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Vintage Computers Any vintage computer systems, calculators, video games etc., but with an emphasis on 1980s and earlier equipment.

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Old 30th Aug 2016, 6:46 am   #1
Viewmaster
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Default My poor old beeb.

I recently started a project requiring speed, many colours and 8 bit input/output.
Now, whilst my trusted old beeb does have the input/output it only has 16 colours and one needs to use assembly to get speed from it.

I have an old Dell laptop with an 8 bit printer port (unlike all the modern rubbish!) so I installed a BBC emulator on it.

Now I get speed without assembly, 8 bit input/output and, wait for it....
255 x 255 x 255 colours !

"Sorry my old beeb, but you must go back into the cupboard."
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Old 30th Aug 2016, 8:06 am   #2
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Default Re: My poor old beeb.

I know. We have kept our old BBC-B (along with its 100k DD) carefully packed in the cupboard since about 1990, when we went PC. Every couple of years we get it out just to check it still works - it does - and then it goes back in. It's taking up valuable room, but we just can't face getting rid.
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Old 30th Aug 2016, 10:00 am   #3
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Default Re: My poor old beeb.

Yes Andy, it's comforting to take them out from time to time,
switch them on and hear that, "Bee bow", sound.

I have three so they all sing in chorus.
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Old 2nd Sep 2016, 12:16 pm   #4
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Default Re: My poor old beeb.

I happened to pay a visit to the National Museum Of Scotland earlier this week and went to their 'technical' division which I missed last time round because it was then closed for re-arrangement. I don't like the way things have been arranged since the recent 'makeover' but in the collection - if you could find them, spread around as they were, were a rubber-key Spectrum, a ZX81, a (now extremely valuable) Apple 1, a Commodore PET, a Psion Organiser and, of course... a BBC B with a Cumana badged disc drive.

I don't know whether to find it uplifting or depressing that my own stock of BBC Bs outnumbers theirs by two to one. To be honest I feel a bit unworthy to own mine because I never had one when they were current (they were priced way beyond my reach) - I bought them in the mid to late nineties when the price had hit rock bottom, but they've never been used and and understood and loved to the extent that they would have been had I owned them when they were current machines.
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Old 2nd Sep 2016, 1:49 pm   #5
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Default Re: My poor old beeb.

I get my fix with this: http://www.mkw.me.uk/beebem/
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Old 2nd Sep 2016, 2:21 pm   #6
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Default Re: My poor old beeb.

The best thing about beebs and the like was (still is) the... Turn on, beep, running. None of this waiting an age for an OS (operating system) to start*. I was lucky to be involved in some beeb development in the mid 80's, so much done with so little. These things are thousands of times slower than the modern kit and still worked just as well.

*So much so I insist when buying a new laptop that it has 'woken up' by the time the lid is open.
 
Old 2nd Sep 2016, 4:00 pm   #7
MrBungle
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Default Re: My poor old beeb.

Having repaired a few they're not that great when it comes to reliability. A lot of times it was turn on, power supply explodes. Or turn on, DFS is missing, spend half an hour reseating ROMs and playing with *config. Or Turn on, put disk in, find it is corrupt.

Edit: then again I've just spent an hour reading a book while Windows updates...
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Old 2nd Sep 2016, 6:11 pm   #8
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Default Re: My poor old beeb.

Quote:
Originally Posted by MrBungle View Post
I get my fix with this: http://www.mkw.me.uk/beebem/
In that case, you might appreciate this: https://bbc.godbolt.org/

This is a BBC Micro emulation done in JavaScript, running in your browser. Talk about "layers of abstraction"

You can make behave like a Master if you wish. And you have full access to the disc images at "Stairway to Hell", which contains pretty much every game published. Hours of fun, and what a technical achievement
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Old 2nd Sep 2016, 7:38 pm   #9
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Default Re: My poor old beeb.

Ooh there goes my evening

Edit: my wife will probably not appreciate Chuckie Egg going in the background.
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Old 2nd Sep 2016, 11:19 pm   #10
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Default Re: My poor old beeb.

Thank you for the link mhennessy, I am a fan of Beebem and the JS emulator the link points to looks very interesting!. I have spent many hours many many moons ago playing Elite and programming, my greatest achievement was a program to solve the Bedlam Cube written entirely in assembler, looked at the code recently - can't understand much of it now!
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Old 3rd Sep 2016, 3:58 pm   #11
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Default Re: My poor old beeb.

I used a BBC B to programme some mixer wipes for our grass valley mixers. I did it in bbc basic. The screen raster was divided up into 16 by 16 elements and you could place the cursor over an element and select it to be the next one in a wipe sequence. Having 'made' your wipe you could run it backwards and forwards to see if you liked it. Some were better than others!

If you liked the result I then got the program to blow the sequence to an attached eprom blower, I think it was connected to the beebs bus parallel port - but not sure after all this time. I then replaced the manufacturers EPROMs with mine - a 2716 maybe?

Here's link to one of them being used on the opening titles to itv's 6 O'clock show. About a minute in.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BYmd-80ICvo

Last edited by red16v; 3rd Sep 2016 at 4:05 pm.
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Old 3rd Sep 2016, 6:34 pm   #12
dominicbeesley
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Default Re: My poor old beeb.

Hi Albert, if you're going to emulate then it may be worth looking into an Archimedes emulator or even RiscOS on a raspberry PI.

My beeb still gets a lot of use, mainly me playing with FPGA's and CPLD, recent projects are a 65816 co-processor and this week a Commodore C64 SID chip + CPLD hanging off the 1MHz bus port.
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Old 4th Sep 2016, 6:34 am   #13
Viewmaster
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Default Re: My poor old beeb.

Quote:
Hi Albert, if you're going to emulate then it may be worth looking into an Archimedes emulator or even RiscOS on a raspberry PI.
There are so many emulators out there. I emulate with 'BBC4 windows' which can input from the parallel printer port on a laptop to input from a photo cell picking up a scanning laser.

Nice to see that you still use your beeb and many others do too, emulated or not.
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Last edited by Viewmaster; 4th Sep 2016 at 6:56 am.
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Old 4th Sep 2016, 10:38 am   #14
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Default Re: My poor old beeb.

I use my BBC Bs on a regular basis along with the Acorn Electrons a BBC Master ,and a couple of Acorn A3000s which I picked up from a school closure clearance a few years ago.

Ive been lucky to have acquired lots of software for almost nothing over the years and in all honesty ive never had a problem with reliability.

Wonderful machines
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Old 12th Oct 2016, 8:28 am   #15
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Default Re: My poor old beeb.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Viewmaster View Post
"Sorry my old beeb, but you must go back into the cupboard."
Nobody puts BBC in a corner!

Sorry...
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