BBC Micro

Back in Christmas 1983 I got my first computer; a BBC Model B. This was a shared Christmas present with my brother. A few years later (1987?) I traded him my Amstrad stereo system for his half, so it was all mine.

In the mean time I had expanded it with a Solidisk DDFS (1770 based) and a Solidisk SWR card; I tried a couple of variants before settling on the 2Meg128 card. This had 4 additional ROM slots and 128K of RAM. I'd also had an EPROM programmer and eraser and had built and burnt a few EPROMs. I'd written my own manager ROM (based off the STL code) and added the E00 DFS to the back of the EXMON code (both were 8K ROMs so I could store the E00 DFS in the 2nd half of a 16k ROM and add a command that'd copy it into a SWRam bank).

Fun times!

When I moved to America I took the Beeb, one floppy drive and my floppies with me, but left my manuals, EPROM programmer etc etc behind. I'd never need 'em again! It took many years before I could actually use the Beeb properly, but I finally got hold of a composite-video to VGA converter that would work on PAL standards.

Recently I found a thriving community of Beeb fans. One person has created a board that allows you to have ramdisk, USB, MMC and so on. On a Beeb! Another person has created a simpler MMC adapter. I got a varient of that. And so I found myself coding for the Beeb again.

TOOLS and REVIEW

• Solidisk 2M128 Manager ROM
  I wrote/hacked/stole code to be a (IMHO) fairly decent Manager ROM for the Solidisk 2M128 board. More recently I further hacked it to work with other boards... but with reduced functionality
• MMB Utilities
  A set of Perl utilities that can manipulate MMB files (as used in the MMC variants)
• Beeb program to image disks
  Once I got a MMC card card, the next step was to get data off my floppies. MMB files basically contain a bundle of SSD files. SSDs are 200K floppy images; 80 track single sided single density. Most of my floppes are double sided double density; 320K per side. Obviously won't fit! Also Solidisk uses extended catalogues to store more than 31 files per side. Further complication! This code allows me to get images of the larger disks onto a PC so I can then work with the files and build smaller SSDs from the results.
• TubeHost code for Unix
  This is a Unix TubeHost filesystem written in perl based around JGH's HostFS concept. It's basically a serial port filesystem for the Beeb!
• UPURSFS ROM
  This is what happens when you take the TubeHost concept and combine it with a UPURS cable.
  Summary: connect the BBC User port to a PC serial port and then run a filesystem over it!
• Steve Picton SWR/Flash board
  As part of the data recovery, I was given a second Beeb (for free!). Naturally I couldn't leave well alone, so I added a modern day SWR board to it
• Growing Collection
  Slowly my collection grows!
• And I re-arrange them
  Make them a little easier to access
• Adding a second (and third) user port My attempts to build an expansion board that can add a 2nd user port to the Beeb.
• BASIC extension ROM Back in the day I wrote (or hacked up) a ROM that would extend BBC BASIC and add new commands and functions.
• Michael Brown's "30th Anniversary BBC and Electron Collection" I've built an index of all the discs Michael has uploaded, in order to make it easier to find and download them.

So much fun from a 40 year old computer!