Acorn BBC

4am

Was surprised to discover there's no available emulator within Retropie for what was one of the UK's 'big three' in the early '80s, a system that brought us some truly great titles (none more so that Elite, which was initially released on the Beeb).

I noted a couple of similar requests (as per my link above) in old threads so wondered if there'd been any change in position/policy? Should stress I've used Beebem (http://www.mkw.me.uk/beebem/)/b-em (http://b-em.bbcmicro.com/) in the past.

Seems a rather major oversight to ignore the Beeb when there's such excellent coverage of far less popular systems from the time.

mediamogul

@4am said in Acorn BBC:

wondered if there'd been any change in position/policy?

Advance Mess is now installed alongside Advance MAME if you want to go that route. I'm not sure how well the Acorn BBC is supported, but I run the Bally Astrocade and the Fairchild Channel F through Advance MESS in RetroPie and it can be completely seamless after setup.

caver01

@4am BBC micro is definitely part of the AdvanceMESS build. There are references to Acorn in the code.

I am using advmess to emulate the Apple 2 with success.

Gavlarr1

Is it possible to emulate BBC Archimedes? Applause for hopping on board this thread

Gavlarr1

Apols even - daft spellchecker

caver01

@Gavlarr1 You'll have to do what I did and dig around in here: https://github.com/amadvance/advancemame/blob/master/mess/systems/bbc.c

You will know the systems referenced better than I do.

Gavlarr1

@caver01 thank you for the link 👍

caver01

@Gavlarr1 Sure. I am not familiar with this line of micros (I have heard of them) being from the US, but I do see an a310.c listed among the systems. If you back up a step to the advancemame repository and dive into mess, then systems, you get a sense of how many different hardware configurations are emulated by mess. It's huge, actually.

OneSwitch

@mediamogul Would your Channel F advice be a very good starting point for getting the BBC Micro working? I'm wondering how complex it would be. Would absolutely love to get the BBC Micro working within RetroPie, as was possible with the Channel F.

mediamogul

@OneSwitch

Adding it and getting it to launch shouldn't be any more difficult using that information. If you try it, I'm sure we'd all like to know how it goes, so please post back.

Gavlarr1

@OneSwitch that's great, thanks for your help