BBC Micro Lives at ROUGOL, Mon 17th Feb 2020

The next meeting of the RISC OS User Group Of London (at its new venue) is:

BBC Micro Lives, presented by Jason Nicholls, ABUG

Monday 17th February 2020, 7.45pm

The Duke of Sussex (upstairs in the Chichester Room)
23 Baylis Road
London, SE1 7AY
http://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/venue.html

Many ROUGOL members will have previously used a BBC Micro. Maybe you still have one, or have a hankering to get one? If so, this is the meeting for you! Jason Nicholls, an active member of ABUG (Acorn and BBC User Group), is going to be talking about some of the modern upgrades available to breathe new life into the Beeb.

Despite Acorn ceasing production of the Beeb over 25 years ago, that has not stopped enthusiasts producing new software and hardware for the systems, adding features the original designers could only have dreamt of. Much of this has been driven by discussions on the StarDot Forum and at ABUG get togethers.

On the hardware side, Jason will be showing some of the storage options that can be added to give access to USB sticks and SD cards, both of which can be used to mount images of your old floppy discs (and if we have time we will look at how to create these). The VideoNuLA graphics enhancer will also be on display, bringing a 4096 colour palette with a full 16 colours on screen in MODE 2 with smooth scrolling.

Rather appropriately combining Beeb and ARM, the PiTubeDirect uses a Raspberry Pi as a second processor connected via the Beeb’s Tube interface. This is able to emulate all the original Acorn co-processors (6502, z80, x86, 32016) and more. It can of course also be run as an ARM co-pro, mimicing the first ARM Evaluation System used to test the ARM1.

On the software side, some of the new games that have been produced will be on display, and we will look at how modern development tools and emulators can greatly ease the programming and debugging task. We might end the night with a browse through the online archive of (almost) every Beeb game ever released at bbcmicro.co.uk.

More info here – http://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/index.html

ROUGOL’s new venue is easy to reach by public transport from in and around London and the south east, being only a couple of minutes walk from Waterloo train and tube station. Parking is available outside the pub, on Coral St, from 6.30pm.

ROUGOL meetings are free to attend, and food & drink is plentiful (but not free!).

Last minute reminder that this meeting is today!

Looks like we will have a couple of BBC Masters along, with MMFS, Gotek, BeebSCSI, VideoNuLA and PiTubeDirect.

Plus we will have BeebEm on Windows, B-Em on Linux, and of course BeebIt on RISC OS!

So there should be plenty of ways to try out your favourite Beeb software :-)

Forgot to let everyone know that the slideshow from this talk is available on Google Docs, which in addition to the presentation contains an excellent set of useful links to all the software and hardware options mentioned and more.

https://tinyurl.com/tx8njp6

If you have the latest Iris browser, then this link works on RISC OS too :-)
(more on Iris at this month’s ROUGOL meeting on Monday 16th March)