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As a student in Australia in the 80's, we ran labs full of BBC model B's and BBC Master 128's all connected via Econet - The level2/3 system was amazing for it's time. At the beginning of each year, the teacher would create a class directory and allow us to create our own user directories and logins under the class directory (we naturally had no access to root), of course you only had access to your own directory and not the parent directory or any additional user directories present under the parent directory. As an inquisitive student constantly looking for ways to hack the network, I found that if you created a user account under the parent directory and made your user name a full stop, you got access to the whole parent directory as well as any user directories present under the parent directory, no matter what individual users had set their permissions to - Sadly, you didn't get access to root (where all the games were stored). It was a small win as a student at the time. As time progressed, we did work out a way to create a root account when the teacher let their guard down during the school fete and allowed more access than they should have so kids attending the fete could play games in the computer labs. Good days and fond memories of both the BBC micro and Econet.

Great video. Are any of rom's available for download?

I really appreciate the presentation and content of your videos. It’s a breath of fresh air.

Awesome content, this is exactly what I needed. I've had a RetroClinic MultiOS for a few weeks now and I'm finally getting around to customizing it, mostly so I can have MMFS built in and use the OS 1.2 and OS 3.x versions and ditch the separate 3.x ROM, and gain access to it in OS 1.2. Thanks for making this video, it explains everything quite clearly.

Excellent video Sir. I also own both a B+ and a Master. My Master is fully kitted out, now I can do the same to my B+.

Takes me back - although we had an Amcom E-Net at school...

Funny! Among your parts and electronic tools you have a Brownian Motion Inducer! Adams would be very pleased!

I've picked one of these up with an AP6/Plus 1 from Dave H on the back of this. Absolutely perfect video, I've watched it dozens of times and have learned a ton about how it all works. Thankyou a hundred times. One question though, is it possible to program MMFS onto the EEPROM if you don't have another SD cart plugged in (like the Elk SD Plus1)? I'm thinking the only way I'll be able to do it is with another MMFS rom in the AP6, and then that should expose the roms to program onto the AP5 ROM. Anyway, maybe I'll take this to the forums if I struggle. I can always manually program the EEPROM on my PC too.

Mom's ivy can you tell her how to fix it

This was another excellently paced and entertaining video, thank you! All the way through I was thinking "but surely the bottle neck is in displaying via the 8 bit hardware, so the speed ups can't be seen", and then wham you hit us with the pi vdu. Bravo

Absolutely excellent and well presented review. Thankyou for this. I knew it was going to be good when I saw the bottle of Laphroaig in the background at the start.

Acorns "dabbling with a 32 bit processor" became the 'Acorn RISC Machine' which launched a family of ARM processors sold by the billions every year!

Games displayed better on a c64 allthough the beeb was far more industrialised

I use to do a bit of bit mapping on the acorn electron lots of maths working out the vdu data its quite simple its set out in the manual as user definable graphics

But will someone soon make a mini new mini version.

VDU stands for visual display unit.....you can change it to 640x256 and theres pokes for multi color but it uses over 20kb of memory...its in the user manual how to do this i remember coloring in mode 0 and using all the colors at the sametime on screen .i use to work my mums knitting patterns into an electron and it was using over 20kb of memory just for that mode leaving about 8000bytes freebl to program with i would use about 4-6 kb in basic programming although programing games in basic is something i almost got the hang of i just couldnt deal with the subroutines and poking around it memory it loaded in hex decimal values

As others have said, excellent video.

Your Electron videos are very interesting and useful to me, so please keep up the excellent work!

Excellent Videos - I should learn how to do better ones myself. Any chance you can contact me? I've some details to pass on about the 2V2 AP5 board and the ROM support - Dave H.

Great video! Well done. Very informative. I've been trying to find the perfect configuration(s) for my Electrons for a long while. It's a shame there's no version of ADFS, with SCSI support, that keeps page at E00 for the Electron. If a similar solution, implementated like MMFS on the AP5 could be found, then ADFS becomes so much more useful. I do like my BeebSCSI hanging off the 1Mhz port. BTW, there's a 5v connector on the AP5 inside, that I use to power the BeebSCSI.

Contrary to the purists, I actually like that you've slowly upgraded your Electron to a hybrid monster more capable and powerful than a Model B. I had a Model B when I was younger which I miss. Never had an Electron, but all these mods are making me seriously consider purchasing an Electron as it's much easier to find a reasonably priced Electron than an even remotely affordable Model B. One of the things I think was great about the Acorn ecosystem was its expandability both in software and hardware. These sorts of mods are totally in the spirit of what these computers were meant to be!

Holy this is hardcore...

Excellent video as always. There's a whole set of functionality I didn't even think about using my AP5 for!

The AP5 is a great bit of kit - not really had the chance to play with it fully, but getting the old Beeb user port for LED flashing and reading thermistors takes me back to 80s Comp Sci degree. I'm still holding out hope for a drop in replacement for the ULA. In terms of point of critical failure, it's the one that seems the hardest to overcome. The Blob ULA is pretty reliable (I have two motherboards, one socketed, and one blob) but it's getting old (as are we all). I've seen a few projects sort of fizzle out on Stardot, so, maybe it's not really doable.

Another nice feature I have used is to add a real time clock to the elk via the I2C bus on the AP5. Great video btw. Looking forward to more on the econet.

I do all my retro computing on FPGA devices these days but it's always great to see new hardware for these systems.

I haven't even heard of the AP5! That's a very cool upgrade for the humble Elk. Thanks for the great video.

Lovely case on that ElkEconet board :) great video too

oh i do hop your going to do this for all the different pitube processor options

This was great. Dearly wish I could buy one or a modern one for my Beeb. Anyone doing production runs of hobbyist boards?

Nice of you to share this.,.

Hi. Thanks for a great video. As a result, I now have the same setup as you. A couple of questions though. You mention a disk interface, which allows use of a Gotek. I can’t find any such device that uses the plus 1. Also, I see you have several language roms and copro applications. Again, I’m having trouble finding them. Do you have any links ir something to these? Thanks.

What about going with a 65F02 FPGA based 6502.

Those of us who grew up with that sound at primary school in the early 80's got to love it again when it was a well used sample in the acid house scene in the late 80's

Can someone pls inform Retroclinic to sort out its SSL and/or security issue on its website. FFS

Brilliant video. One thing I would like to clarify, though with reference to interlace on/off in mode 0-6 (non-teletext). It would be easy to get the impression that, with interlace off one is losing out, that there is some part of the picture generated but never seen. This is not the case at all. The vertical resolution of the BBC micro graphics modes is 256 lines and those same 256 lines are send in every field regardless of the interlace setting. What the interlace setting does is affect where on the TV/monitor they appear, i.e. either in same position twice in a row or one row up/down compared to the previous frame. Teletext is different in that the SAA5050 chip was designed for TVs and generates a full interlaced output, i.e. the two fields, even with a static display, are different.

Fascinating - thanks for taking the time to create this video, in such high quality - much appreciated. I fall into the BBC B fans category, rather than the Master, so learning about the Integra was quite an eye-opener. Is Ken still producing these boards?

Every time I see the BBC micro, I just can't help but think about my school days. We had these things networked all over the place. I can even still remember my login details for econet. *I am 10.254 p110167(I think) 😄😄

Excellent video, thank you

Excellent video and work. How did you connect the RGB2HDMI adapter? I'm assuming you rigged it up to the composite jack. Thanks for sharing

Gosh, this is complicated. An even simpler break down would help me! Even so, I'd love to try this stuff.

the file server should have been written in assembler so that no one can hack the file server.

Very cool! Awesome channel and very informative!

Excellent stuff. Question: when I now switch my Master on all I get is a continuous beep at startup and I can't type on the keyboard. Any ideas? Regards Kevin

It's so impressive just how advanced the BBC Micro was compared to other 8bit home computers at the time.

I've got a BBC Model B+ which can use 32kByte EPROMs, such as the 27256. You can program them with two sideways ROM images so, for example, I have View and ViewSheet stored on one chip, occupying one physical ROM socket but providing two 16kByte sideways ROMs. The 28C256 is an EEPROM, which can be reprogrammed without the need to be erased with UV light and is still being manufactured, which make it more convenient. It's also almost pin compatible with the 27256, but not quite. There are two pins that are different, so I made a small PCB with header pins that fit into a sideways ROM socket on one side and a surface mount SOIC version of the 28C256, a pull-up resistor and a pair of jumpers on the other side. If you set the jumpers to the Program position the chip is connected directly to the pins and you simply plug it into the programmer. When you've programmed and verified it you can put the jumpers in the other position and it looks to the Beeb like a 27256.

I used that one too. While in there, why not change out that hot 7805 with a buck converter?

Is there a MIPS processor option in that PiTube thingy?

Woah... I last saw BBC BASIC on a Model B... this is all rather posh. I loved the assembler, in later years when I've used other assemblers, I always find myself thinking how much nicer/easier it would be if I had the BBC BASIC assembler.

Back in the olden days, I didn't have much interest in The Master... it was a bit too much of a word processing and spreadsheet machine for my liking. Watching your videos, I'm now finding out all the things I missed out on by being far too snobby.