BBC Micro on Retropie & Pi3?

BuZz

Trust me - you don't want a clone of me :-) Poor @herb_fargus would have two people calling him up drunk!

mediamogul

I can only imagine the blackmail material you two must have on each other.

herb_fargus

@mediamogul we have been discussing a mailing list or chat of sorts outside of the perpetual hangout window Jools and I have, might be nice for others to be the target of his drunk dialing!

Also for the record I have been pestering Jools for the beeb since 3.0, he's probably sick of me asking by now. Though I have no doubt eben Upton would be thrilled.

spmbrown

The BBC Micro (the original Models A, B, etc.) was created at the request of the BBC as a public education project. There was controversy, in-fighting, the usual whining about how the TV licence fee was being spent and a lot of arguments about who/what company should make the hardware - microcomputer, to support the programme.

Acorn Computers won the contract and (skipping a lot of detail here) produced the BBC Micro (the Atom was first, the Electron was a cut down, lower cost version and there was the subsequent Master version).

The Raspberry Pi Foundation were paying homage to the BBC Micro when they named the original Pi computers Model A & B.

A BBC Micro running BBC Basic was used to design the first ARM instruction set. Acorn the company went on to produce the Archimedes machines and (again, skipping all the detail) was later renamed ARM Holdings and produced the Advanced RISC Machine architecture.

Any of you who have a mobile (cellular) phone, made by Apple, Motorola, Samsung or whoever, have an ARM powered computer in your pocket and that is the modern iteration of the BBC Micro.

The Micro:bit is another of the BBC's efforts at "educating" kids/the world about programming computers.

You may not have heard of it but the standout game developed fot the BBC Micro was Elite. The inspiration and reference for all modern space trading RPG games.

dankcushions

my mum had a bbc micro (she still does somewhere! a big master unit with 2 drives etc). she was a teacher, and they were pretty standard components of most UK classrooms in the 80s/early 90s. in fact, i seem to remember my high school still using them as late as the late 90s!

it was my first exposure to games/computers, but i don't have that much nostalgia for it. i loved repton but i replayed that not so long ago. it's a classic that has a weird following in the chess community due to the nature of the puzzles.

i wouldn't mind going back to play a game called 'spellbinder' which was a sort of dungeon/adventure game that completely confused me when i was 7!

spmbrown

@backstander Do you have a mobile phone? It probably has an ARM processor.

A BBC Micro running BBC Basic was used to design the first ARM instruction set. Acorn, the company that manufactured it was later renamed ARM Holdings and produced the Advanced RISC Machine architecture. Almost all current mobile phones, the Raspberry Pi itself and countless other products are the latest versions of the BBC Micro.

jamesbeat

When the BBC was looking for a computer for their Computer Literacy Project, Sinclair were also trying to win the contract.

There is an excellent dramatized version of this battle between Acorn and Sinclair called 'Micro Men' (it's on youtube)

backstander

@jamesbeat
I'll have to check out "Micro Men"! I didn't realize that ARM processor came from the BBC Micro. Now I wonder what the Raspberry Pi will be when it grows up?

Also @mediamogul is right! Cloning yourself is a bad idea! I almost never turns out good in the movies (I'm thinking of the movie The Prestige]!

Fruitybit

@jamesbeat I use a pi2 and risc os to run the BBC emulator and it works perfectly! It won't run on a pi3, so older hardware comes in handy here. Elite, Space Adventure, hehe re-living the long old days:)
Plus it's all small files/os so you can get away with a tiny sd card for just about all of it:)

jamesbeat

@Fruitybit said in BBC Micro on Retropie & Pi3?:

@jamesbeat I use a pi2 and risc os to run the BBC emulator and it works perfectly! It won't run on a pi3, so older hardware comes in handy here. Elite, Space Adventure, hehe re-living the long old days:)
Plus it's all small files/os so you can get away with a tiny sd card for just about all of it:)

I'm sure that's great (in fact running on riscos is probably much better than running it in Linux).

The trouble is, that won't solve the problem of getting it running on Retropie.

I'm trying to make my dream setup here - a nice old PC case, old keyboard and mouse (all in pristine condition mind you), turn it on and be presented with a menu showing all of my old computers.

Retropie is perfect for this - it is a great menu system.

The last thing I want is to have to open up the case and swap the card around if I want to use a BBC Micro - it would ruin the effect.

Beebem works perfectly on the PC that I use for my main Retropie console hooked up to my TV.

I just hope it works ok on a Pi3 too.

I'm kinda doing things backwards - I'm using a PC as my console and a Raspberry Pi as my computer :D.

There's a good reason for this though - N64 is spectacular on my PC based console, and using a Raspberry Pi to emulate my computers means I can use an older (and smaller) case that couldn't keep a modern PC cool.

caver01

@jamesbeat I restructured my apple2 setup using advmess so that it is a bit more modular with config files. This will allow me to use different .rc files for each disk image, but more importantly, I can try other system roms like the BBC micro easily and make adjustments without messing up my apple2 setup. I may give it a shot tomorrow.

caver01

Well, it's working, but I don't really know what to do next. I have a handful of disk images as suggested above, but launching them gets me to this screen. Maybe my setup isn't quite right yet. . . But clearly the micro is running in advmess:

alt text

herb_fargus

@caver01 did you launch the game eg:

CHAIN "SNAPPER.IMG"

From my notes here when I first tested:

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/issues/210#issuecomment-174157574

caver01

@herb_fargus no, i didn't do that. Is CHAIN a command I need to learn? Snapper.img? Was that just your example image file? I tried to load TheHacker.zip I think.

herb_fargus

@caver01 yeah snapper is a Pacman clone, just an example. I only got it to work with ssd files and img files but I think that may have been determined by the launch script, might be different for tapes etc. I imagine .zip isn't supported or has to be extracted I'm not super familiar with AdvMESS outside of my tests though by your not knowing of the chain command I imagine you never owned a beeb ;)

Fruitybit

@jamesbeat said in BBC Micro on Retropie & Pi3?:

The trouble is, that won't solve the problem of getting it running on Retropie.

I know it's not the perfect solution, so I'm watching closely to see if and when a retropieable version manifests, I hope it does as it would be the icing on the cake so to speak:) but in the meantime.... I can play Space Adventure!!

jamesbeat

@caver01 said in BBC Micro on Retropie & Pi3?:

@herb_fargus no, i didn't do that. Is CHAIN a command I need to learn? Snapper.img? Was that just your example image file? I tried to load TheHacker.zip I think.

I don't think it likes zip files. My installation won't even recognize them. Try unzipping it - at least on the version I'm using it just loads itself (as long as it's a disk image).

It looks cool running on your arcade machine lol

pjft

@spmbrown thanks for the nice piece of history here - I love these bits that pop up every now and then!

I always thought of Elite as a ZX Spectrum game first, but I concede that might've been just me growing up with a Spectrum, and reading Sinclair User and Your Sinclair.

jamesbeat

Quick update:
I bought a Pi3 today.
The Beeb appears to be running a LOT better now.

I played a quick game of The Hacker and I think it's running full speed (it was always kinda jerky)

I didn't mess around with it in earnest because, well, the Atari ST is working perfectly and I got distracted :D

martin8777

@jamesbeat said in BBC Micro on Retropie & Pi3?:

Quick update:
I bought a Pi3 today.
The Beeb appears to be running a LOT better now.

Hello. Sorry to drag up an old thread but how is the BBC emulation on the Pi3 now?
I have an old Acorn Electron that I will be putting my Pi3 into and like you would like to have retropie setup just to do the old computers from my youth. Sadly I don't think retropie supports Elkulator for the Electron so the BBC will have to do.
Just wondering how it all turned out in the end?
thanks.