Acorn Electron - Part Three: Fixed! In more ways than one!
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- čas přidán 15. 07. 2024
- Hi everyone and welcome to this long-awaited episode on the Acorn Electron where we finally refurbish the machine and attempt to solve some of the issues the machine had at launch, and that make the machine a pleasure to own today.
NOTE - The two brown wires are linked to AC current so it doesn't actually matter which way round they go! I blame my eyesight - didn't even clock the AC label!
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00:00 Intro
01:36 Repair
04:55 Clean & Refurb
08:30 Composite Mod
09:00 Elk64SD
Elk64SD
ramtop-retro.uk/
MMFS
github.com/hoglet67/MMFS/wiki...
References
www.acornelectron.co.uk/c-home... - Věda a technologie
I had an Electron as a kid. I remember my mum got a 2nd job just to pay for it !. They were very expensive back in the day, and even more so when mortgage rates in the UK were near 20% at that time. It was 3 months late so i got the machine in March rather than at Christmas. When it arrived from dixons it was dirty, and the power was intermittent. I didnt tell my mum or dad and waited until they were out one day and i took it apart. I was only about 11 at the time but i was into electronics and i found a cracked Solder joint on the power connector. So i reflowed it. I think i had got a shop used unit. After my repair it was sweet. It was great to do my programming at school on the BBC, then bring it home on tape and carry on using my Electron.
Good old mums!And well done for the repair!
6:21 Very good advice (says the bloke that managed to snap a small part of his Elk's casing off when giving it a deep clean). Great to see another Electron being cleaned up and restored.
Whoops! Hope you managed to fix it?
You were ok, but Mrs Retroshack's finest tea towel again steals the show.
Poor me :( Always a bridesmaid and never a bride ;)
I've missed that tea-towel. Good to see it back at work...
I can see that tea-towel getting it's own channel at some point... :) Hope you enjoyed the video :)
One of the best channels on these subjects out there....more more more
Thank you SO much for your kind comments! And yes, there will be more more more :)
I've refurbished a few computers, but i now feel the tea towel i used wasn't good enough! Another great video!
:) Perhaps I need to do a video on tea-towels ;)
Hi all - This ELK64SD is a great bit of kit and really transforms the machine into something really usable. And for those eagle-eyed viewers who spot the stray bit of solder at 08:43 - don't worry, I spotted it too and it has been evicted from the building! :) Hope you enjoy the video!
OK, so I just ordered an Elk64SD because of this video. Now one of my 3 Electrons can be setup and I can relive my teenageer hood playing the games of my youth! :D I guess I'll also have to get out the best tea-towels and give it a good cleaning up.
You know it! A hoopy frood always knows where their towel is! (Obscure reference apologies probably have to follow this...) :)
Enjoy it? I flippin loved it. I grew up on this computer when we had BBC B in school. It wasn't obvious to me at the time that this was so much slower than its larger sibling. I guess a younger mind was in awe with it and it was such a great start for me into the world of IT. Still in it so many years later.
You're right - as a youngster I just thought it was a more affordable BBC without some of the businessy/schooly type stuff in it - I was a Spectrum boy so didn't have either, but I've absolutely loved doing this Acorn series - even though it has made me feel like I missed out on it first time round - FOMO!!! :)
Interesting subject, great editing and filming. Thank you for making the video and sharing it with us!
Thanks very much! Glad you enjoyed it :)
All you are missing is bad copyright free music far louder than the wonderful humorous dialog. Great video!
Ermmm thanks? I think? :) Are you saying that the music in this video is still too loud? It’s at -40db from the dialogue and I can only just hear it in my monitor headphones. Hmmmm.
@@TheRetroShack No, your levels are great, I'm pointing fun at many other videos out there. I like the quality of your videos, thanks!
@@rudge3speed Phew! Good to know because I struggled with that in the early days (lol - early days, only been going for three months! Feels like I've been doing this forever :) :) )
I used to write my BBC WHSmiths/Dixons program in assembler and hook it in to the reset vector so they had to power off the entire set of computers!
I recall my love of the feel of that keyboard like it was yesterday. Spoiler: It Wasn’t. Marvellous restoration of a nugget. (Edit) Dixon’s Special ... So much identification with this!
It's sitting on the bench next to me here, and I swear that every now and again I'm reaching out unconsciously to press the keys!!!!
Excellent! Well done.
Thank you! Cheers!
Recently restored and modded an Electron so was looking forward to this video. Thanks, another quality production. Better get my Elk64SD ordered...
You won't regret it! And good luck with your own refurb!
I am stunned that you don't have more subscribers. Your content is very high quality and enjoyable to watch. Keep up the great work!
Thank you very much - greatly appreciated!
Don't worry, he only had a couple of hundred last month - he's growing at a nice pace and deservedly so - even if it's basically RMC ver 1.1 :)
@@ukcroupier Hey, I’ll take that comparison! RMC is a fantastic channel! Thanks very much :)
@@ukcroupier I much prefer this channel to RMC. It is not like RMC was the first channel of this type and as interest in vintage electronics/computers continues to grow, there will undoubtedly be even more similarly themed channels.
@@jondough76 I have no problem with people using a similar format, I enjoy RMC and I enjoy the love shack, I mean retro shack too.
Awesome video as always.
Thanks very much!
That’s a really cool addon!
Indeedy do! It’s really useful!
Another excellent video. Great channel
Thanks very much!
Brilliant.....we seem to share a similar sense of humour and i must admit i havent grown up much either........still write bum on my sisters kitchen chalkboard every visit lol
hoping a preventative recap is on the cards and looking forward to next vid 👍👍👍
Grow older, never grow up! :)
I'm not sure replacing your cap will actually prevent you writing "bum" on the chalkboard... but your choice of millinery might annoy your sister even more! 😁
Beebs in WHSmith and getting kicked out!
I had a program that would leave the screen looking like the machine had been reset... wait (say) 30 seconds and then start producing an unholy din (The Beeb was by far the loudest)
Giving us 30 seconds to escape before the assistant nearest the computers had time to say "Which little b...... did that?!!"
10 PRINT "BBC COMPUTER 32K" : PRINT : PRINT "BASIC" : PRINT : PRINT ">";
20 TIME = 0 : REPEAT UNTIL TIME > 3000
30 REPEAT SOUND RND(3),-15,RND(255),1 : UNTIL FALSE
Wow... I can still remember it!!!!
Even reading that I can tell it would have annoyed the staff! :) :)
Another excellent video about the Elk. Maybe worth a mention the Elk128SD is also available now for a little more money, with extra Ram and a joystick port to boot.
Blimey! Might have to try and wrangle one of those :)
Great video! I was a Commodore 64 lad back in the day (I still have my original machine)... but I always wanted an Acorn Electron!
Grab one! You won't regret it :)
Don't think you were missing much. I was an Atari fan at the time for most of the late 80s. Before that Commodore 16.
Great channel !...cheers.
Thank you! Cheers!
A friend of mine had one of these. Borrowed it one weekend and couldn't get it to load any cassette games. Eventually took it back to him the same day or next.
That's a shame as they're actually really nice, usable machine :)
The brown wires are 18V AC, it doesn't matter which way round they go.
This made my phone heat up and kick off the bluetooth connection.
Thus is the awesomeness of the ELK ! :) :)
very interesting to us Retro-Krauts because Germany was practically a Commodore country in the 80s with some Sprinkles of Amstrad (sold as "Schneider" over here) and Atari ... it would have been nice to get my hands on some Acorn machines in those days ... I still thinking about getting an Archimedes
Me too :) Got an eye on a local A3010 at the moment :)
The ole' 10 print "something rude" routine was part of the fun when messing around with in store displays.
Years later the fun continued with internet kiosks on campus, except now it had pictures...
Pictures? Yikes! That sounds like a recipe for disaster :)
@@TheRetroShack hehehe. They never found out who. But we did stop. Eventually.
What I want to hear one day is the following
"Well now we have everything working we're going to give it a clean"
"And now we're going to put it all back together"
"Well we've spent 28 hours on the cleaning and rebuild and now it's buggered, totally shot, absolute pile of scrap, I don't know why I bother, load of old 80's rubbish anyway, sod this I'm off to the pub"
What? You think that doesn’t happen?? Lol. I just don’t air those ones :) :)
@@TheRetroShack I think ya missing a trick, I can't be the only one ;)
Ooh that oscilloscope looks interesting - do you have details about it? (PS love the OTT tea towel comments 😂)
i used to type this in to spectrums in the local computer shop
10 print " Jetpac 2 is loading "
20 randomize usr 1234
which simulated a game loading with flashing loading border.. i'd stand back and see how many people would gather around waiting for the game to load and how long they were prepared to wait. lolol
Nice! I bet kids stood watching it for ages!!!! :) :) :)
Evil!
4:47 Nice too meet you! ;-)
If you'd watched the Paul Fellows interview, you'd have met me already :) :) You're not missing much, believe me :)
@@TheRetroShack I have only recently discovered this channel, or shall we say, CZcams has let me discover it. So I have watched most of your video's in the last few days and have really enjoyed them. I am looking forward to seeing more of them.
Actually that's the first review I've seen of the Elk64SD. It looks absolutely amazing, although it's a shame you didn't load up at least one game - I'd love to have seen how 'quickly' it loaded a game from a virtual disc.
In the next episode I’ve planned to do exactly that - comparing the Beeb to the Elk with their respective add-ons :) There will be games and applications aplenty :) Stay tuned! Edit: It’s VERY quick :)
little bit of criticism.
if you have a series it's useful to put a link to the previous video(s) in the description, so people don't have to search for them
That’s a good point - I’ll make sure to do that.
try generating a mandelbrot set or two on this machine, should take about half a day or so. My mate had one and we used to set it running before school and it was the end of the school day before it had generated the image. The case and key cpas could do with some retro bright action since they are a bit yellowed with time. Nice to see the machine back in good working order
Thanks - I did check the colour of the machine as they were a cream colour to begin with. The inside of the case matches the outside perfectly so I think we're all good on that front :) The LC475 on the other hand... Well, I've bulk ordered the chemicals already :) :)
@@TheRetroShack they were cream coloured but i seem to remember them being lighter, it looked more yellowey on camera (might just be the lighting). Cool that you are getting to play with this tech from my formative years, where do you tend to get your machines from?
@@Brett_is_Veng I keep an eye on most places - FB Marketplace, Gumtree, Craigslist, eBay, Local Ads, House Clearance, Auctions etc... It takes time but you can land the odd nice one here and there... and then there's the LC... :)
@12:06
Oh you! :P
This stuff was a bit before my time, so I never got to do things like that.
By the time I was in school in the early/mid 90s, the Beebs were relegated to the first couple of years of primary school, with the later ones in primary school being a mishmash of various Archimedes and some PCs (up to early pentium systems).
Comp school (aka "high school") was all PCs. Starting off with a mish-mash of ancient 286, 386 and 486 machines, jumping to lots & lots of brand new pentium 4 IBM netvista machines in my third year onwards.
Did I say lots of netvistas? Yes, I really mean a lot of them. The school moved to a brand new building. We went from having maybe 30 PCs in the entire school (of about 1000 kids) to something around a thousand of the things. It was a massive jump going from the 2/3/4/86 machines to a pentium 4 and the school simply didn't know what on earth to do with the things.
Ah, 90s/early 2000s computer education in Wales. It was so good. (not).
You know how to make a chap feel old :) ‘bit before my time...’ Cheeky young scamp ;)
@@TheRetroShack Oi, I'm not *that* young! :P
In my case, it was just that little bit before my time, than the kids who use it ironically. These days, we have kids who haven't even seen an optical disk drive, let alone a floppy!
@@TheRetroShack Don't worry, I first used a BBC Micro in college back in the mid eighties... and my first computer, the Sinclair ZX81, celebrates it's 40th birthday this month. 😉
Love your "Spare Capacitors" box. Did you buy it as a kit?
Yep - I have several big boxes of bulk bits :) You can get them online easily enough :)
Nice job as usual! Aren't the 18V connectors AC rather than DC? I think it doesn't matter which way around they go.
Mine had the same issue with the ULA needing cleaning and reseating. The keyboard connector also had some weird white residue growing on it, not sure what that was!
Lol - maybe! I'll have to check that out - I'll feel a bit foolish if it is :) And yes, it's quite strange what you find on these old machines sometimes :)
Yes. It says 18v AC right there on the motherboard. It would not have been designed with unpolarised connectors had there been a risk of getting it the wrong way in the factory.
@@IrrationalRecreation Well, that's me told - didn't even notice that! :) I guess I'll have to fall on my sword for that one :)
@@TheRetroShack Better safe than sorry!
@@TheRetroShack Sorry, didn't mean to come across in a critical manner. I was just a bit too matter-of-fact !
Idea for a future episode. I almost bought an EPROM programmer for my BBC so I could put my code into ROMs, but I ended up making do with loading into my Sideways RAM add-on from disk instead.
I wonder what using an EPROM programmer would have been like.
Consider the idea duly noted and under serious consideration - mainly cos that sounds like fun!
@@TheRetroShack The device I was looking at was sold by Beebug. It had a ZIF socket with a locking leaver. You'd drop the blank in and connect it to a port and run an app that feeds the ROM image into the blank.
Nice. I used to go one stage further than you at Dixon`s then.
As i would type in on the spectrum Print at 10,10 ;"Donky king Loading" : Randomize usr 1234 ;-)
You scamp! :)
@@TheRetroShack LoL i did
My SD card expansion is different to yours. I wonder how many variants are out there ? LOL.
Oscilloscope and Signal Generator ? Digital DSO138 2.4" TFT Oscilloscope Acrylic Case DIY Kit SMD Soldered R2C0 Is it this one and is it any good and do you recommend them ?
Yes that's the one :) And you know what? For the price, and for what I use it for (checking the signal status on IC pins) it's fine - you're never going to get the absolute accuracy that you'd get with an analogue device but for what I need it works just fine :)
@@TheRetroShack Thanks for the feedback. Know where i can get one cheep ? Parts seem to add up a bit :/
@@JohnDoe-qg6hm I grabbed mine off Amazon as a kit - look up DSO138 kit :)
How about a 2nd processor on the Electron?
Or adding a serial port and doing some comms?
Well, Retro Recipes got a c64 to talk to the space station - perhaps I could set my Electron's sights on the Perseverance rover? :)
@@TheRetroShack One of the Electron 2nd processors. www.acornelectron.co.uk/info/electron/pms/E2P.html
@@stephenwalters9891 That is FASCINATING!
In theory you can use a Pi Tube via a cartridge plugged in to the plus 1
why wouldyou not want colour as a default ?
Who knows! :) I certainly wouldn’t :)
What is the difference between a black and white black screen and a color black screen?
LOL - Well, nothing at all :) I suppose I *could* have done all the ELK64SD commands in Red :) You'll see plenty of colour out of the Elk in the next episode where we'll be comparing loading times, game speed differences, sound differences etc between Beeb and Elk software :)
@@TheRetroShack ok! Did I miss something though? Maybe there was something on the screen I didnt see.
@@snorman1911 Could you not see the writing in black and white (and grey) at the top of the first screen, and then in colour on the second? What device are you viewing on, so I can check and see if it shows correctly? Thanks :)
Why did they not use an ARM processor in the ACORN ELECTRON.
Wouldn't that have been something! But watch the Paul Fellows interview and you'll get some answers to this :)
The original aim of the Electron was to be a cut price BBC Micro, so more families could afford a micro with BBC Basic and run BBC software.
IT WAS NEUTERED?!?!?!
Don't you just feel sorry for the poor thing? :)
Nice job!.. Sweet little machine that was a year too late / under spec and overpriced when it was released... and not black. Sinclair and Amstrad did well with their black home computers simply because people thought they looked cooler.. The only way Britain could have ruled instead of Intel, IBM AND Microsoft, would have been for a consolidation of all our home, business and education PC makes into one, government-subsidised range of computers.
--
Sinclair, Acorn and Amstrad together could have maybe ruled business, education and home markets with a small range of compatible, great spec, well priced machines.. Acorn designed CPU, Sinclair and Acorn designed ULAs and new tech. such as 'Wafer Storage'.. SINCLAIR as the brand name due to international fame, with Amstrad getting exclusive distribution rights and Acorn credit for designing the guts (+ Sinclair a little bit)... Acorn would have probably ended up buying out Sinclair and Amstrad after their ARM CPUs took off.
Thanks!
Never grow up !
Absolutely do not intend to ;)