BBC Micro - Blast from the past

[The Shaggy D.A.]

Runs in your browser.

https://bbcmicro.co.uk//index.php?rt_R=&rt_B=&rt_M=&rt_P=&rt_U=&rt_W=&rt_L=&search=&sort=p
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Chances are quite high you are not in my Monkeysphere, and I don't care about you. Don't take it personally.
Currently : Royal Enfield 350 Meteor
Previously : CB100N > CB250RS > XJ900F > GT550 > GPZ750R/1000RX > AJS M16 > R100RT > Bullet 500 > CB500 > LS650P > Bullet Electra X & YBR125 > Bullet 350 "Superstar" & YBR125 Custom > Royal Enfield Classic 500 Despatch Limited Edition (28 of 200) & CB Two-Fifty Nighthawk > ER5

[Howling TerrorOutOfOffice]

Acornsoft....the little owl....the heat off the main board.
The hours spent hacking code so I could eat the whole maze in Ms PacMan.

[I remember using some primitive music software ...I think it only made keyboard sounds...no sequencing....or was it one of those programs that came in a computer magazine.]

Ahhh BBC model B you were great.
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Diabolical homemade music Bandcamp and Soundcloud
Singer songwriter, Artist and allround good bloke Listen to Andrew Susan Johnston here
The Harry Turner Project

[bhinso]

Emulators rule.

The Amiga 500 one is my favourite.
The best bit: You can get like 1000's of games in seconds downloading as they're so small in memory

[MCN]

[Howling TerrorOutOfOffice]

Yes, also similar to the mags for fishing but without the free waggler on the front cover.

Exciting times they were for Post-Punk Geeks.
Many of us PPGs went on to program VCRs for OAPs.

Some of us had real sex, often by mistake and sometimes without the aid of a RS232.

Sure we had floppies but they were big floppies.
____________________
Diabolical homemade music Bandcamp and Soundcloud
Singer songwriter, Artist and allround good bloke Listen to Andrew Susan Johnston here
The Harry Turner Project

[BanditsHigh]

Still got a Beeb Model B, Master and my Risc PC ... the good old days

[doggone]

Oh dear just spent a good 30 minutes playing space invaders and it was quite addictive

[Nobby the Bastard]

Does elite work on it?
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trevor saxe-coburg-gotha:"Remember this simple rule - scooters are for men who like to feel the breeze on their huge, flapping cunt lips."
Triumph Sprint ST 1050

[tracks]

[The Shaggy D.A.]

[WD Forte]

Jeez, this takes me back to when my lad and I copied code line by line
from a mag to play a shitty game on an Atari 800XL
Tapes? cartridges? floppies? you lot don't know your born.
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bikers smell of wee

[Easy-X]

[Nobby the Bastard]

It wasn't the typing it in that did it for me, it was the ones that were all code rather than basic and going through it character by character trying to find the fucking number you got wrong.
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trevor saxe-coburg-gotha:"Remember this simple rule - scooters are for men who like to feel the breeze on their huge, flapping cunt lips."
Triumph Sprint ST 1050

[bhinso]

This ^^

Any remotely decent game was written in machine code, i.e.:
DATA 3A1FBA78FAEC24....

One slip and it's Game Over (or Game Not Begun).

Towards the end of my career they brought in Checksums, i.e. a code at the end of each line. They printed the code in the magazine and if yours was wrong it meant an error in the line. This helped a lot.

[Hong Kong Phooey]

Hours playing Chuckie Egg, programming shitty type in games. Trying to create better ones and failing, machine code was not possible for us noobs.

Most fun happened in school, when we installed the speech ROM in a master system, it gave the BBC a robot voice.

We then remoted in over the network from another machine within the same room. Speech was less distinct than even Hawking's primitive voice box, but the teacher understood the computer was telling her to 'fuck right off' amongst other obscenity laden instructions.

The hardest part was suppressing the laughter.
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'81 CG125, '97 FZS600 : '99 CBR600F4, '09 KTM RC8

[Nobby the Bastard]

[Hong Kong Phooey]

[blurredman]

Got plenty of old pc's here and software.

Notibly the cpc 464 and 6128 and an Acordn Archimedes a3010 w/ ethernet module.

Of course the pc1512- but seeing as that's XT then that doesn't count to me as 'old' or any different to what a PC is now.
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CBT: 12/06/10, Theory: 22/09/10, Module 1: 09/11/10, Module 2: 19/01/11
Past: 1991 Honda CG125BR-J, 1992 (1980) Honda XL125S, 1996 Kawasaki GPZ500S, 1979 MZ TS150.
Current: 1973 MZ ES250/2 - 18k, 1979 Suzuki TS185ER - 10k, 1981 Honda CX500B - 91k, 1987 MZ ETZ250 (295cc) - 40k, 1989 MZ ETZ251 - 51k.

[bhinso]

[Hong Kong Phooey]

[BanditsHigh]

Hardware scrolling on the BEEB is simple ... can't remember the registers you write too, but it's basically high byte / low byte of screen start address.

To move the entire screen left or right you added/subtracted 8 bytes of the start address, up/down was 640 bytes (well for MODE 0,1,2 anyway).

The scrolling was 8, 4 or 2 pixels at a time horizontally (depending on mode ) and 8 pixels vertically.

The beauty of hardware scrolling was that you only had to redraw the edge which had just moved onto the screen, and any objects you had moving independently ... was amazing how fast you could get things moving!

Elite was special .... it mixed modes on the one screen ... I think main flight display was MODE 1, the console was MODE 2 ... clever stuff!!

[bhinso]

My 10 year old nephew is really interested in coding and wanted to learn.

I remembered this post and downloaded a decent Amstrad CPC emulator.

Funnily enough, he's amazed with the programming despite the severe limitations of the system (16 colours, 188kb disk space, LOL)

Brings back a lot of memories too