I was around during the BBC Micro era but I don't think I could afford one. My first stab at Elite was on the ZX Spectrum. Happy days with my rubber keyboard.
BBC
- Thread starter Valan
- Start date
My first computer.
The BBC B was one of the best excuses when pestering your parents for a home computer. What with Acorn having a monopoly on the british educational system.
I remember working on the doomsday project and the giant 1mb winchester hard drive which had a stack of 12? platters you stacked in a big box. That thing was our computer studies teachers pride and joy (till the archemedes with its RISC processor). The Winchester stored all the data for the whole school including student records etc.
Then I got my Amiga 500 and the BBC was soon forgotten.
I remember working on the doomsday project and the giant 1mb winchester hard drive which had a stack of 12? platters you stacked in a big box. That thing was our computer studies teachers pride and joy (till the archemedes with its RISC processor). The Winchester stored all the data for the whole school including student records etc.
Then I got my Amiga 500 and the BBC was soon forgotten.
I hope I'm allowed to mention this here.
If anyone is interested, I am a collector of 1980s vintage computers - I have 247 computers for example. If you are interested my website is http://www.micromuseum.co.uk.
If anyone is interested, I am a collector of 1980s vintage computers - I have 247 computers for example. If you are interested my website is http://www.micromuseum.co.uk.
Mine too. The BBC was for rich people.
I remember having to drill a hole in the top of my cassette player so that I could get a screwdriver in to adjust the head to improve the reliability of the loading.
Anyone else notice the name C.Roberts in the scrolling credits? Yes it is Chris Roberts.
ETA: I started out Elite on the Electron. My family managed to get it before Acorn had supply problems with the large amount of people wanting one.
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It`ll still work. The Beebs were well-built. The only weak point are the power supply caps, which are easily replaced. I`ve got a pretty big collection of BBC machines (and others). Forget tapes and disks - you can run them off SD hard drives, these days.
If memory serves, I believe the BBC Elite had some if the most advanced copy protection of it's time. I've still got several BBCs and a few of the original Elite.
I used to recreate 'bad sectors' for some software backups with multiple pass formating and forced aborts (a cheap and dirty method, can't remember what for, something checked rather than it just being used to stop a simple *backup).
1st pass, complete format.
2nd pass, abort format during track 12 sector 8
3rd pass, abort format during tract 7 sector 2
Then backup data into remaining space.
Other 'bad sectors' were created with non-standard formatting markers between the usable data to fool basic backup software. It would read fine but then be written with 'corrections'. The Tatung Einstein was particularly flexible for non-standard disc access and was used to develop copy protection for several other systems.
The protection on the Tatung Einstein Elite itself was quite interesting and some aspects were rather brutal. It was one of a handful of games where simply trying to list the contents of the disc caused a bit to flip (or a sector to be marked as bad?) rendering the game unplayable, it would boot, start the intro, then crash. I may need to revisit it as I think its the only version of the original Elite that fails to run in any emulator. Of course complete and accurate emulation of the floppy drive would overcome that too, rather than the basic data feeding that most emulators do. I think Ian Bell removed the disc image from his site for that very reason, but I digress.
Happy days.
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I love way that the beeb's caps failing after 30 years can be described as a weak point. It really does show how well made the rest of it is.
