BBC Micro

Back in 1983 or 1984 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

So much fun from a 30 year old computer!


Last modified: Thursday, 26-Aug-2021 21:40:54 EDT