Alioth's Journal: BBC

After years and years (and years) of wanting one, I finally got myself a BBC Micro (model B) plus disk drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro

The BBC Micro was probably the best 8 bit computer ever made. Made by Acorn for the BBC's Computer Literacy project, it was one of the most popular computers in Britain. Schools bought them in huge numbers. They had handy things like a low-cost LAN (in the days when LANs were fantastically expensive and complex, Econet was simple, relatively fast and pretty cheap), the best BASIC interpreter of its day - absolutely miles ahead of the Microsoft-derived BASIC of the C64, and quite a bit ahead of ZX BASIC on the Spectrum, a built-in 6502A assembler, built-in 'teletext' mode (a hardware text mode that matched broadcast Teletext as well as early online services like Prestel and Micronet).

Other interesting display features were in the graphics mode, the screen is treated as being a virtual 1280x1024 display, regardless of the actual resolution - so if you write a graphics program, it'll display more or less the right aspect ratio and size whether you're in a high colour, low resolution mode, or a low colour high resolution mode.

It also has good direct hardware access with two lots-of-IO-pins ports, the user port and the 1MHz bus. (This is why I've been after one for a while - PCs don't come with anything nearly as handy as the 1MHz bus, and it's always a rigmarole of system calls to get anything useful to happen with a custom device on a PC. All you do is poke values into the memory mapped I/O space on a Beeb, and it shows up on the applicable device. So the first project will be to make up a cable for hooking up the 1MHz bus to breadboard, which is quite quick and easy since the Beeb uses flat IDC connectors).

Oh, and a really nice keyboard. I learned to touch type on the BBC Micro's keyboard.

But enough fanboyism.

I had to go through the game discs which came with the machine - some Superior Software collections (the Play it Again Sam collections). We all go on about how much games "back then" were so much more playable, and had to rely on playability because you couldn't do particularly flash graphics. Well, just as now, there really were only a few really great games, and most of them were formulaic and rather crap! (The same thing can be said about Spectrum games too - there were some really stunning games, but just as today, many games were a bit crap to be honest). The good games are a wonder to behold though. Take Repton Infinity for instance. This game not only fit in 32K of RAM (which was partly taken up by the framebuffer), but also had a scripting language so you could make your own Repton game! All stuffed into 32K! The original Repton is a lot of fun. I also recently got the original Repton for the Spectrum, and it's a great game on both machines. (The BBC version is of course faster to load, given it's on a floppy disc).

On the subject of floppies, I was fairly surprised to find that all of the commercially-recorded discs all loaded flawlessly, and all but 3 of the user-recorded discs worked, too. (I reformatted the unreadable ones - two of them formatted fine, and one of them would only format for 40 tracks). I didn't think floppies would last as long as they had. Then again, the recording density on an 80 track 5.25 inch disc is hardly earth shattering.

All I need to do is get the original disc version of Elite for the Beeb and I'm all set.

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[Alioth]

I'm not sure in fairness Acorn could have been much quicker - they did have to design the CPU architecture after all. When it came out in about 1988 (IIRC) - our school got one of the 'all in one' (i.e. Amiga style case) Archimedes. I was blown away by how fast it was - in speed stakes it just blew the 68K based machines out of the water, and as for Intel based machines... the Arc (I think it was a 3000, perhaps the second generation all-in-one Archimedes, if I'm not mistaken) could emulate a PC at full spe

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[Alioth]

Well, except that Apple's machines are all but in name PCs these days, now that the macppc architecture is history (and even macppc was a PC just with an alternative CPU). Although these days it matters little because it's all abstracted away by the operating system (for normal apps I couldn't tell you whether I was using a PPC Mac, or an Intel Mac). Back then the platform was hugely important - sparc, ARM and alpha blew away the competition. But now x86 has caught up (and overtaken a lot of them), for desk

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Nice!

[arb]

I gotta admit though, the Beeb was never high on my list of computers to get/use. They weren't as popular down here - Commodore and Atari were the two main home computer brands, with Apple having a very strong hold on the education market. In the early-mid 80s the MicroBee (an Australian designed computer) became the standard computer in schools (at least in New South Wales) but the BBC never seemed to rate down here...

BBC Micro

[Tet]

The BBC Micro was probably the best 8 bit computer ever made.

Much as I love my Speccy and C64s, you'll get no argument from me there. Although it had many worthy attributes, the killer feature was the built in assembler. That alone put it miles ahead of the competition.

The original Repton is a lot of fun. I also recently got the original Repton for the Spectrum, and it's a great game on both machines.

At the time it was released, I was very much looking forward to it. I'd been playing Boulderdash obses

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[arb]

At the time it was released, I was very much looking forward to it. I'd been playing Boulderdash obsessively on the C64, and everyone was raving about Repton bringing similar gameplay to the Beeb. But I always found it lacking in comparison. It just clunky and awkward compared to Boulderdash.

I loved Boulderdash. I played it so often that I memorised all the rooms and would try to work out the fastest way to get the most diamonds. Hours and hours of fun! ;^)