My Name Is Joel, And I'm An Acorn-a-holic...

This page is all about the Acorn BBC Microcomputer, an 8-bit British computer. Acorn featured in the TV drama Micro Men which documented (with artistic licence) the battle between Acorn and Sinclair in the early 80s. You probably remember it as the BBC Computer in your school, on which you could play Elite, Granny's Garden, and Chuckie Egg.

Me, I do a fair amount of 'retro' 8-bit stuff and I'm part of the Classic Gaming Events Union. I'm also a fixture at classic computer fairs, usually exhibiting my BBC Domesday Project and I've given a talk a couple of times on 'Teaching Old Micros New Tricks: Fun Stuff For Your BBC Micro'. My belief is in sharing knowledge to preserve what we have left of these machines and their software.

I also have a tendency to blog my efforts.

Talks

Slides from my talk 'Teaching Old Micros New Tricks' can be downloaded as a PDF file here. This particular flavour of the talk is from the one I gave at Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club in November 2009.

Events

I tend to take equipment to retro computing events to demonstrate, and let folks get 'hands-on' with some of the rarer bits of my collection. Usually the Domesday Project is the most popular although I also drag along an MDFS and build an Econet if there's enough space.

I'm planning to exhibit at the Wakefield Acorn Show again in 2010.

There are photos from previous events on my photo gallery's BBC Micro section here.

New Hardware & Projects For Your Beeb

These are in no particular order, but my recent talks have featured the following devices to play with:

Useful Boring Stuff:

• Sprow's Y2k fix ROM which also includes timezone support.
• Retroclinic switchable MOS (not linked on their site but Mark sometimes lists them on eBay)

Storage:

• The USB/IDE Datacentre and CF card interface are provided by Mark Haysman and can be obtained from Retroclinic's website. He also sells them on eBay occasionally.
• John Kortink may have stock of his GoMMC internal ROM storage left, you could try asking him. If there's enough demand he may also do another run. His website is here.
• Jonathan Harston is posting that he's sold out of the BBC IDE interfaces.

Memory/CPU enhancements:

• By far the most fun one is Sprow's ARM7TDMI coprocessor. Don't forget to find a cheese-wedge teletext adaptor so you can use the case for it!
• John Kortink's ReCo6502 is available although you will need to source your own Tube ULA.

Networking:

• Back with Sprow, I also demonstrated his BBC Master Ethernet interface which talks Samba to other computers. Sprow's also working on a series of calls (presumably OSWORD and OSBYTE) to access the TCP/IP stack directly.

Honourable Mentions:

(aka stuff I missed out from the talk but are also cool):

• Sprow's MiniB, although purists say it needs a video interface (the quote I heard the other night: "if you can't play Chuckie Egg on it, it's not a Beeb!").
• Not really BBC, but attach MMC cards to your Acorn Atom.

Chris Whytehead has a more comprehensive list which he maintains here.

 

 

 

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© 2013 Joel Rowbottom