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.
@@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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
@@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.
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 Au contraire, M'sieur! This thread was started in English, and your countryman contributed in English. You, yourself, are the ignorant, disrespectful one.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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??
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.
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 :)
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.
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).
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.
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.... :)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 🤓
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?
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.
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
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 :-)
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...
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.
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.
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!
The BBC Micro was a powerful machine for its time. Its one major deficiency was its lack of sprites - if it had had those, it would have been the equal of the 8-bit Atari and C64 in terms of superior gaming power.
@@rednammoc Indeed, lack of hardware sprite support didn't stop the Spectrum being a massive gaming machine either. But given the no-compromises design methodology behind the BBC Micro, it's slightly surprising that hardware sprites weren't included. It's the one significant deficiency.
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 🎉🥂
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.
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.
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.
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
Great as usual Neil - can you tell me the song on the outro? Also you have a lot of great music in your videos, would you be able to have the track names in the credits at the end? Thanks!
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!
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.
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!
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.
Where did the audio from the beginning ("We've embarked on a wild adventure...") come from? I would love to hear it, maybe even sample it, without the music running over it!
That is calling back to an interview clip which shows in episode one of this series about 4 minutes in, it's from the series "The Mighty Micro" and is the voice of James Martin
@@RMCRetro Thank you! Found it, it's towards the end of episode 6. Seems like a pretty cool series, I have to check it out thoroughly when I get the time!
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.
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.)
@@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.
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."
@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 ability to inline assembly into BASIC was pretty cool. I wish the C64 could have done that. I'll have to fire up the BBC Micro in MAME to see how it compared with the C64. I'm from the USA and I had very little knowledge about this computer before your videos so I'm looking forward to learning more.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Over here in Germany the BBC was pretty unknown. But seeing those games now I must admit that it definitely looks better than IBMs CGA. However I would still say that the C64 color palette looked a bit nicer. Is there an active homebrew scene for the BBC today, like for the C64? EDIT: It seems there is quite a bit of homebrew and demoscene going on. This one here is very nice: th-cam.com/video/y2knYNDNKfY/w-d-xo.html
I think some of those caps got cracked in the PSU because was when I was a school, if one of the beeb's got flaky the IT teacher would hold the computer exactly 10cm above the tabletop and then drop it! - it always seemed to fix the issue!!!!
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.
Nice work on the BBC. Those caps are well known across many machine to blow out, my MZ700 PSU was exactly the same. The BBC is one of those machines that I keep looking at but I cannot convince myself to get one. They always had a feeling of institution that puts me off, is that a weird comment? Possibly. Looking forward to the next part, maybe it'll finally swing my opinion.
Hi, just wanted to share something. Back in 1985 (i think) i remember out teacher getting all excited about BBC Networking from the classroom. A way for him to monitor all our computer screens from his "hub". Funny thing is we - - - friends and I being sods - - - figured out a way to send a command from our screens, over to the networking hub so that we could inject text onto a classmates computer. So when my classmates where typing out homework on their screens, we could insert words like Ar;se Tw;at randomly appearing in their homework. LOL. We got called into the headmasters office soon enough. Headmaster said "ok you lot, now listen. Youve been very naughty... CLEVER... but naughty!". He let us off and promoted us to being top of the class. Good on him I think it was like: make a call to the hub, nominate (classmates) computer, input text as one line. Something like HUB1,Goto PC2, print:Text... i cant remember. But it was something like that :)
great video, but a small error. the DDFS you have there will show each side as a separate drive 0,2 are the first drive 1,3 for the second one. Acorn's ADFS used both sides as one drive.
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.
R.T.Russell wrote the Z80 version of BBC Basic, which was shipped with CP/M for the Z80 second processor and was also available for purchase for a bunch of different machines. See here: cowlark.com/2019-06-14-bbcbasic-opensource Sophie Wilson's 6502 BBC Basic isn't open source, but the ARM version is, and is here: gitlab.riscosopen.org/RiscOS/Sources/Programmer/BASIC It's actually being developed as part of the RISC OS Open project.
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.
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.
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 miss teletext so much. Youngsters and those outside of the PAL territories don't know what they missed out on. Know people who met over it and got married. Sci-Fi Channel had quite the wonderful boards also I recall.
I miss teletext. It's completely useless in this day and age but yeah it was so useful in the pre Internet days. A great way to immediately get news and info and football scores on demand rather waiting for the news or match of the day. It was like we all could access a primitive Internet on our TVs in the 80s and 90s, the original smart TVs! I was surprised to learn other countries didn't have similar systems
![PASULOL รามเกียรติ์ ตอนที่ 4 นนทกพบรัก [Ramakien Ep.4: Nonthok in love]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/tMUQgmZzf_A/mqdefault.jpg)
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!!
Wow, yes... i remember this too. Christmas 1984 Commandor 16k. Thanks DADs!
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
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!
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.
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?
Such a high quality product compared to most other home micros of the time.
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.
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.
Programming BBC BASIC was always a joy. Very efficient.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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??
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.
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 !
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.
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).
"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!
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.
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.... :)
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!
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.
This video has been so useful to me today after picking up the first Beeb I've laid hands on for nearly 40 years!
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.
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.
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 🤓
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
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?
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.
Before my love of the Amiga, was the love of my BBC B, what a wonderful machine to learn about computers from.
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
all of those upgrades and dust in there you can tell this BBC was well loved for a long time!
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...
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.
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!
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.
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!
Great video. Your editing and use of music is top notch!
The BBC Micro was a powerful machine for its time. Its one major deficiency was its lack of sprites - if it had had those, it would have been the equal of the 8-bit Atari and C64 in terms of superior gaming power.
Even without hardware sprite support it still did OK for games for the time - we weren't short of games or applications
@@rednammoc Indeed, lack of hardware sprite support didn't stop the Spectrum being a massive gaming machine either. But given the no-compromises design methodology behind the BBC Micro, it's slightly surprising that hardware sprites weren't included. It's the one significant deficiency.
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 🎉🥂
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?
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.
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.
Why are these videos so mesmerizing! Fantastic work on your channel, love the content.
Good to see Elite being justly celebrated on a new Royal Mail stamp!
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.
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
Great as usual Neil - can you tell me the song on the outro? Also you have a lot of great music in your videos, would you be able to have the track names in the credits at the end? Thanks!
Excellent series: and I also really liked the music selection, I hope Neil might upload another collection sometime
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!
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 loved the Beeb. The Model A and B designations of the Beeb were replicated in the Raspberry Pi as an homage to its inspiration
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!
You should have added your initials there next to KAZ. :-)
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!
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.
Loving the content. I have bought many retro machines now watching your channel and many other retro computer channels.
Where did the audio from the beginning ("We've embarked on a wild adventure...") come from? I would love to hear it, maybe even sample it, without the music running over it!
That is calling back to an interview clip which shows in episode one of this series about 4 minutes in, it's from the series "The Mighty Micro" and is the voice of James Martin
@@RMCRetro Thank you! Found it, it's towards the end of episode 6. Seems like a pretty cool series, I have to check it out thoroughly when I get the time!
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.
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.
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 :-)
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."
Send those X capacitors to Big Clive. He will explode them for us!
Awesomely presented as ever Neil. For some reason I find your videos very soothing!
@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.
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
The ability to inline assembly into BASIC was pretty cool. I wish the C64 could have done that. I'll have to fire up the BBC Micro in MAME to see how it compared with the C64. I'm from the USA and I had very little knowledge about this computer before your videos so I'm looking forward to learning more.
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.
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.
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
Aw yeah, SAA5050, now we're talking.
Diagonal half-pels time
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.
I just wish I lived somewhere with enough space to fill with a collection like this.
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.
Over here in Germany the BBC was pretty unknown. But seeing those games now I must admit that it definitely looks better than IBMs CGA. However I would still say that the C64 color palette looked a bit nicer. Is there an active homebrew scene for the BBC today, like for the C64?
EDIT: It seems there is quite a bit of homebrew and demoscene going on. This one here is very nice: th-cam.com/video/y2knYNDNKfY/w-d-xo.html
I think some of those caps got cracked in the PSU because was when I was a school, if one of the beeb's got flaky the IT teacher would hold the computer exactly 10cm above the tabletop and then drop it! - it always seemed to fix the issue!!!!
We too were acolytes of the 2 inch drop of the BBC in school. Always seemed to work.
@@handlesarefeckinstupid Sounds like my Marshall amp! Thump=hi-tec repair. Never let me down, ever.
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.
I didn’t realise it was such a great computer! Thanks for all the effort in making the video.
Another excellent video, many thanks Neil! Looking forward to the third part.
Nice work on the BBC. Those caps are well known across many machine to blow out, my MZ700 PSU was exactly the same.
The BBC is one of those machines that I keep looking at but I cannot convince myself to get one. They always had a feeling of institution that puts me off, is that a weird comment? Possibly.
Looking forward to the next part, maybe it'll finally swing my opinion.
Hi, just wanted to share something. Back in 1985 (i think) i remember out teacher getting all excited about BBC Networking from the classroom. A way for him to monitor all our computer screens from his "hub". Funny thing is we - - - friends and I being sods - - - figured out a way to send a command from our screens, over to the networking hub so that we could inject text onto a classmates computer. So when my classmates where typing out homework on their screens, we could insert words like Ar;se Tw;at randomly appearing in their homework. LOL.
We got called into the headmasters office soon enough. Headmaster said "ok you lot, now listen. Youve been very naughty... CLEVER... but naughty!". He let us off and promoted us to being top of the class. Good on him
I think it was like: make a call to the hub, nominate (classmates) computer, input text as one line.
Something like HUB1,Goto PC2, print:Text... i cant remember. But it was something like that :)
The BBC Micro was the computer I needed as a teen in the 80's. All that parallel IO!
great video, but a small error. the DDFS you have there will show each side as a separate drive 0,2 are the first drive 1,3 for the second one. Acorn's ADFS used both sides as one drive.
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
R.T.Russell wrote the Z80 version of BBC Basic, which was shipped with CP/M for the Z80 second processor and was also available for purchase for a bunch of different machines. See here: cowlark.com/2019-06-14-bbcbasic-opensource Sophie Wilson's 6502 BBC Basic isn't open source, but the ARM version is, and is here: gitlab.riscosopen.org/RiscOS/Sources/Programmer/BASIC It's actually being developed as part of the RISC OS Open project.
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.
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.
The first computer I ever used :) POD EXPLODE!
BBC Micro was iconic and ahead of its time.
I used to fix the BBC here in NZ.. Still have one
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 miss teletext so much. Youngsters and those outside of the PAL territories don't know what they missed out on. Know people who met over it and got married. Sci-Fi Channel had quite the wonderful boards also I recall.
I miss teletext. It's completely useless in this day and age but yeah it was so useful in the pre Internet days. A great way to immediately get news and info and football scores on demand rather waiting for the news or match of the day. It was like we all could access a primitive Internet on our TVs in the 80s and 90s, the original smart TVs! I was surprised to learn other countries didn't have similar systems
In another 20 years you'll be kicking yourself for using rifa caps again.