In case you missed it I’ve been at the Byte Back UK Classic Gaming Convention which took place down in Longton, near Stoke-on-Trent. I was principally there to demonstrate the Domesday Project which I still have in my possession but it finished up as a bit of a general Acorn nerd-out! I met with quite a few enthusiasts from the BBC Micro maillist and the Stairway To Hell forums, it’s always nice to put faces to names you’ve talked with for years 😉

So what was there? Quite apart from the Domesday, I’d taken the MDFS network fileserver down and some random Beeb stuff. Ian Wolstenholme and myself constructed an Econet on our six-table Acorn island, networking together three stations and the fileserver; it was a bit of a frig and there were occasional bare wires and curses as the termination failed. Ian had also brought along a 6502 second processor and Teletext adaptor (probably the last time you’ll see that working given the digital switchover), but sadly the signal just wasn’t good enough and we had to make do with trying to decipher the headlines. Dave had an Atom there with an MMC card as storage (!), and you could buy RAMagic for the Beeb too.

Our room – “The Executive Suite” – was predominantly Acorn (Ian reckoned 75%). Adjacent to us were Superior Interactive and Retro Software showing off their Repton levels, and Retro Clinic had some fabby external Compact Flash drives for the BBC Micro. I was pretty impressed with those, and came home with one for my main Beeb – it’ll mean I don’t have quite a nightmare transferring stuff over, and also means I can back up things to the house fileserver more reliably.

Saturday was exceptionally busy, probably at capacity – I spent most of the day demonstrating the Domesday Project but did manage to nip out for a wander and a drink. It’s always nice to see reactions to the Domesday in action: they vary from the highly technical inquisition (since the LVROM usually has no screws in it I occasionally pop the top off so visitors can see the innards), right to the non-technical people who look to see if their school is on there or how areas have changed since the mid-1980s. Occasionally you’ll get a teacher who’s never seen the system, or a pupil who contributed and who’s named in the credits.

Sunday was quieter so we could tinker – we started the morning ambitiously extending the Econet to Rob’s A5000, and from there to the Retro Clinic stand. It sorta worked, although both Rob and Mark had fileservers running (although the network failed in interesting and fun ways resulting in some undocumented Econet error none of us had seen before). Actually, Mark’s fileserver deserves special mention since he had it running on a Master 128 using a CF card instead of a Winchester… yes folks, with a little bit of messing around (limiting the formatting program to 64MB) you can run an Econet fileserver off a flash card! Then at 3:30ish just as I was leaving Alex got his BBC Buggy working – with a rather weird situation where the buggy PSU could back-power the Master through the user port.

It was an interesting venue (“Bidds”) more a live music shed falling apart at the seams and with rather crap lighting but it served the purpose… I’d advise against trying the burgers or the hotdogs, mind. Bit damp too, and occasionally pools of water would appear in the back corridor as the rain fell.

Bizarre/heroic/fun stuff: Guitar Hero on a C64 (“Shred64”, GH on a SID chip, how cool?!), an old vector-graphics Star Wars machine (played that a few times I can tell you), various Game&Watch toys from Nintendo, and a Sega bare-board flight-sim setup for the US military.

Only one potential disaster: Leaving the SCART cable at home for the Domesday so haring it to Maplin with 30 minutes to go… then the monitor going pop-whine in a rather annoying fashion 5 minutes before the show was due to open (luckily there was a telly around with SCART – thanks to whoever found that for me!). Actually, I was pretty impressed with the Domesday and MDFS holding up over the course of the two days.

Photos are here – enjoy.

Anyway, if you’re naffed off at missing the Acorn geekery you’ve got another chance! The Wakefield Acorn Show takes place on 25th April at Cedar Court Hotel (just off J39 of the M1) and I’ll be running an 8-bit museum of sorts there with the Domesday and a few other things. There is a movement to try and get an Econet running, plus I’ll be running an 8-bit surgery if you’ve got a machine that’s not working properly or want some pointers.

In the meantime, it just goes to show – the Acorn 8-bit retro scene is alive and well! Game of Chuckie Egg, anyone?

Update: If you want to see more, David Glover took some video (there’s a little chunk of my bit around 1m20s) and a few photos, plus there’s pics from the Retro Software chaps here. Peter also did an extensive write-up on STH which you can read here.

Ladies and Gentlemen, an important announcement: Econet Level 3 can now be run off a CF card.

(Well, *I* thought it was impressive.)

I’m blogging this from the Byte Back Retro Festival in Stoke where I’m demonstrating the BBC Domesday Project, as well as the Econet and MDFS. There are quite a few of us in a large room almost solely dedicated to BBC Micro 8-bit stuff, quite mad really.

It’s nice that the Domesday System gathers such a crowd – I’d intended to blog this 2 hours ago but I’ve been run off my feet!

If you’re coming to the festival, come and say hello – we’re in the “Executive Room” which is next to the main arcade room and we’ll be having a few ales from 5pm onwards. There are many many BBC stalwarts there both from the maillist and the “old times”.

Photos will be in the usual place tomorrow.

I got round to putting Haven Viewdata back online this evening. The user file is a bit corrupt but I think i’ve managed to fix that.

Have fun 🙂

Earlier this year I was given some MDFS kit. Manufactured by SJ Research, this was a modular Econet fileserver system which didn’t require a host computer (the MDFS controller did all that) and you could just attach drives and printers to it – very advanced for its time and the hardware even matched. All told I had three MDFS controller units, a few drive units, a tape drive and a dual 5.25″ drive unit. Add to that the three (!) printed manuals and 5.25″ floppy software and I’ve got what can probably be said to be a complete system with spares!

So having a little spare time I got mine working. The first thing was getting the MDFS controller running: these have CMOS battery backup that charges over time, but given they’d been switched off for some years it was all corrupted. Simple fix, hold down the ‘RELEASE’ button for 5s and it’ll clear.

Next thing – talk to it. SJ Research were pretty forward-thinking so you can do rudimentary utility control through the serial port allowing disk format, copy, initialise, resetting password file, set Econet station number, all that sort of thing. It takes a 5-pin domino RS423 connector which is coincidentally the same as in a BBC Micro so I had one available, and it only took 5 minutes to reset it all.

The SCSI drives were a bit more complex. One of the slices worked straight off giving me two Fujitsu SCSI drives (40MB and 100MB), but the other disk slice with the Rodime RO752 drive was defective. I did however have a Morley external hard disk unit from an Acorn A3000 which had a SCSI drive in – further investigation yielded a Seagate ST277N-1, which with a few jumper changes and when that didn’t work a quick hunt for the jumper settings on the ‘Net, made a third drive of 60MB.

All formatted, passwords set, and… ‘*I AM SYST’ worked fine across on the workbench BBC Master!

So, it’s all racked up now. The A4000 is the older fileserver, the A5000 is there for assistance in copying 5.25″ floppies. Hooray!

Photos here.

I’ve just been having a look at the contents of those LVROM discs – aside from the Countryside Disc I mean.

I have three volumes of ‘Energy Curriculum Pack’, produced by the British Nuclear Forum and distributed by Eltec; inside each pack there are a few floppy discs, a laserdisc and an instruction manual. Reading the requirements they’ve been designed for an Acorn A3000 hooked up to a Philips VP406 player (not the same one as the Domesday System), together with a serial interface (RS232), genlock and memory upgrade inside the A3000. The system itself is referred to as LaserStar V occasionally in the documentation so I guess that’s what we have to look out for!

As well as the Energy stuff there’s also three volumes of 3 laserdiscs each marked ‘The World Of Number’, with ‘Trial Version (c) NCC 1992’. No instructions or indication of what system they run on. That’ll be the biggest mystery I think!

BBC Micro creators Hermann Hauser, Steve Furber, John Radcliffe and David Allen are reuniting at the Science Museum for a CCS reunion “gig”.

I’d love to go to this but finding few details right now – anyone know any more? Also of special interest: “The Science Museum plans an exhibition about the BBC Micro and its legacy in 2009”. Wahey!

For those of you who can’t wait, there’ll be a special 8-bit exhibition (run by me and a few other 8-bitters) at the Wakefield Acorn Show on 26th April at Cedar Court Hotel. I’ll have the Domesday system running, and probably an Econet and a Music-5000.

(Thanks to Ollie who pointed me at the news article.)

Edit: It’s this afternoon. Cocks.

Edit(2): I’ve just realised Sophie Wilson is missing from the lineup…

Some of you out there may remember Granny’s Garden, an educational game for the BBC Micro which was released by 4Mation in 1983. It was a staple of primary-school classrooms all over the country and those who are aged around 30-31 probably played it at school.

In a little experiment this morning I booted up a BBC Micro emulator and loaded Granny’s Garden into it, suggesting to Ellie (aged 6) that maybe she’d quite like to play it. Now before I continue you must remember that this game was prior to any sort of controller or speech synthesis – so there’s no mouse, and you have to read stuff on the screen.

I was actually pleasantly surprised – she cottoned on to reading the prompts instead of having instructions spoken to her; likewise the keyboard, although I had to explain a few times about that (especially when choosing ‘the magic tree’, where you have to type in a grid reference such as ‘A3’ or ‘D1’). She took logical steps involved in solving the basic puzzles such as the word ‘FIG’ on the cottage, and when the witch caught her she was anxious to have another try. Yay for MODE7 teletext graphics and some odd noises from an emulated sound chip!

All in all I’m really quite pleased, and I think I may set up a basic Beeb with the game in the studio – either that or put Beebem on the Mac Mini upstairs.

(Pics here).

Next step: ‘A Day At The Shops’, or some other similar educational game we played in Mr Mordue’s class, aged 10.

Note: I’ve just been asked about a copy of Granny’s Garden being downloadable or distributable – 4Mation got very stroppy the last time someone tried this and won’t enter it into the public domain, so you will need to source your own copy; this is presumably because there is a Windows/Mac version still on sale. I would suggest eBay or somewhere like that – I picked up a legal original in a batch of kit I rescued from a primary school some time back, so YMMV.

As a nice bonus this weekend I got given some MDFS hardware – this was a standalone setup which ‘talked’ Econet Level 2 and Level 3, so you needn’t run the FS on a Beeb. There’s some pics of SJ Research MDFS stuff over on Chris’s site, and a more thorough rundown of what it was over here: I’ll use it to replace the A4000 doing the L4 file server probably.

I’ll take some pics and get it all working when we’ve got Ellie’s birthday done with.

Given the service manual arriving and a day away from the Beeb heap in the garage, I was absolutely champing at the bit to try and get the Domesday system working. After finding the focus error, the service manual suggested cleaning first (easy), or replacement of the focusing module (pretty much impossible). I’d got a few photography-grade cleaning buds in my lens bag so that seemed like the first port of call; goodness me, the muck that came off that lens, all that grease and dust – it’s a wonder the sodding thing hasn’t got more in it. Anyway, that cleaned, I powered it up with the debug codes on.

I’ll be honest with you, I wasn’t expecting it to work! Thus I was really pleasantly surprised when with a ‘rumble’ the disc span up. It seemed quite shaky on its bearings and spent 2-3 minutes ‘focusing’ and recalibrating itself, and eventually I shut it off again thinking it was still bust. Bring it up to read the POST codes some more and – well I’ll be damned, I was rewarded with the intro video from the Community Disc on the screen.

A quick bypass of the CUB monitor that the Beeb was showing, and this was the result. Hooray!

Power-down of the LV player to get rid of the POST codes, and it came back up no problems. No shaky disc, no problems reading, I spent the next ten minutes trying each side of both discs in turn which worked fine. It even showed the video on side 4, and searching worked fine. Now this is important, because in order for the computer to allow searching, almost everything needs to work – the SCSI card, the Master AIV, the 65C12 coprocessor inside the Master, the genlock (which is apparently one of the more frequent things to go pop) and the LV player itself.

All is not completely happy though – we still have no sound. There’s a very slight ‘fzz’ in the speaker when the audio is meant to get to a higher volume, and if you switch off either audio channel you get a satisfying ‘pop’ from the audio as it cuts in and out. This is leading me to believe it’s something as simple as a popped bit of the amplifier circuitry, which should be trivial to fix from the service manual.

If you’re curious, photos are here. There will be more (and some screenshots) once I’ve fixed the sound, and I’ll try and encode the video too.

I’ve not done a lot of Beeb stuff recently, primarily because the garage has been in such a state it’s been impractical to work in there. However with Christmas gone I can clear a lot of the junk out and that’s given me better access to the Domesday system I acquired late last year. Plus I was in a bit of a stinky mood last night so decided to have a crack at getting it all going again.

Having fixed the monitor, I was confident that I might be able to fix the remaining non-worker! The Philips VP415 laserdisc player is a notoriously cranky piece of kit famed for failures and overheating; since the videodiscs themselves loaded fine and it seemed to try and spin up I was in a pretty bullish mood as I connected it all together and switched the BBC Master AIV unit on.

Uh-oh. Click click click. Something’s resetting the BBC Master computer repeatedly. Disconnect everything, retry, click click click. Traced it down to the PSU which had blown (and thankfully I have some spare BBC Master units I could strip one from) but still a bit of a heart-stopper moment – the SCSI interfaces in those are like hen’s teeth.

So back to the LVROM: nothing on the screen at all, and I still couldn’t find a service manual! I’d already asked on the BBC Micro mailing list with no success last year, but I thought I’d give it another stab and within 10 minutes I’d got two replies telling me about Mauritron who sell service manuals as PDF files! Hurrah! One debit for a tenner later and I was waiting.

This morning the manual arrived by email. It’s taken me five minutes to put the LVROM into service mode and got an onscreen result error code ‘007’ meaning ‘Not in focus after 5x (no rotation of disc)’. Now this could be one of three things: the focus module, the control module, or the decoder module. My money’s on the focus module, which may (fingers crossed) just need a clean.

As a side-point, at least the debug info appearing on-screen indicates that the video circuitry is working and the monitor works too. There’s still a thousand things that could go wrong yet but I’m quietly optimistic 🙂

OK, i’m going to promise right now I won’t blog about this on a daily basis like I did with the Econet, but I’ve been asked a few times about this so here’s the update.

Easy one first: I removed the monitor switch from the equation and now you need to turn it on/off at the plug, but it works.

Now, there is a fault with the Philips VP415 player: it powers up OK and appears to work, but when a disc is inserted it won’t spin it up. If I put it in ‘replay’ mode, it will ‘jerk’ the disc as though it’s trying to spin, then stop. At that point it beeps and the red standby light flashes (indicating an error maybe? I have no manual for this unit). I need to acquire a service manual for it really then I can test it properly. And I need to buy a new multimeter, since mine’s gone walkies.

In any case, the Master appears fine, and the discs appear OK too – that’s part of the battle, I might still be able to find a spare LV player from somewhere (they were ‘hacked’ from a fairly popular Philips range I think, so some of the bits will be cross-range I guess).

More anon.

Last night I acquired a new toy: a BBC Micro Domesday system, complete with laserdiscs (LVROMs), trackball, monitor, trackball and manuals. It’s been sat in a cupboard in a school for years, but almost works.

What needs doing:

• The laser needs re-tracking on the LVD player itself – apparently it has issues reading from the disks. This isn’t a big job I don’t think unless the servo itself is gone, but I’m sure I can source parts.
• The power switch on the monitor needs fixing – looks like the catch on it has either bust or come off. Not a big job.

The ROMs themselves appear in good state, as does the Beeb. I shall attempt to power it up over the weekend and get it going properly.

Update: More about the BBC’s Domesday Project here, and some info on CAMiLEON (the preservation of the Domesday data) here together with a photo.