Episode: 2731
Title: HPR2731: My 8 bit Christmas
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2731/hpr2731.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 15:51:56

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This is HPR episode 2,731 entitled, My 8-bit Christmas.
It is hosted by Andrew Conway and is about 26 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, I got a new, old computer for Christmas, an ACON BBC Microcomputer Model B.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support Universal Access to All Knowledge by heading over to archive.org, forward slash, donate.
Hello and welcome to another Hacker Public Radio episode with me, Andrew, also known as
McNalloo.
You might recognise my voice from such podcasts as Toxjam and The Duffercast.
And you may remember it from a very long time ago in Hacker Public Radio because it's been
two longs since I've done my last show, sorry, Ken.
Well I've been shamed after listening into the December community round up where I didn't
hear my name mentioned in the list of people who did shows in 2018.
I fully intended to be in that list but I never did it, so here I am.
And what I'd like to talk to you about is my new computer, well my new old computer.
Now I got it for Christmas and those of you who do listen to Toxjam might have heard
an a very implicit plea for Mrs McNalloo to buy me this for Christmas and she did.
So Christmas came true for me, Santa did his job.
And in front of me I have an ACON BBC Microcomputer Model B just like the one that I had as a child.
Now this one was, I've dated it by an opened up, I've had to open it up, I'll come back
to that in a minute.
It's dated back to December 1982 so it's quite an early model and issue three motherboard.
And for people outside the UK, this would be roughly comparable to a Commodore 64 but
the sound doesn't quite as good as that.
But in other respects I think better, build quality certainly better than the Commodore 64
and the ZX Spectrum which I guess where it's two main competitors back in the day.
And well let me just give you a brief description of what it looks like.
So it's big actually, it's bigger than any of the other micros that we're all at the time.
It's bigger, way bigger than my ASUS 15-inch screen laptop.
It's I guess it's sort of a sort of rectangle, you'll learn about 45 by 40 centimetres
and about just under 10 centimetres tall, bait centimetres with lovely thick rubber feet
that it sits off the table with a bit of ventilation going underneath it.
It's beige, mainly beige coloured, I don't know if this one's yellow but it probably has
but it feels good quality, it's not that creaky, you know, it feels well put together.
It's a textured surface, it's keyboard, it's probably the thing that shouts quality at you
because even today when I look at it looks brand new, not a single letter is faded or partly worn
away, where the modern keyboard typically you'll start to see some of the most commonly used
letters in the centre from where touch types have been using it daily, you'll start to see them
rubbing off, you know, maybe after, you know, maybe a year of heavy use, you can see those keys being
rubbed off, not with the BBC though. And the keyboard as well as I should say is I think it's
individual sprung switches, there's no membrane going on here. So it feels a bit chunky if you're
not used to it, but actually it just again oozes sort of kind of quality that it comes back to me.
The keyboard layout is a bit as worth a mention too because the keys are all black,
because of a couple of grey ones, but except for the roll on the top, which is nice bright red colour,
these are the user function keys, numbered F0 to F9, it starts at zero, very, very programmer oriented
computer. It's got an escape key in the top left, but doesn't just say ESC says escape the full
letter, and on the right to the end of the roll function keys at the top, you've got the brake
key, and the interesting fact about the brake key, that if you know any 650 to assembler, that's
the microprocessor that sits at the heart of a BBC micro, so it's more closely related to the
Commodore 64, which I think had a 6510, and it's just similar, not the same, but that brake key
actually sends the BRK in assembly instruction, or instruction number zero to the processor, so it's
quite a low, you've got a key that sends a specific instruction, and it resets the computer,
it's a soft reset, so now I should say a bit about what it was like, the unboxing of the computer,
so I didn't see it before, I knew it was here, but I didn't see it, and I opened up like a big
kid on Christmas Day, so anyone who's of my age, mid-forties in the UK will have grown up and
seen these computers, not so much at home, because we're fiendishly expensive, it was £399
in 1982 money when it came out, I think it actually was priced lower than that than they
soon realised that they priced it too low, and they put it up to £399, which in today's money is
about £1200, so I guess I don't know what exchange rates are at the moment, but it's going to be
so mid, so maybe $1,500, maybe a bit less than that, I don't know, again a little high on
£1200 in euros, but yeah, exchange rate with the pounds aren't great at the moment, depending
which way you're looking at it, so yeah, so I mean if you think about it, this is the cost of this
for home user, it was equivalent to a pretty hefty gaming rig, so my gaming PC was actually cheaper
than this in real terms of adjusting for inflation, so it was expensive, but schools got a big
discount, so in the UK it was an educational thing, every school, my school certainly had loads of
them, and you didn't see so many people have them at home, but my parents being very into computers
wanted to get what they thought was the best from their point of view, and BBC is the best in one
regard, certainly, I mean I would say I'm not into the wars that go on, but one thing the BBC
really had going for above build quality is it was very expandable, the reason it's got such a
big case is because there's loads of ROMs you can put in it, there are loads of cables, so you
can put a second processor and attach that to it, the hard way you could get, I think I had
double density, double double decided drives, so even people who were programming on some
technically superior machines like the Commodore 64 which had a slightly better processor,
although it was slower processor, it was clocked at one megahertz, BBC 6502 was at two megahertz,
but the reason I think that some people use the BBC to develop for other even slightly superior
machines like Commodore 64 as I was saying has 64 k of RAM, whereas this BBC only has 32 k of RAM,
32 k can you believe it, the reason they did that is because the BBC's peripherals like hard drive,
this drive was better, you could get hard drive at the BBC actually, but it was very rare, I never
never saw one myself, anyway, so the other thing that was great about the BBC is it had a fantastic
user manual, in fact I've still got my original user manual, even though I don't have the
original BBC, I've even got like this advanced machine gold manual that you had to buy separately,
and they're great, they're extremely well written, I mean like the best manuals I've ever seen,
and one of the things it brilliantly described was the basic that came with the BBC model B,
which I think to my mind is the basic I, it's not the basic I learned first, but I think
is the best basic I've ever seen, I think people are even still trying to keep it alive today in
various forms, it really was very good, and one great feature that it had is that you could switch
to doing some assembly in the middle of your basic program and use basic as a kind of environment
to do to pass assembly and other things, I don't want to get into such details here, anyway,
I think I was going to tell you about my unboxing of it, so I excitedly opened it on Christmas day
of 2018, and I took it out and went off and filmed this old flat screen television, I don't
have any CRTs left, and frankly I'm trying to cut down in the month of stuff cluttering up the space
in my house, so I'm not likely to get a CRT, but this little flat panel screen, I guess it's a
1450 inch, it's very small, 10 years old, maybe it says Luxor on it, and it's a terrible brand
many ways, but it has lots of old connections, so I've got the guy who sold it to my wife over
eBay, RetroFix UK, I think I've topped my head, I'll put the correct link in the show notes,
because I think this person, as you'll see, deserves some credit, and everything was nicely wrapped
up, and he'd recapped the power supply and any other capacitors that were needing changed,
and he put a new power flex and cable on it, because you're yet to want the 36-year-old
mains cables in your house to you, and it was all spotlessly clean, and he provided a RGB
din plug that goes in the back of the BBC to SCART, which goes in, well, not modern tellers,
my two newest televisions can't take it, but slightly older flat screen televisions have SCART on them,
you could use the UHF, Arial out, but which quality terrible, and that's the first thing I'd
like to say, is hats off to the BBC, I mean the RGB, the text, when after you've switched it on,
you see BBC computer 32k, wow, I say well, not it, and it says Turbo MMC, which is a disc drive,
it's got in it, which will come back to basic, that's the language, and then there's a little
closed ankle bracket type, a greater than sign prompt, and a little flashing cursor,
now that text is crystal clear, I'm not kidding you, it's absolutely perfectly clear,
I can't actually believe how good it is, because I never saw that, I used an old bang and
old sun valve television, which was quite big, I think it was 28 inch, my dad loved to collect
them, and he'd break, and he'd fix them, and so I had a big screen, but the UHF, the UHF,
UHF, Arial lead, did a lot of damage to the picture quality, and the highest resolution mode,
BBC could do, which I think 640 by 480, with just black and white, well two colours, it could be
any two colours, that was unusable pretty much for a text anyway, back then, but now if I type,
go into that mode, it's called mode 0, type mode 0, I don't know if you can hear the keyboard,
nice, slightly squeakingness to the keys, I've type mode 0, it's just perfect, you know,
for this little flat screen monitor sat on top of the BBC, because they're not supposed to put
CRT monitors on top of the BBC case, strong as it is, but this little flat screen monitor is
15 inch, it's perfect, it's great, so I've got 80 columns of text to work with, which is
what you'd want, and I think 40 lines 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9, I think 40, I think 40,
vertical lines, anyway plenty, for doing a little bit of programming,
anyway, so that's not the first thing I did with it, when I got it, I remembered, you know,
the muscle memory comes back, you press and hold shift, and hit the brake key, and it reboots the
machine and loads up the disk, but there's no disk drive here, there's no tape, and I started with
a tape and then upgraded to a disk drive later back in the 80s, so when I do shift brake now,
it reboots the machine and loads up something off the disk automatically, and this is happening,
because inside the machine is what's called the turbo MMC, which is kind of like, you know,
ST card, kind of things, MMC, obviously, card, and that's sitting inside with a new
ROM, e-problem thing plugged into another ROM socket, and it's fully in the BBC into thinking
that there's a disk drive in there, and I think, currently, I've got 268 disks
loaded up, and I can change disks at just like a quick command, a very short command,
a star, dense space, slot number, space, disk number, you know, we'll put it, it will give me access
to a disk, it's that simple, but even more simple, if I want to do shift brake, it just gives me
the huge menu of games, pretty much, every game I could ever remember, not just playing or owning,
or having a pirated copy of, not that I would do that, of course, every game I can think of,
and every game I've heard of is here, I think a full one or two bits of educational tool for which
I think have been withheld copyright reasons, but all the games that I can think of are there,
it's absolutely amazing, and let's see, let's see, I'll go quickly find one, just so you
can hear what the sound might be like, yes, this one, I think this is a good one,
of course, it's incredibly fast as well, I mean, compared to tape took ages, but even compared to
the original disk drive, there's no mechanical weight, recognise that, anyone recognise that,
that's the game frack, yeah, I don't know if you could hear how well you could hear that,
but I'll stop that now, let's break, so yeah, so I spent a little bit of Christmas morning
playing these old games and having a wail of a time, until I was dragged away and had to be
sociable with family, and then I didn't get back to quite late in Boxing Day, I think I had a
quick go in BBC in the evening, then woke up excited in Boxing Day and decided to get my old
joystick, because although I don't have my old BBC, I still have the old analog joystick that I used
to play a lead on, and elites amongst those games, and while my joystick was broken, so it needed
some fixing, so I was fixing it and testing it, and while I was testing it, I had to power off
the BBC for a bit to do something, the BBC for a bit to do something, I forget what, I want to turn
it on, no beep, fact, no lights, no little LED, caps lock LED, nothing, and I opened up the BBC
and have a look, and well, it got a long story short, I determined there was no power getting
to the motherboard at all, I don't really know much about BBC, so I was very tentative when I looked
inside it, but my meter was revealed that there was zero power going to it, there should have been
five volts at various places, there was nothing, and then I contacted the guy that my wife bought
it off, this is in Boxing Day, and he replied immediately and gave me some pointers of what to look
for, and in the meantime I was poking around and I found that there was a fuse inside the case,
obviously I checked the fuse in the mains plug, and then in the power supply, which I removed,
I looked, there was a little fuse tucked away underneath the power switch inside it,
and I went, oh, and so I tried to price it out to have a look, so I could test it, and to my
surprise I came like a little metal end cap with the fuse, and there was a crunching of glass,
I thought, oh no, I've broken this old fuse, or did I break it? Now it's a two amp fuse, so I
happened by luck to have one lying around, so I put one in with the power supply disconnected from
the BBC now, and switched it on, and kaboom, and there was a flash in the explosion of the fuse
exploded in my face, so this, oh, didn't hurt me I should say, didn't actually blow up in my
face, no metal, no shards of glass hit me anyway, but I was quite spectacular, I have to say,
puff a smoke and everything, so I really did this back to the chap that I bought it from,
and again he was, he said, oh, that's unusual, but he said, look, best send me the power supply,
and I'll either fix it, or send you a new one, and I did a bit more research and said to him,
you know what, I think I bet you, it's the bridge rectifier, I actually dialed in it, and I
reckon, I didn't test it, but I just thought that, you know, it seemed to be contained very close
to the mains side of things, I thought, I bet you, that fuse is blown because there's been a short,
one of the dials had failed in the bridge rectifier, and it's current where there should not be a
current, and indeed he, he received the power supply few days later, filmed that it was the bridge
rectifier that had blown, and by, just when I, I was away from you here, when I came back, first
thing I received a new year in the post was, a brand new power supply, and figures crossed,
BBC has worked perfectly ever since. Now I have to say, I'm hats off to the guy for giving me such
good feedback, especially over the festive season, I thoroughly recommend if you want to buy
BBC stuff off, I mean, does spectrum stuff, I guess it's in the UK, but maybe it does
do orders without, without, with the UK, I have to check, but yeah, excellent service there,
and you know, when you take on an old computer like this, it's going to go wrong, it's 36 years old,
but I'm quite thankful just the power supply that went, because that's probably one of the most
fixable things, you know, what if one of the integrated circuits chips goes, you know, they don't
make them anymore, so you'd have to either get an old salvage replacement or rely on a slight
variant in this, you know, a 6502A processor that can run at two megahertz. Well, I understand that
if you can buy them quite cheaply in eBay, but you might not get, it might say 6502A on it, but
it might not run at two megahertz, because it might be a rebad 6502. Anyway, I digress. So yeah, so
the last thing I'd like to talk about is, in this episode at least, is I took it out for the
Wii Spell programming, so I did a little bit of basic, which came back to me quite fast. I mean,
I even did find that I was sitting there thinking, well, how do I, how do I do an LS on the disk,
you know, find it, you know, and then, oh yes, it's StarDawd, which is a, which is short-hand for
StarCat, you know, sort of catalog, and that was another nice thing about the BBC is if you could
always reduce any command down to the smallest number of letters that made it unique. So Star,
Star's an Asterisk, StarDeleteSpaceFile, name would delete a file, but you could do StarDelDawd,
and some of the most common commands, like list to list a basic program, you could just do LDawd,
you know, so that actually is quite a time saver, you know, and I soon got back into
having a bit of using those abbreviations, and you could use that with keywords inside Basics,
so instead of next, in a four next loop and basic, you could just type in Dawd, you know, so I think
it was a bit of an answer to the ZX spectrum having the, you know, it had the full print command
on the P key, for instance, you hit P, I think in the right circumstances and print would come out,
so it was kind of, I think it's actually, to my mind, an obviously ambiance towards the BBC,
I think that's the BBC system is a better way of doing it. Another thing I then was really keen
to do, and I never really got to grips with the BBC was do, you know, I'd like to go and explore
the 6502 assembler, because, you know, with an 8-bit mic, we can really get to know the hardware
and interact with it fairly low level through the, through the assembler, and the BBC comes with
it's built in assembler, as I said, in the basic, so it's a lot of code to do bouncing balls,
you know, very simple arithmetic as well, flood-filled screen, and you know, I'm impressed to
help fast, you know, after a day or two of re-educating myself, you know, I was producing fast
machine code graphics and was getting this assembler right almost first time, you know, with occasional
error, and it's quick forgiving, because the reason it's forgiving is as simple as that I can save
quickly, I can create this virtual disk in this turbo-MMC very quickly, so I can save my progress,
but also, then the last thing is, the brake key, when you hit brake, I say you write a assembler and
you inadvertently write completely for their own bit of memory and trash a bit of memory that's
important, locking up the BBC, and almost all circumstances, you hit the brake key, that soft reset
will clear it, and this is the magic bit, you type in a command OLD old, and it will reload,
it will remember all the, everything that you were doing just before the catastrophe occurred,
so you don't even need to restart the machine, do a hard reset, you can do a control brake,
which is a slightly harder reset, and then of course you can power cycle it, and then load the
program off the disk again, and so, you know, that makes the, when, and then the restart of a
computer this year is instant, you know, it's as fast, it's as fast as BB, that you heard at the start,
so, you know, it's going back to a previous era of coding, where yes, your resources were
slightly limited, you had only 32K, in fact, you don't even get 32K, because some of it was eaten
up by the screen memory, so in some cases, the highest resolution mode of the mode that had 16
colors, I think you only have 10K of memory left over after all that, it actually writes a
program, which seems like nothing, but on the plus side, it was very fast and easy to program for,
because you could recover from your mistakes quickly, and, and, you know, and, you know, it was very
rare that an author catastrophe did occur, to be honest, it's quite, you know, crashes are already
crashes are quite rare, and the other thing I think was a lovely system that they had is,
there's no copy and paste, obviously, because there's no mills, it's all command line, you know, text
driven, but there are cursor keys, and what you can do is, if you press a cursor key while you're
writing a basic program, and I think this applies actually outside basic and just running system
commands, you can press like the cursor keys, navigate, and the cursor splits into a big block
cursor remains on the command prompt, and then a flashing underscore cursor, can then be moved
around the screen, so I can move up here to where it says, for example, basic, and I can hit
the copy key when the, the movable cursor is under B, and it produces B in the command line,
so you can see that, I can copy the word basic here, of course, that's not going to like that,
but say I want, I type in a long command, rather than pressing the up keys, you would do in a
modern terminal to, and, and, so unixy environment, you press the up key, then you press the copy key
to copy anything else that's on the screen, so that's a great way of editing a line in a program,
or moving a line, you just copy the line of your basic program, including the line number,
and then you just change the line number, and then that'll copy the line, you might have to remove
the original line if, if it's a copy paste rather than a, or sorry, a cut paste rather than a
copy paste, but that cursor key, copy with a delete button, is incredibly powerful and convenient,
you know, in this era, and another thing I found myself doing after coding an assembler for a while,
I became much more careful with what I was typing, because I didn't want, because I had no up key
to go back and edit, I know either copy and paste is there, but it's not quite as convenient,
I have to say it's made me a better coder on modern machines, because I'm now taking,
going back to taking more care on the command line again, so at the moment it's, I'll be honest,
it's just a toy, but it's sad to think, you know, as I say, it's a reminded me of a
slower way of using a computer, and not necessarily slower in a bad way, there's some lessons,
I think, that us modern users of computers, we could do better in our typing and
command line usage by slowing down a bit, maybe some people are more careful than me, but I feel
like I've got to a bad habit of rushing too much, and you know, I'm typing, I type it out,
and I have to go back and edit, and you know, all these things that modern devices make so easy,
you know, they're trying to babysit you, you don't get any of that, and the BBC has no command
completion, there's no command history, none of that, so I think I'll leave it there,
if people are interested, I could talk a little bit more about 6502 programming, because that's
obviously relevant beyond just the BBC Micro, I mean, 6502, as I say, is common to Commodore,
and some other machines, I think it was using arcade, games as well, I think 6502 wasn't it,
another thing I, a little project is the fixing my old analog joystick, I managed to fix it,
and it's delightfully simple, I might, if there's interest, I might, if I'm interested, I might
just do an episode on that, and who knows, the BBC might fail again, I might have to do some
surgery on it, so maybe, I hope I don't have to do an episode on that too soon, but I think,
well, with 36 year old complex electronics, at least complex for the day, it's inevitable,
something's going to go wrong, but fingers crossed, not too soon. Well, thank you for listening,
and I shall maybe do some more shows in the future, until then, please consider doing an
APR show, about your experiences with your first computer, perhaps, or indeed anything else
that you wish to talk about, bye bye for now.
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