Less than 1 week to go until this year's Econet LAN party! Bring your machine along and plug in. Last year we got 57 machines and several remote connections - how many can we do this year?

Book here.

If you have any BBC or Archimedes machines with an Econet interface, please bring them along. We’d be very interested to see any other machines too, so if you have a rare System rack or an Atom, you’ll definitely attract our attention.

Can't be there in-person? Follow this thread for more information on joining our network remotely!

We're also hosting an auction on the day of Econet/Acorn/BBC-related items. More info here.

As part of the event, we’re going to have some short talks with an Econet theme, exploring the past and present of Econet, as well as some TNMOC exhibits.

Details

Doors open 9:30am on both days. Clear up by 5pm on Sunday. The room will be locked overnight, so your equipment will be secure. We will provide chairs and tables, a nearby mains socket and an Econet point(s). Please bring your own Econet cable and mains leads. To avoid confusion, we recommend you label your kit.

Admission

Admission is £15/day or £25 for both days. The museum will be open to normal visitors too, and you are welcome to look around. Lunch is included in the ticket price.

Getting there

Sat-Nav postcode is MK3 6DS. Parking is available very close to the room. There is an electric car charging point on site, although this is a short walk from TNMOC’s building. Bletchley train station is a 5-10 minute walk away with two direct trains per hour to London and Birmingham.

We'd love to see you there! 🖥️

I recently bought this BBC Micro Model B+ 128K, I've tested it and it's working, it has the original monitor with it too. No cassette deck or other accessories are with it, I got a 6 pin DIN cable from amazon to hook up the computer to the monitor, which the prompt shows up fine, I tested a print command it works. I've tried my best to search far and wide on eBay and other sites and not a single one, only the standard model B and model A and masters are for sale. So could I have some kind of realistic valuation for this thing that I can't find anywhere for sale?

EDIT: image seems deleted trying it as a jpeg

https://preview.redd.it/ns9qwa1xntyc1.jpg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9ae4adc15e69bdab8d1150b5238d4dc604a4ddb0

Both .ssd images have a *CAT listing that shows:

SWAG L
SWAG1 L
SWAGGY L

What does the "L" mean?

Obviously no !BOOT, so *EXEC !BOOT did not work. How does one start these (using MAME as an emulator) from the prompt?

*EXEC SWAG or *EXEC SWAG1 both do not work.

Any one know if Beebem will run okl on the 350M ( has 640x480 ) screen compared with the 350 which is half that ? The github page for beebem references the 350 but not the slightly later models... thanks

Its back! Vintage computing enthusiasts are invited to The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park for this year's Econet LAN party. Bring your machine along and plug in. Last year we got 57 machines and several remote connections - how many can we do this year?

Book here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/econet-l ... 3532547827

If you have any BBC or Archimedes machines with an Econet interface, please bring them along. We’d be very interested to see any other machines too, so if you have a rare System rack or an Atom, you’ll definitely attract our attention.

To make the event more memorable, we want to do some multiplayer gaming. Would you be interested in writing a simple game for the event? We’ve got Colossal Cave, but what about some other games? So we are putting a challenge out there. Could you write or convert another game to make it multiplay over the network?

As part of the event, we’re going to have some short talks with an Econet theme, exploring the past and present of Econet.

Details

Doors open 9:30am on both days. Clear up by 5pm on Sunday. The room will be locked overnight, so your equipment will be secure. We will provide chairs and tables, a nearby mains socket and an Econet point(s). Please bring your own Econet cable and mains leads. To avoid confusion, we recommend you label your kit. We’ll be allocating Econet station numbers shortly. There will be several sub-nets, linked by bridges.

Please do not plug in any equipment that is damaged, unsafe or may have faulty mains capacitors. If you are unsure, we can work together to repair any power supplies on the day. Please do not have covers open on any equipment which runs at more than 12V. i.e. you can run your Beeb or Arc with its cover off, but not a monitor or partly dismantled power supply unit.

Admission

Admission is £15/day or £25 for both days. The museum will be open to normal visitors too, and you are welcome to look around. Lunch is included in the ticket price.

Getting there

Sat-Nav postcode is MK3 6DS. Parking is available very close to the room. There is an electric car charging point on site, although this is a short walk from TNMOC’s building. Bletchley train station is a 5-10 minute walk away with two direct trains per hour to London and Birmingham.

​

We'd love to see you there! 🖥️

I'm sorry in advance for the vagueness of this.

There was a game I played back in primary school, Nursery / Reception class. All I remember of the game was that the main character looked like an egg. But it may not have been an egg. I'm pretty sure he was white and egg shaped though. It almost resembled Dizzy I believe, but I couldn't find anything relating to that. The game had a top down view, wasn't side scrolling. It must have been some kind of educational game since it was in my school. I remember the background being a cyan colour. I think the main character had to walk around, collect an object and then walk to the goal.

My memory is so vague on this but I know the game existed. I'm not even sure if it's on BBC Micro to be honest.

If anyone knows it, you're a legend. My apologies for how weak the info is. And thanks in advance

There's a game I remember from the mid-80s at school. I think it was called Watchman, but nothing comes up on searches. The premise was basically a 2D top-down view of a series of paths that criss-crossed and the point was to travel all the paths without travelling along the same path twice. You were allowed to cross paths already travelled. I don't particularly remember a character sprite that moved, but I remember that footprints were left along the paths you'd travelled. Does anyone have any memory of this game, what it was called, and whether it exists anywhere now?

I Have a BBC Micro B which has a recapped psu and works fine. I’m planning on writing a book and for fun thought I’d try typing it on the Beeb, would be great to use the for something productive instead of just games.

What would be the best word processing software for this purpose? and will I be able to transfer it to PC after.

I’m not very technical and was gifted my Beeb by a relative so answer in simple layman’s terms would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

Hi

Can anyone offer any advice about it sending a beeb to the States? After rescuing the computer from my parents loft (see previous post), I now need to get it home to the states from the UK. I think I need to supply an fcc form as part of the customs documentation, but there’s no fcc id, obviously. But will I be ok since it’s just for personal use?

Thanks

The "Welcome" tape that came with the BBC Micro contained a program called "MESSAGE", which displayed this message:

Most of these programs were simple examples of their kind. For details of other programs from the BBC software library, and details of other parts of the Computer Literacy Project, write to

BBC COMPUTER LITERACY PROJECT

P.O. BOX 7

LONDON W3 6XJ

enclosing a large stamped addressed envelope.

Did anyone write to them? What did they send you?

Would be cool to see scans of whatever was sent out, but a description would be good too.

Switched on my childhood model b for first time in 30 years. Just gives continuous beep. Suggestions?

(Not got the monitor anymore so not sure what is on the screen, or how to most easily connect it to a modern TV).

Hey everyone,

I thought I'd throw this post out there to see if anyone can point me in generally the right direction.

The machine I'm working with is a BBC Master Compact with dual floppy drives. I have been able to use both drives to format a floppy and build a !BOOT file, so it seems both drives are functional from within BASIC.

The problem I have is with the EDWORD ROM I have fitted. I want to get that functional as that's what I did all my word processing on when I was using these machines. Using *EDWORD actually gets me to the main EDWORD menu. The problem I have is trying to get EDWORD to do anything that involves disk access.

If I try and create a file, it asks me to give the file a name. Giving it a name and pressing enter just causes EDWORD to beep at me and go back to the main menu. If I try and get an index of the files on the disk, it just gives me a blank screen with a cursor and the disk does not seem to be getting accessed.

It's just a little bit baffling because I seem to be getting no error messages at all to work with. Outside of EDWORD, the drives seem to be working. So I'm just a little confused as to what could be causing this. I was hoping someone here might have worked with EDWORD enough to have some suggestions.

ETA: One thing I have noticed is that once I leave EDWORD, I have to enter *ADFS to access the drives again. I suspect this might be relevant - I don't have DFS installed, nor do I have ECONET or any other file system ROMS, but I'm wondering if it's trying to activate a file system that's not there and that's causing thing to get upset?

Hello all!

I found a couple of Beebs at a car boot sale the other week. PSUs went pop so I've just done a recap.

Upon opening the second machine, I found that there appeared to be some kind of expansion board inside with a fairly hefty number of chips attatched. I'd really appreciate any help in identifying what this is!

Additionally, as these machines are a bit before my time I'm looking to sell them on. I've just done the recap and both power on with the beep, but I haven't plugged them in just yet to see if they actually output video. Assuming they work, would someone be able to let me know their approximate value? The other unit I have just appears to be a bog-standard model B with a chip for inter-word installed.

Pictures of the machine with the expansion board at the link below :)

https://imgur.com/a/36tTWWN

Thank you!

In qBASIC you can 'RANDOMIZE TIMER' to get RND to choose its values from the internal clock. Is there a way to do that in BBC BASIC? Or any way to generate actual random or pseudo random numbers?

I've been working on building a 6502-based computer using r/beneater's tutorials on youtube. As part of that project, you write some assembly code that gets burned to ROM. As a separate project from that channel, I built an EEPROM programmer.

Rather than using an emulator per the videos, I decided to use my beeb (and a commodore 64 in another video) to assemble the code for the ROM. I'm new to bbc micros, so this was a fun project that I thought I'd share with this group.

I created a youtube video where I use my BBC Micro B to write in assembly in BBC Basic, and send the bytes over RS423 to a Max232 on my EEPROM programmer.

​

https://preview.redd.it/wwcx4rv063pb1.png?width=1062&format=png&auto=webp&s=ceae653522ad4ddde4904560db1574934b8e1ca8

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:45 Everything you need

01:10 RGB cable

02:42 Clearing the EEPROM first

03:17 BBC Basic and Assembly walkthrough

05:55 Assembler options - where code gets assembled on ROM vs computer and two pass assembly

12:26 Sending the 6502 Reset Address

13:40 Sending ROM data

14:18 Message header

14:47 Actual sending of bytes over RS423

15:34 Actual assembly, bytecode output, and running of the code!

19:23 Proving it worked

20:40 Moment of truth - running in my 6502

Anyway, it was another fun project related to the EEPROM programmer and the 6502 build. And a great excuse to learn more on my beeb.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/bbc-micro-the-2mhz-pc-that-changed-video-gaming/1100-6419919/

"The thing that was brilliant about the Acorn Atom [the Micro's predecessor] and the BBC Micro was that they came with everything you needed," Braben tells me, "which, from a kid's point of view, is brilliant, because you don't have to then say, 'Oh, I need this compiler, or I need this sort of thing.' You could write a game in machine code; you had everything you needed.

So, I notice on videos (and in my memories of school BBCs) that when you boot up, it says BASIC and you can type BASIC programs. Is there a key combo or command to switch from BASIC to Machine Code or assembly or some other language such as Forth?