stardot.org.uk

I’m glad to have helped in a small way to get Kenton a copy. (Specifically, having a UK postal address and agreeing to forward it!) In an amusing twist, literally a few days after I finally got round to posting it, I was rummaging through a box looking for a network adapter when I found another copy...

For what it's worth, I feel your pain. Same thing happened to me with a 5.25" disc when I was trying to archive some old Acornsoft titles.

And then I buggered up the drive by (I think) nudging the heads when I was trying to clean them...

I don’t think discussing copy-protected code from several decades ago is going to be a problem! I wouldn’t worry about it, really.

I don't think Codemasters did many games at all for the BBC Micro, possibly because they just started out doing C64 / Spectrum stuff, or more likely because they looked at the commercial side and decided it wasn't worth it. I'm sure they absolutely could have been ported to the Beeb, although fittin...

For these sorts of questions it's quite helpful to give a bit of context explaining why you want to do this? How will the resulting value be used, what possible values could it start with, what is the maximum and minimum you might want to count up to, etc. With more context, people may be able to co...

It’s indeed widely acknowledged that the Microsoft’s exclusivity on the IBM PC Operating System handed them a golden opportunity to sew up the PC market. I recall a line I read many years ago in an article discussing it, something like “Once IBM gave Microsoft the exclusive contract, all they had to...

Well, two possibilities spring to mind: 1. The fix was developed and tested on a Master, and there were instructions that stated "You must be in a screen mode that's using shadow screen memory before you do this!" but that bit was cut from the column for space / layout reasons. 2. Original...

Just looking at that description in Hacman's column, it struck me that the 'RUN' after the line that saves the altered file back to disc was a bit odd. Surely that's a typo? Edit: Actually it's even worse ... it's poking a value into screen memory, then saving everything from &1100 to &8000 ...

To be fair, I've just asked the seller on FaceBook and he said that the Electrons did all have motherboards inside.

There was a picture that showed an awful lot of Electron motherboards in a box. This would suggest that *maybe* they've been removed from all those cases!

It's also worth noting that then 'keyboards' might be empty shells with no motherboard inside.

There are always people who’ll look at retro demo videos on YouTube and post comments questioning whether it was really done on original / unexpanded hardware. (Sigh)...

I know my Mk.1 eyes and brain are doing a lot of work to fill in missing detail (blurring your vision makes them even better), so I'm wondering if it would be possible to use some eye-brain hacks/optical illusions to fool it even further when viewed on hardware? I'm thinking of things like the lila...

That's the chip! (Although it's worth noting that there are at least three known variants found in BBC Micros and Masters, by Hitachi (the one above), Toshiba, and VLSI. The VLSI ones behave differently to the other two and although so far the Toshiba and Hitachi seem to be behave identically, it wo...

I was discussing this with a few friends last week. Our conclusion was that it’s either people colluding to drive prices up, or some kind of low-level money laundering or other dodgy practise. If you look at the two top bidders, you don’t get to find out who they are, but you can see their feedback ...

Interesting. Back in the Day, I had a BBC Micro that had lots of modifications. Replay installed, a ROM/RAM board of some description, a dual 1770 and 8271 disc interface, etc. I think every game (including Elite and Exile) ran on it fine ... except Stryker's run. I didn't even know there was anythi...

I need a little help getting Beebasm to build Starquake from source... Starquake is basically one big file that contains 1 large chunk and 3 small chunks, all concatenated together. This big file loads from disc at &1200 and the large chunk is immediately relocated to &E00, while the 3 smal...

Excellent to hear that you'll be playing it. One thing to mention: I have seen Youtubers in the past attempt to play Exile, and give up after jetting around using a joystick for 20 minutes, shooting at a few things, but never really doing the things you're meant to do to make progress. So, as a plea...

Welcome! I heartily recommend the whole "picking up 6502 as an escape from the day job" thing! There are so many resources out there to answer any questions you might have. I can't imagine what it must have been like to develop complicated/difficult techniques 'back in the day' with no int...

Having bought drives from <popular auction site> in the past, only to have them damaged even when wrapped in bubble-wrap, I think if you really want to protect the drive, it can help to use a surrounding layer of those expanded polystyrene blobs (I've just realised I don't know the official term for...

Just to clarify: Do you need the email address associated with the Steam account, or the Steam account name?

Thanks!

Certainly looks like the other crew members are featured! This video confirms it.

https://youtu.be/MBVlzXshOw4

I think you’ll have difficulty doing this on the Beeb version. For one thing it uses pretty much every last byte of memory, and more importantly it does hardware scrolling both horizontally and vertically, so whenever the screen scrolled you’d have to redraw the entirety of the helper area, which wo...

It's been about a month since this challenge finished, but I just wanted to post this:


LOOK AT THAT SCORE! WAVE 10, YEEHAH!

This is amazing work!

Would like to join this but family may have to take priority this time. If I can get the time away I will post again to request the meeting details. In any event, I suspect my time may be better served right now by trying to sort out the boxes and boxes of software and manuals I’ve got, and fix my d...

Quick reply: I believe you have to keep the sound chip write active for at least 8us, which is longer than you've got it active in that code. EDIT: Was going to add an additional sentence to say "I know you're tried a delay, but have you made sure it's 8us" ... but you replied in the meant...

That grommet is a total pain. There are apparently tools that you can use to get it out and in again, but I generally go at it with a pair of pliers and work two small screwdriver blades into the gap between the wider ‘lip’ and the metal case, then lever it out. I’ve often found that it’s the imposs...

edit: deleted this post as I realised it didn’t actually help with the question being asked!

When your sprite plotting / reading code is running, do you have interrupts enabled or disabled? If you are writing directly to ROMSEL and ACCCON, instead of using the OS-approved routines to control whether shadow or main RAM is CPU-visible and/or is displayed and which SWR bank is active, then the...