original Repton music there!!
My fav game was Chuckie Egg - I used to play in 4-player mode to get more practice!
I was just watching an old Adrian Black video where he unboxed a TRS-80 and it let out the magic smoke. Same RIFA filter capacitors!
"Does it work?" BANG! Just kidding! Happy new year RMC.
Fantastic descriptive info
Great vid Neil, this brings back memories. Used to use Beebs at school and remember a mate had one at home. I was jealous because I had the Electron and trying to do game swaps was always a disaster for me. Beachhead was as great game for the beeb
You do such beautiful work.
Wish I still had my old BBC. When I got my Atari 1040 STE my mum sold the BBC in the News Shopper for £30
I used to love the BBC Micro computers that were in our computer lab in my little school on the north of Iceland when I was a kid in the late 80's and early 90's.
This was really informative! I bought a Beeb recently that was refurbished for me, so it's great to get an inside look at how to do it. Maybe one day I'll pick up a poorly Beeb on ebay and give it a go myself!
I find UKs BBC Micro project amazing. The GOV going out of its way to teach an entire nation about hi-tech. One good thing Thacher did?
I doubt anyone in Parliament had anything to do with it at all.
@@edgeeffect So i looked it up and the newly elected conservative party wanted "quick wins", so they fully backed the BBC.
Loving this series on the computer we all used at school. It was also the computer which got me taken out of a college course!
Wait, what?
The first computer I ever used :) POD EXPLODE!
I did not think the hardware would be so interesting but I was wrong. Great video :) Nice outro/credits with the scanlines :)
Thanks that's a new tweak, I'm quite pleased with the look
I loved the Beeb. The Model A and B designations of the Beeb were replicated in the Raspberry Pi as an homage to its inspiration
I have a BBC Master 128 from Retroclinic, excellent machine with a Datacentre which adds solid state storage and USB connectivity. I've added a PiTube direct Raspberry Pi which adds emulated second processors for all chips, i.e. Z80, 80286, ARM1, 6502 etc. Have had CPM running on my beeb no problem via the Pi. Amazing the inherent ability of the machine. Just before Christmas I attended the Domesday Event at Computer History Museum and was lucky enough to meet Chris Turner, who was Chief Engineer at Acorn, one of those moments in life you'll always remember! Sophie Wilson remains my all time heroine. This is a great interview with Sophie - th-cam.com/video/aiSOYnMAxZ4/w-d-xo.html a lady who changed the world, yet most people wouldn't even know.
I remember Wordwise from PRimary school. When that chip in installed, you type in *w. and it'll take you to the word processor. What Wordwise never seemed to be able to do (at least, not at this school) was talk to the printer.
Neil, the only man I know who will service a computer in a natty shirt, a huggable woolly jumper, and a spiffing jacket with a nice handkerchief in the pocket... it's the kind of innate "Britishness" that the BBC Micro deserves.
Just need a framed picture of Ian McNaught-Davis on the wall and it'd be perfect.
I might just do that, Mac is an inspiration
You should have added your initials there next to KAZ. :-)
I was re-watching Micro Men last night and one line from Chris Curry - ‘a company led by engineers’ - whether real or dramatised, really explains the mentality of the Model B’s design versus say the more marketing and ideological driven designs from Sinclair, Apple etc. I really cannot think of a computer platform not only so carefully designed, optimised and relatively uncompromised for its intended market but also so open, so expandable and so adaptable. I mean, if someone spruiked the idea of being able to plug an ARM CPU alongside your Intel or AMD based system (or vice versa) today in 2022 to get hardware-level compatibility with an entirely different platform, they’d be considered at best delusional and more likely insane! 🤪 No wonder we were still using them in school throughout the 1990s even though they over a decade old.
My Beeb blew that cap, thankfully it didn't seem to have any adverse effect, but it sure was dramatic; a surprisingly large amount of smoke. They say you can run without it, but I did promptly get a kit and recap properly. As an adult, I can appreciate the overall build quality and expandability, whereas young me could only really find time to deride the colour palette, sound, RAM size, lack of sprites and iffy games. It did have some gems however; I never got into Elite, but always liked the Beeb version of Thrust best.
An interesting look back, those things were built like a tank, something like the old Ferguson video recorders of the time!
Those rectangular yellow capacitors do have a nasty habit of going 'bang', I've had them fail in a few appliances over the years, where they are fitted as suppression caps.
@16:30 Those RIFA caps are designed to burst into flames when they fail (actually not but that's what happens)
Digikey sells replacements for those; .1Uf part number 399-7498-ND. Made by Kemet, PME271Y610MR30
other capacitors provide a higher safety rating of 275V or 300V. Always double check the old and new parts have the same Lead spacing of 25mm.
The BBC Micro was the computer I needed as a teen in the 80's. All that parallel IO!