OK, so I didn’t really go for the RISC OS stuff at all, I went purely to meet up with the 8-bit chaps and do some serious Beeb geekery. Photos are here.

The charity stall rendered a fantastic pile of goodies, mostly to assist me in my evil projects: an ARM710 module for the RiscPC; an old Arc Beebug disc buffer; 4-slot backplane for an A310; SJ Research Econet clock box, ATPL BBC Micro mouse (the rubber on the ball’s gone all sticky and gooey tho); ROM cartridge for the Master populated with a couple of ROMs I’ve not ID’d yet; internal 65C02 copro for the Master (swiped from under the nose of the bloke who kept bagsying the cheese wedges); some manuals including a pre-release of the original BBC Micro manual; a MEMC1a; some RO3 ROMs for Kieran; a couple of replacement mouse balls; a Beeb with 1770, ADFS, and various other bits; an 80-track double-sided 5.25″ drive; and an Econet module for a BBC Master.

I’m especially chuffed I got the clock box. Those things are like hen’s teeth.

Dropped into Jonathan Harston’s stand and purchased one of his 8-bit IDE interfaces for the Beeb – he’d got one of Sprow‘s MiniB devices as well but sadly no power for it, which rendered it pretty useless 🙁

Next door were the guys from Binary Dinosaurs and the computer museum at Bletchley Park, who had a variety of interesting stuff including a full, working, original BBC Domesday system. It was acting up a bit later on in the day but seems to have been largely reliable.

There didn’t seem to be much RiscPC which I found interesting other than a podule to do USB and a laser keyboard thingy.

Socially it was nice to see old colleagues, but there were a lot of people missing and the show was half the size it was last year. This is it really – the RiscPC stuff is still too new to be nostalgic, which I think is why there was so much fascination at the old Beebs. I mean, I was only 15 when they stopped making the damn things!

As I write this I’m battling installation of a pile of stuff on the various Beebs so more later once I’ve stopped swearing. Really.