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Thanks all; I have a couple of Electrons in a water proof tub in the garage which I think work, so I'll steal the ULAs from them.

I noticed that both non-working ULAs have totally different sockets for the same chip. Lack of parts on later Elks?

I've been going to my stock of old computers to try and get things working, I've had some successes (one Oric resurrected), but I've got two Electrons that are being difficult as I suspect the ULAs are toast: The first one had a flaky power connected, which was due to the solder being dry and crack ...

I wrote a basic openup library years ago (my local drive has a date stamp on the files of 2011) and a simple dumper, this can be found on my github page: https://github.com/tautology0/dataconve ... ter/openup

The code is a bit hacky.

Interesting - it's not one I've heard of - I can add it to CASA.

The database system was originally written in TRS-80 BASIC and published in a magazine. IIRC only Adventureland and Pirate Adventure was in this format. Later games were coded in machine code, but the database format was unchanged until QP3. The engine was cloned by Brian Howarth, which led to the M...

Bearing in mind the standard version of Island of Xaan has 8 KB of unused memory; I'd expect something special, like graphics.

(Maybe not quite 8KB on the Electron as it doesn't have mode 7.)

Newsflash - in August 87's Electron User Pendragon column Robico announced that due to unprecedented demand for the re-released version of Magus' Village of Lost Souls, Blazing Star will not now be released until the Autumn. Stick with me on this one, I'll hopefully find further clues later on as t...

I have a half written Interword convertor somewhere, that I could probably mangle to do Wordwise.

One of these days I ought to properly script these up to convert WW/View/IW to HTML (or similar).

Oh the good news is that once I replaced the Oric-1's voltage regulator, the computer works. Woo! It's only taken me five years to get to this point...

I know how OE and CE are meant to be used, but I found following the flow in the datasheet brought back random results; forcing them permanently to ground worked every time. I've just powering the EPROM straight off 3.3V and it works perfectly. This means I can revisit it an make a setup that will a...

According to the datasheet, you as well as Vcc and GND, you have Vil which is -0.1 to 0.8 and Vih which is 2 to Vcc+1. Vpp needs to be about 24V for programming; I can't do that from a Pi (well not without frying it). I may try it with VCC being 3.3 to see whether I can just power it at that voltage...

Are you planning to use any kind of level shifters? If not, you could possibly damage the Pi, all of it's GPIO pins work with 3.3V levels. In testing the O0-7 pins had the same voltage as the A0-12 pins; so it bounced back 3.3V to me. But it's a good point; and I probably ought to look at a compone...

Nice detective work there. The CPC version contradicts itself: Looks like I'll need to change my code back! Damn 35 year old bugs...

After a bit of mucking around trying to resurrect a dead Oric-1; to prove that the EPROM was fine, I coded an EPROM reader in python (interfacing to a Raspberry Pi). This was actually a whole lot easier than I expected; the most complex bit was getting the 27 different wires into the right places. A...

Btw, Stardot-user tautology has written a GAC-decompiler/interpreter called "grackle" in C , and he's found that his interpreter somehow has the same bug that I discovered in Beeb GAC!: https://github.com/tautology0/grackle/issues/1#issuecomment-358220683 :?: Yeah; after a while of digging back thr...

I've been extracting stuff from Text Adventures for decades. Some of my code is on my github page which includes Robico, Adventuresoft and the BBC Quill: https://github.com/tautology0/textadventurestuff https://github.com/tautology0/grackle https://github.com/tautology0/ascape I'm not very good at d...

Spoilers be here - this is that dumped output; which looks pretty sane. But it's been decompiled so I would only use it for hints.

It's definitely Graphic Adventure Creator; my GAC dumper tool (https://github.com/tautology0/grackle) makes a semi-decent attempt to decompile it but it isn't perfect as it won't play.

Don't overlook the importance of solder quality. I currently use Kester solder, it is NOS and lead / tin with an internal rosin core. I also have some el-cheapo eBay rubbish, which is not lead based and may or may not have flux (might be coated instead of cored). This stuff is CRAP, it does not flo...

As you've decided to patronise, I'm not going to respond to you anymore.

At work we have use a Metcal soldering station (near £200) which is really easy to use, especially for SMD work and tacking wires to debug pads. At home I generally use a cheap Chinese station, which I think I was lucky on getting a decent one (IIRC it was around the £50 mark). In my hardware toolki...

I don't want to really get into an argument about this; but you seem to be expecting more from certificate integrity than it was ever designed to do. The certificate is prove that the server (or optionally the client) is who it says it is i.e. that stardot.org.uk is stardot.org.uk and not stardto.or...

Cools thanks!

It prevents the library or coffee shop, or their other patrons, from snooping your session and causing mayhem. If that's your only concern, use a VPN or Tor; no need for https at all. That's fundamentally missing the whole point of encryption - using Tor or a VPN you're just allowing people at the ...

+1 on this. As a person who works in the security industry; I recommend that every site is distributed over SSL where possible. SSL certificates are no longer stupidly expensive and can be obtain quite cheap, or even for free. It should only take about 30 minutes of time to configure the site to use...

I plan to dive deeper into the code for the next post; but as this one took me a few weeks to write, it could take a while...

Starter blog post on disassembling Island of Xaan:
https://tautology.org.uk/blog/2017/11/0 ... d-of-xaan/

I'm just the wrong side of 40; but we saw our first beeb in the last couple of years of primary school (only the one for the whole school) - though this was in deepest, darkest Yorkshire (full of inertia for change: I still remember doing maths exercises in £'s, shillings and pence, even though curr...

Right, so this is a museum exhibit, given all these bits have labels on. So why would a fort show off a BBC Micro? Surely that's decades out of the way? Apparently it was used as a radar and weather station back in the 80s and this set up was showing what was used. The whole place was filled with v...

I found a beeb during our summer holiday in the Nothe fort in Weymouth. Bonus points for spotting the printing error.