Joel's Mundane Life

Last Wednesday I gave a talk at Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club on new projects for your BBC Micro, entitled 'Teaching Old Micros New Tricks'. I also covered 'getting started in the retro Beeb scene' a little bit, and did a Q&A at the end.

First off, the links. I'll split these into the sections of the talk:

Useful Boring Stuff:

• Sprow's Y2k fix ROM which also includes timezone support.
• Retroclinic switchable MOS (not linked on their site but Mark sometimes lists them on eBay)

Storage:

• The USB/IDE Datacentre and CF card interface are provided by Mark Haysman and can be obtained from Retroclinic's website. He also sells them on eBay occasionally.
• John Kortink may have stock of his GoMMC internal ROM storage left, you could try asking him. If there's enough demand he may also do another run. His website is here.
• Jonathan Harston is posting that he's sold out of the BBC IDE interfaces.

Memory/CPU enhancements:

• By far the most fun one is Sprow's ARM7TDMI coprocessor. Don't forget to find a cheese-wedge teletext adaptor so you can use the case for it!
• John Kortink's ReCo6502 is available although you will need to source your own Tube ULA.

Networking:

• Back with Sprow, I also demonstrated his BBC Master Ethernet interface which talks Samba to other computers. Sprow's also working on a series of calls (presumably OSWORD and OSBYTE) to access the TCP/IP stack directly.

Honourable Mentions (aka stuff I missed out from the talk but are also cool):

• Sprow's MiniB, although purists say it needs a video interface (the quote I heard the other night: "if you can't play Chuckie Egg on it, it's not a Beeb!").
• Not really BBC, but attach MMC cards to your Acorn Atom.

I'll make the slides from the talk available when I get a chance to PDF them, and will be repeating most of it at an upcoming Manchester Acorn group meeting - more about that closer to the time.

I will also write about the 'retro scene' and how to get back onto the Beeb in a future blog post.