BBC Micro | Hacker News Reader

BBC Micro

en.wikipedia.org

12 pointstosh11 comments

The BBC micro was a ridiculously good hobbyist / tinkering machine ever created. It had a bunch of easy to use interfaces both digital and analog. It had great upgrade potential with interfaces for sideways roms and even a second processor. It also had a extremely fast Basic interpreter. The only thing that really limited it was the 64k memory limit due to the 16 bit addressing of the 6502 processor.

I heard somewhere that all of those wonderful unshielded ports posed a barrier to entry in the US market. Fine in the UK. Not fine by the FCC.

Acorn MOS allowed an extra 16 banks of sidways RAM, so you could get up to 256KB extra RAM, but you would need to buy an extra board.

The B+ models (64/128KB) also had an extra 32KB of Shadow RAM, 20KB of which shadowed the address space used for video and the other 12KB was for the MOS.

So a theoretically maxed out Beeb would have 32+32+256=320KB of RAM.

The cool thing about Sideways RAM is that you could use it for data, code, or to load ROM images which would work as normal ROMs.

The Micro Bit is a worthy successor in the time of the smartphone and iPad

It abstracts aways the annoying part and lets you focus on what you want to build.

Any excuse to revisit BBC4’s brilliant comedy drama doc “Micro men”..,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sIcAyFVK0gE

Only have hands-on experience with a slimmed down cousin, the Acorn Electron.

Its Basic has a built-in assembler, which lets you mix Basic & assembly as desired.

Iirc you'd just inline the assembly, reference Basic variables for input & output values, and RUN the combined program like any other. No separate assembler or handcoding + POKEs required.

Very nifty feature that I hadn't seen before in other home computers of the day.

Somehow my school in a developing country had a fully equipped BBC Micro lab with network (Econet) and file servers. Due the BBC Basic I picked up assembly language for the first time there. Also the sound chip was very advanced with programmable envelopes. And all the screen modes were very useful for different applications. Amazing computer for its time.

I was lucky to enter a school in The Netherlands which had a classroom full of them, including the network and the server with co-processor.

I recall a hot ( possibly humid ) day when it wouldn't work.

Great times because the classroom was open during lunch breaks.

As a big fan of the BBC Micro:

When I heard of the BBC micro:bit, I was hoping for a raspberry pi like device with the software of the original BBC Micro.

Anyone know if that's available?

You can run RISC OS on it and then drop down to BBC BASIC within that. I think the MOS is there too.

Yeah, you can arrange RISC OS on the Pi to boot up into BBC BASIC V. Much of MOS is in there too, but there are things that changed between the BBC and the Archimedes (and between the Arc and the Pi) so not all code is compatible.

Could probably arrange to boot into !65Host or !BeebEm if you want an even closer similarity, though.

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