Here’s something I’ve only just learned about the BBC Micro: you can burn ROM chips using modern EEPROMs. Who knew?* One of the strengths of the BBC Micro was the way it handled ‘language’ ROMs. The quotes are there because while many of these ROMs were, indeed, programming languages, others were applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, utilities and so… Read more »
If there’s one sound that makes me nostalgic, it’s the brrrrr-BIP! noise of a BBC Micro being switched on. And that sound – as well as pretty much all the Beeb’s audio capabilities – can be traced to one chip – the Texas Instruments SN76489. This chip was used in a whole host of devices, including Sega consoles and arcade… Read more »
Just when you thought it was over… When we last saw this project it was complete except for stuffing the joystick into some kind of box. As that kind of mechanical stuff doesn’t interest me greatly (and I’m crap at it), I wasn’t going to bother with a post about this final step. But hey, I’m nothing if not a… Read more »
Having got impatient waiting for my PCBs to arrive from China, I went ahead and cobbled together some interim solutions for this project. And what happens? The PCBs arrive the next day. These are the ‘fixed’ PCBs with the proper footprint for the DB15 connector. And what can I tell you? They work. There is one slight issue that I… Read more »
While waiting for revised PCBs to arrive from China, I figured the time would be well spent learning a little more about the BBC Micro’s analogue port. And I have taken delivery of a couple of DB15 breakout boards, which meant I could try wiring up the joystick, albeit in a crude and temporary way. One joystick needs to send… Read more »
Ah well, another valuable lesson learned. The PCBs for my homemade joystick, designed to work with the BBC Micro and Master, should have been very simple. They are very simple. And yet I still managed to screw up. The PCBs for both the main adapter, which plugs directly into the computer, and the connector for the joystick arrived the same… Read more »
In the first part I described the interface between two RJ45 Ethernet sockets and the BBC Micro’s analogue port. The idea behind using RJ45 connectors is that you can use any old Ethernet cable to connect the joysticks. But as these are homemade joysticks, they’ll need RJ45 sockets of their own into which one can plug the other end of… Read more »
My recent PC build was undertaken partly to allow me to play Elite: Dangerous. There was no small amount of nostalgia involved in that decision: the original Elite was one of the few games I played back in the 8-bit days. But while I can now play the two incarnations of the game – separated by 30-odd years – side-by-side, there… Read more »
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be – it’s a lot better. Once upon a time, examining the past relied heavily on memory – an unreliable witness at best. Maybe you could dredge up a few old magazines and books, some dusty photos and a few other artefacts. But you were mostly dependent on whatever you’d personally kept from the… Read more »
There are three things that are certain in life – death, taxes and blown capacitors in old electronic equipment. But at least you can do something about the last one. Powering up a 35 year-old computer that has sat in a loft for the past two decades is foolish. But we did it anyway. The BBC Master ran fine for… Read more »
It’s always the same. “I’ll just hack out this quick program,” you think. And you get it to the point where it works and does the job you intended it to do. But then: “Maybe it would be nice if it also did this…” And even when you’ve added all the functionality the program will bear, and your wife is… Read more »
In the last post, I mentioned how I’m using a RetroClinic DataCentre to make it easy to transfer files between the BeebEm emulator on my PC and my real BBC Master 128. A USB memory stick plugged into the DataCentre becomes my main disk drive (*DRIVE 5) for program files. It also holds floppy disk images (single-sided .SSD and double-sided… Read more »
No, this isn’t going to be a tutorial on BBC Basic. Nor am I about to offer programming tips and tricks. This is about being comfortable while hacking. In the last post I wrote about recreating the first serious program I ever wrote on the BBC Micro. And I mentioned that I’d written the code using the BeebEm emulator running on… Read more »
So what was your first program? You know, the first one that meant anything. My guess is that when you unwrapped your first home computer (mine was a Sinclair Spectrum 48K) the lines of code you typed were little more than snippets – changing some colours on the display, perhaps, or making rude words scroll endlessly down the screen. You… Read more »
My BBC Master micro is alive again, thanks to a generous donation. So what was wrong with it before? Buggered if I know. The Beeb suddenly developed a fault a couple of years ago. On powering on, it would show the OS greeting and sometimes the disk filing system greeting but would then hang. I tried a few things but,… Read more »