[Peter Mount] had a simple problem. He’d treated himself to a retro purchase in the form of a BBC Master 128—a faster sequel to the BBC Micro Model B. The only problem was he needed a way to get software on to it. Cue a creative hack using a Raspberry Pi Zero W.
When [Peter] received the machine, it already had a GoTek floppy emulator, which pulled disk images off a USB drive. However, he wanted an easier and quicker way to get disk images to and from the machine for development purposes. Swapping the USB drive to and from another machine seemed too tedious.
Instead, he decided to swap in a Pi Zero W for this purpose, setting it up to emulate a flash drive by following instructions from MagPi Magazine. This would allow him to use the SCP tool to copy disk images over to the Pi Zero W via its WiFi connection. Basically, the Pi Zero W was acting as a wirelessly-updated storage device hooked up to the GoTek floppy emulator.
It’s a nifty way of doing things. [Peter] could have set about creating his own floppy emulator from scratch with wireless capability included. However, there was no need. He just needed a wirelessly-accessible USB drive, and the Pi Zero W was more than happy to act in that role.
The BBC Micro is a beloved machine of many in the British Isles, and it had rather an extended family. If you’ve pulled off your own nifty hack on this classic machine, be sure to hit us up on the tipsline!
“The only problem was he needed a way to get software on to it.”
When I was a kid, if we wanted software on our computer, we had to type it in ourselves. From books and magazines, or write it ourselves, then fix all the bugs. Back then it was uphill to school in the morning, and uphill to home at night. Kids these days….
I like this, purely because of the Acorn -> ARM history. It’s like a great great great grandchild coming to the rescue.
You can connect quite a number of Arm processors to a BBC micro. Gotek, usb emulator, BeebSCSI/Pi1MHZ, RGBtoHDMI, PiTubeDirect, RS423 to ESP32 WiFi, PiEconetBridge and every single one has thousands of times the processing power of the original Beeb. It’s rather fun :)
“The BBC Micro is a beloved machine of many in the British Isles, and it had rather an extended family.”
It could even be used as an alternative to an IBM PC at some point.
The Master 512 upgrade contained an 80186 board with a copy of DOS Plus and GEM (and a mouse).
So it could run well behaved CP/M-86 and DOS applications.
dBase III, Turbo C, Pascal etc. Maybe Locomotive Basic (GEM), too?