Buried treasure

We were doing some cleaning up and I found something long lost and thought to be long gone.

Oooooooo. Pretty

Argh! Lurking gremlin!

It was a very pleasant surprise. I have the vaguest memory of the floppy drive unit having messed up jumpers and I didn’t have the documentation to sort it. First chance I get I’ll give it a clean up and a test. I know when I put it away aeons ago it was still working fine, except for the floppy drives.

I have the vaguest memory of the floppy drive unit having messed up jumpers and I didn’t have the documentation to sort it.

Have you tried looking at the documents online at Chris’s Acorns?

If that doesn’t turn up anything then ask with details of make and model and see what people come up with.

Ah, yes. The benefit of now (with internet) versus then (magazines and if you’re lucky a localish group). ;-)

A lot of the older stuff has been documented, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get that Beeb up and running again.

Is that an Electron behind it? Do you remember what ROMs you have?

First thing to check: the BBC Micro X2 capacitors

I just got it out of the box and gave it a quick wipedown. It had an old piece of masking tape covering the hole next to the keyboard. Strange that it has the cutout but the socket holes on the PCB are unpopulated.

It has an overlay for EdWord Educational Word Processor System under the clear overlay.
The floppy drive is a BARSON Computers BBC Disk drive.

This is the only mention I found of Barson so far. Looks like the UK gave us the standard middle finger, but something good came of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econet

Shame the Econet hole is blanked even though I would have literally no use for it.

David, thanks for the heads up on the capacitors. I’ll have to check them. I’m not a fan of escaped magic smoke nor the process of getting it back in.

I haven’t powered it up or stripped it yet.

Please excuse the mess. We’re in the midst of a big winter clean.

e: not an Electron. Just a breadbox C64. At least I know where the piano keyboard overlay thing went. Been wondering about that.

e2: Looks like it’d be dead easy to use the RGB out with the C=1541 monitor. That’s a plus.

It has an overlay for EdWord Educational Word Processor System

Oh, can you scan that if you have a moment? User guide if you happen to have one? I used to use EdWord at school and there’s practically no information about it available online that I have found…

As for Econet – some info here to nudge nostalgia: http://heyrick.co.uk/econet/

Oh, can you scan that if you have a moment? User guide if you happen to have one? I used to use EdWord at school and there’s practically no information about it available online that I have found…

I was going to say that I might have a user guide at the other end of the country, if it hadn’t already been recycled… and then realised that I’d already rescued it and that it’s sat on the bookshelf here amongst the other BBC Micro manuals. EdWord 2 “User Reference Guide” and “Word for Word — a self-instructional guide”. They’re both quite big, though: several hundred pages.

They’re copyright the Council for Educational Technology, which presumably means that copyright is still held by some dusty bit of HM Government.

Strange that it has the cutout but the socket holes on the PCB are unpopulated.

Actually very common. Having seen probably over 100 BBCs in the last 25 years (A lot more in the years before that) I reckon only about 10% still had the perfoated cover in fully in place, many have it have it half attached but most have it missing and about 30-40% have tape over it. Only about 1-2% have the Phrom socket fitted.

Don’t forget about the stardot forums if you need guidance. There are people on there who had connections to Barson Computers so you might discover something about the drive by asking around.

I took a couple of minutes to shift it somewhere useful yesterday and instantly came to a halt. There have been at least a couple of ice ages and a mass extinction since the last time I had a composite video cable with a BNC end. I have the vaguest memory of using a video cable with one end hacked off and the wires wrapped around and inserted to test it.

Because it looks like I’ll have to order parts anyway, does anyone know what DIN type the component video connector is? I might as well give it proper RGB because it’ll be used on a Commodore 1084S anyway.

Did I mention that recently I got RO on a Pi to display on a 1084S in 576i via the Luma and Chroma inputs using some adaptors, butchery and perseverance? Well, I did. Getting the Micro to work via RGB would be even better!

Today I found a BNC to RCA adapter in town and gave the BBC a try. It seems sane but the keyboard is scrambled in a really strange way :( Time to dismantle and start checking I guess.

On boot it says:

BBC Computer 32K
Acorn DFS
BASIC
>_

So I’m lucky it’s still sane.

does anyone know what DIN type the component video connector is?

http://mdfs.net/Info/Comp/BBC/Monitor/BBCtoTV.htm