BBC Micro

21 Articles

Screen caps of upgraded BBC Micro, and OS 9 code

BBC Micro: A Retro Revamp With The 68008 Upgrade

October 1, 2024 by 2 Comments

The BBC Microcomputer, launched in the early 1980s, holds a special place in computing history. Designed for educational purposes, it introduced a generation to programming and technology. With its robust architecture and community-driven modifications, the BBC Micro remains a beloved project for retro computing enthusiasts. [Neil] from Retro4U has been delving into this classic machine, showcasing the fascinating process of repairing and upgrading his BBC Micro with a 68008 CPU upgrade.

Last week, [Neil] shared his progress, unveiling advancements in his repairs and upgrades. After tackling a troublesome beep issue, he successfully managed to get the BBC running with 32 KB of functional memory, allowing him to boot into BASIC. But he wasn’t stopping there. With ambitions set on installing the 68008 CPU, [Neil]’s journey continued.

The 68008 board offers significant enhancements, including multitasking capabilities with OS-9 and its own hard drive and floppy disk controller. However, [Neil] quickly encountered challenges; the board’s condition revealed the usual broken capacitors and a few other faulty components. After addressing these issues, [Neil] turned his attention to programming the necessary ROM for OS-9.

Looking to get your hands dirty? [Neil] has shared a PDF of the upgrade circuit diagram. You can also join the discussion with fellow enthusiasts on his Discord channel, linked in the video description.

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Celebrating The [Jack Ells] Automatic Photometric Telescope

July 11, 2024 by 5 Comments

Here at Hackaday, we take pride in presenting the freshest hacks and the best of what’s going on today in the world of hardware hacking. But sometimes, we stumble upon a hack from the past so compelling that we’ve got to bring it to you, so we can all marvel at what was possible in the Before Times.

This one, a completely homebrewed automatic photometric telescope, was designed and built by the father-son team of [Jack Ells] and [Peter Ells]. From the elder [Ells]’ field notes, the telescope saw its first light in 1988, giving us some idea of the scale of problems that had to be overcome to get this wonderful machine working. The optics are straightforward, as least as telescopes go — it’s an f-4.0 Newtonian reflector with an 8.5″ (221 mm) primary mirror on an equatorial mount. The telescope is very rugged-looking indeed, and even stands on brick piers for stability. The telescope’s mount is controlled by a BBC Micro running custom BASIC software.

For the photometric parts, the [Ells] boys installed a photo-multiplier tube at the focus of the telescope. More precisely, they used a liquid light guide to connect the eyepiece to a rack full of equipment, which included the PM tube, its high-voltage power supply, and a series of signal conditioners and counter circuits. The idea was to view a single star through a pinhole mask over the objective of the telescope and count the rate of photons received over time. Doing so would reveal periodic changes in the star’s brightness. Today we’d use similar data to search for exoplanet transits; while we don’t think that was a thing back in 1988, it looks like this telescope could easily have handled the job.

Sadly, [Jack Ells] died only two years after finishing the telescope. But he left it with his son, who eventually moved it to a location with better seeing conditions, where it gathered data for another eight years. The quality of the work is amazing, and as father-son projects go, this one is tough to beat.

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The BBC Micro, Lovingly Simulated In VR

April 14, 2024 by 5 Comments

The BBC Micro was many peoples’ first exposure to home computing, and thanks to [Dominic Pajak], you can fire up this beloved hardware in WebXR. Is it an emulator? Yes, but it’s also much more than that.

The machine, the CRT, the keycaps, and even the sounds of the original keypresses are all brought to life as accurately as possible. The result is not just an emulator. It’s a lovingly-made BBC Micro simulator you can use with a VR headset. Or just use your browser and type on your real keyboard if you like.

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BBC Basic Is Back In A Big Way

November 28, 2023 by 70 Comments

The BBC has a long history of teaching the world about computers. The broadcaster’s name was proudly displayed on the BBC Micro, and BBC Basic was the programming language developed especially for that computer. Now, BBC Basic is back and running on a whole mess of modern platforms.

BBC Basic for SDL 2.0 will run on Windows, MacOS, x86 Linux, and even Raspberry Pi OS, Android, and iOS. Desktop versions of the programming environment feature a BASIC editor that has syntax coloring for ease of use, along with luxury features like search and replace that weren’t always available at the dawn of the microcomputer era. Meanwhile, the smartphone versions feature a simplified interface designed to work better in a touchscreen environment.

It’s weird to see, but BBC Basic can actually do some interesting stuff given the power of modern hardware. It can address up to 256 MB of memory, and work with far more advanced graphical assets than would ever have been possible on the original BBC Micro. If you honed your programming skills on that old metal, you might be impressed with what they can achieve with BBC Basic in a new, more powerful context.

If you’re passionate about the BBC and its history with computers, we’ve talked plenty about the BBC Micro in the past, too.

[Thanks to Stephen Walters for the tip!]

A Virus For The BBC Micro

September 12, 2023 by 11 Comments

If you work at all with British software or hardware engineers, you’ll find that there’s an entire generation perhaps now somewhere between their mid-40s and mid-50s, who stand slightly apart from their peers in their background and experience. These were the lucky teenagers who benefited from the British government’s 1980s push to educate youngsters in computing, and who unlike those before or who followed, arrived at university engineering courses fresh from school fully conversant with every facet of a computer from the hardware upwards.

[Alan Pope] is from that generation, and he relates a tale from his youth that wasn’t so out of place back in those days, of how he wrote what we’d now call a simple virus for the BBC Micro. Better still, he’s re-created it.

The post is as much a delightful trip back through that era of microcomputing, including an entertaining aside as he shared an airline journey with BBC Micro designer Chris Turner, and it serves as a reminder of how the BBC Micro’s disk operating system worked. There was a !boot file, which was what would be run from the disk at startup, and his bit of code would subvert that and hide itself in the machine’s so-called sideways RAM. The payload was pretty simple, every 32 soft reboots it would print a “Hello world” message, but it seems that was enough back in 1989 to get him into trouble. The 2023 equivalent works, but we’re guessing no teacher will come for him this time.

If you can’t find a real BBC Micro but still want one on hardware, we’ve brought you an FPGA version in the past.

Reading Floppies With An Oscilloscope

May 20, 2021 by 6 Comments

There’s a lot of data on magnetic media that will soon be lost forever, as floppies weren’t really made to sit in attics and basements for decades and still work. [Chris Evans] and [Phil Pemberton] needed to read some disks that reportedly contained source code for several BBC Micro games, including Repton 3. They turned to Greaseweazle, an interface board that can dump just about any kind of floppy disk if it is attached to the right drive. The problem is that Greaseweazle couldn’t read the disks due to CRC errors. Time to break out the oscilloscope and read the disk manually, which is what they did.

Greaseweazle provides a nice display of read sectors and shows timing coming from the floppy read head. The disk in question looked good with reasonably clean timing clocks except in the area of one sector. At that point, the clocks degenerated into noise. Looking on the disk, it was easy to see why. The actual media had a small dent in it.

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The Tube Map, In Glorious 8-Bit!

February 15, 2021 by 6 Comments

There was a time when visitors to London would carry an A to Z map to navigate the city’s Undergound railway system, referring to the iconic London Transport map printed on its back as they did so. Now it’s likely they’ll do the same with their smartphones, with apps ranging from simple analogues of the printed version through to fully annotated route planners with up to the minute train information. Is this a new technology, something only possible in the last decade? Serial British rail YouTuber [Geoff Marshall] thinks otherwise, and has programmed a Tube map on a vintage BBC Micro.

We don’t expect anyone to heft a pile of vintage hardware onto the Central Line at rush hour even though in reality he’s running it on an emulator due to his real BBC Micro being kaput. Perhaps someone should drop him a line about capacitor replacement in that power supply. But it does provide an entertaining jaunt back into afternoons in a 1980s school computer lab, with MOVE, DRAW, and PLOT commands as he wrestles with the limited colour palette of MODE 2.  The result only covers Tube Zone 1, or the very centre of London, so to visit London Hackspace you’ll have to remember to take the Bakerloo line northbound out to Zone 4 and disembark at Wembley Central.

Happily as you can see in the video below the break he enlists the help of a friend to run it on real hardware. He posted the code as a comment to the video but it’s really hard to find. Try this direct link and scroll down, it should be the first comment but you need to click “Read more” to unfold the code. We think the Tube Map would make a great test for any retrocomputer, so we look forward to this feat being repeated.

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