Am I nuts? Well? Am I?
Well, to start with despite its age it is a good machine. I can't fault it. The games are some of the oldest around. From e-bay, it cost £50 and I spent another £25 on a SD card reader system for it. Dead simple if you know how to fit it; and the only serious problem I've had with it is that two of the keys weren't working.
The BBC Micro keys were designed to take a beating. They normally fail through lack of use. One was brought back to life after taking a hammering but the other has, despite managing to re-make the connection, lost its spring which hasn't returned despite a bath in electronic cleaning solvent. I have a feeling a bath in something else might sort it.
So, one soldering iron later, the faulty C key was swapped with the little used F9 key and I'm back in business.
On the way is a card which will allow me to take the BBC's RGB output and display it on a standard LCD monitor via the analogue connection.
The SD system can hold the equivalent of 511 floppy disk drive images on a 128meg SD card. In fact, the only problem I'm likely to have in the future is the inability to get hold of SD cards, so I'm going to get a few more next month.
The RGB to VGA system is going to be a little more complicated. Fortunately, Kat Maul thinks it will not be a serious issue. I'll document all this in video in the future. The converter unit cost £30 and there will be a few pennies in some small components to drop some voltages somewhere.
So why?
Well, the BBC B was the first machine I really used as a child. I had it for a good few years and it is what made the magic possible. Befuddled by constantly losing while playing games, I did a James T Kirk, Kobayashi Maru on them. I'd break in to the code in order to stop the game detecting a collision. That way, I'd never die.
This is what led to my programming lust and that translated in to a real passion for IT.
Today's consoles don't offer that possibility. They are there to play the game only and it is so difficult to dick around with them that the process of learning by hacking doesn't happen like it used to. Sony offered an Other OS on the Playstation 3, but then unilaterally took it away. Bloody corporations should be shot.
All those peeks and pokes that children used to do, typing in games from magazine pages, anyone with the time to learn could work out how to change the numbers to their advantage. Normally it involved looking for the number 3 and increasing it to 255 to see if you got extra lives when you played the game!
How I learned was by messing around. The systems weren't that complicated back then, so it was possible to learn the system quite quickly. Modern systems are just to complicated to do that unless you've got serious amounts of time on your hands. Also, there is so much technology around that teachers can't keep abreast. One teacher thought Linux was a virus. Another saw a child passing around Linux CD's in the play ground and confiscated them believing that no software can be free. Ha! Did they have to eat their words!
There is a soft spot in my heart for this particularly old pile of chips. Not only that, it is built like a tank. Thirty years old and still running sweet. Not only that, the capability to read SD cards and transfer data to other computers is something that just shows how many people still invent for and support this platform.
It is a gorgeous piece of kit and I'm happy that I own one again, even if it will get a hammering when I play, "Track and Field." Oh happy days!
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