hello there Tom here and welcome to
another Wi-Fi cheap text video this
one's being recorded on February 2 14th
that's the evening of Valentine's Day
and yet here I am sitting in a darkened
room all on my own
yes that's only because my girlfriend
works at a card shop and as you can
imagine card shops have been quite busy
selling Valentine's cards right up till
about now the staff after then stay
behind and get all the stock switched
over so she's working very very late
hence isn't around hence why I'm doing
this video right now right well we got a
show well I posted this on the 8-bit
computers group on Facebook and was
asked to do a video demoing how this
worked so this is my BBC master 1 to 8
an acorn 8-bit computer dating from
about 1986 they were last sold in 1994
towards a late machine for the 8-bit era
and what I have is a Raspberry Pi Co Pro
now that is a recipe 0 which is here and
it's attached by this ribbon lead and
that ribbon leads a 40 pin lead and that
actually goes under the machine into
Anna's direct pin out straight into the
socket called the tube which was a
interface support allowing for second
processors to be fitted to the BBC
micros they all have them including the
earlier model B's so what we'll do is
turn the machine on
we are pretty much a standard a twin
beat boot for a BBC micro and there's
usually nothing about specialist happens
however now hit the brake key you'll see
it now reads acorn tube 6502 64k what
it's now done is the software on the PI
which just it just loads of on the SD
card the PI is being powered purely from
the BBC micros 40-pin out and what
that's done is that's loaded and
emulated 6502 ii processor into the
Venus micro or vice versa
meaning that the BBC micro thinks it's
now talking to a proper secure go to
second processor not an emulator and
that's pretty cool and what does that
mean we can do well technically it means
that we can run second processor
software most of that was sort of
educational or business and yet is
because second processors were bloomin
expensive well one thing that was made
did a special version of it I was made
for the second processor was elite which
is a 3d space backing game and it so
happens that I do actually have a really
authentic looking copy there we are can
you see that yeah and I have attached to
the Beast micro excuse me a modified
Amiga freeing 1/4 inch like it's a
friend of quarter 4 and a half inch 3.5
inch floppy drive I put that in there
just shift brake on the machine it will
now load from floppy disk and look at
the speed the man is running a liter so
let's just launch and I can tell you a
nice plate is there we are and you can
now fly in a 3d world and it's not too
much slowdown it's certainly a lot more
colorful and a lot faster than the
original BBC micro version because we've
now got a lot more going on such as
anthoer ship flying by which I can try and attack and all sorts will happen
And they all come flying out the space station and get very annoyed with me
yeah anyway you get the idea of that
so that's elite running using an
emulated coprocessor bio artifice but
that's not all this can do let's take
that desk out one of the things it's
quite a recent development and this is
on the star dot forum was that someone
managed to get the full power of our
supply 0 which is it's much later ARM
chip single core ARM chip clocked to one
gigahertz thousand megahertz and they
managed to get the full power of that to
be utilized by an original use micro
which is just amazing and so cool so
what I've done I've updated the firmware
on the SD card it's a standard Russian
PI type firmware it's a config file and
then boot kernels just updated that from
the zip files that are being shared and
what I'm going to do is I'm going to
implement the native Co pro mode and to
do that I can either switch manually in
the config file on the SD card by taking
it over to a PC putting the SD card in
changing the config txt file or I can
just temporary could reconfigure the pie
by talking to it
writer BBC micro now to do that I need
to call an FX command which is asterisk
star FX one five one two three oh that
calls the PI and then we say comma and
then we can select what we want so I
want mode 15 enter nothing happens we
now press break and you'll now see it
reads armed 1176 coprocessor thousand
megahertz it's now waiting with a star
command on the
ARM processors that's the native process
of the PI now waiting for instruction
from the BBC micro that is amazing
so what can we do with that well not an
awful lot because it's a bit buggy and
rather experimental one thing we can do
is we can load a modern version of BBC
basic V or B basic v which is an version
use of RISC OS for the ARM processor so
we try and run the basic and it thinks
it's got on ROM there because the basic
called ROM in the machine is designed
for 6502 that's going to crash and hang
if we try and use it in its mode so what
we need to do is we need to put on an
enhanced basic so what I have here is an
amiga disk I think I may get users going
to hate me really using all their stuff
but these are cheap magazine discs I
bought a load just loose boxed 700k
double-density floppies which all happen
to be old cover discs from the 90s for
amiga and I just wiped them and reuse
them
so I've got on here is a DFS disk image
200k disk image with the rom file which
i got off the startup forum so this is
going to put that in the floppy and what
we'll do is we're just going to ask the
cat just to see read of the registry
there we go
as you can see there's a couple files on
there one of them is pass 1 3 5 I type
star and class 1 3 5 I'll take a few
moments
there we go
our BBC basic 5 starting with more bytes
my care to try and read out and that's
now loaded the basic interpreter so we
can now use commands example lightweight
just won't do anything on its own but
wait wouldn't work if you around with
the native basic two basic one that the
BBC micros came fitted in their roms so
this is kind of awesome this means we
can run much enira software at
ridiculous fast speeds on 30-year old
hardware so you can just imagine the
sort of the homebrew coding projects you
could do that are just insane and it's
all going to be cost compatible or
virtually across compatible with the
raspberry PI's running RISC OS because
the relative that operating system on
the PI uses be basic 5 so it's just like
well ok so let me show you an example of
a program that wouldn't normally work on
a BBC micro and let's just look at
further areas again I put on a program
here called CIL sir not serve as an SI
our CI are sure for silikal basically so
they can cycle those VR let's just clear
the screen
CLS those of you who remember your basic
from you and Commodore 64 Apple tools
and expect your days are going to
recognize all these Ottomans and this
has looked at a good old list so there's
this program which is just to draw a
random circles on the screen and line 30
which is circle and then the random
command so random knew three coordinates
X Y and then the diameter rather so I've
got my coordinates I'm just asking to
random between 0 and 12 thousand two one
thousand three hundred so it's going to
create different and circles etc which
is cool so we should be able to run that
now and it gets so far and then it gets
stuck it says mistake at line 30
this is the program again 9:30
what's wrong the line 30 watch this if I
use the cursor and the classic duplicate
copy key and I'm just going to purely
coffee 30 answer let's change anything
I've just copied it remember it says
it's bad oh now it works I think it's a
bug between a program that's written in
these basic two you try to run in basic
five each other running basic two
doesn't like until you rien put it in
basic five and it does like it I think
it's a slight glitch or so this is quite
a new ROM image so it's still very much
in a sort of hobbyist experimental
stages
this program is now drawing circles so
the circle command in basic wasn't there
something basic for if I remember
correctly someone will correct me on
that but I know for about the recent
micro didn't natively do circles without
a lot of mathematics you didn't have one
command to do it basically what we can
do it is is at the moment is running in
mode zero this is the highest resolution
mode abuse micro can manage we can't
increase the color palette all the
resolutions available because that's
done by the UI allow you LH it rather
within the micro itself so with no
improvement there so we still start for
black white mode for high resolution
which is 640 by two five something on
abuse micro black and white only of
course but what we could do
escape our program will change line ten
which is the mode a go mode oops
smoothly am i doing no - so let me get
the full color palette and but adds a
reduce resolution so it's the cost of
the resolution but we do get more colors
on the system which is kind of cool and
that's just generally randomly drawing
circles which should be possible on a
BBC micro but you can see just make out
the PI 0 here flashing away like mad
trying to run all this so that's kind of
cool
okay let's do a system reset
there we go you'll notice because it's
still in the co pro mode we need to
change the mode to something else now
this particular BBC micro was a or still
is a standard BBC micro master one two
eight which meant it was a stock machine
128k which is not they came with there
wasn't a ramp version called the master
512 now 512 had a built-in code Pro and
Intel 8086 I think it was coprocessor
and that allowed it to run dos now
through the rig we got with the
Raspberry Pi it is actually possible to
run or emulate an Intel processor and
run dos applications which is seriously
cool now to do that we need to change
the emulator again it's all built on the
wrong of the SD card the PI is booting
from so we simply got to ask it to fx50
one two three o which is our address for
the PI remember and this time we're
going to ask it for eight which is Intel
coming to break and now you can see it
now says 80286 and it's brought over 960
k of ram now waiting for an instruction
let's change this going to run this disk
labeled as gem and you may notice it
says ad FS which I'm scribbled on in
beautiful handwriting I've ever and I'll
table that is in a minute so let's put a
disc in okay so if we try and load now
or get a directory that's right cat
is thinking about it
disk failure why is that well the BBC
master had two filing systems for
reading floppy disks it has the FS and
AD FS any of SN stood for advanced disk
lining system versus standard disc
binding system so basically we're in the
wrong formats so what we have to do is
have to change over to ad FS and to do
that we go to control a and then break
it will now automatically read what's in
the drive it says bad command don't
worry about that you notice it also
reads acorn ad FS now let's just get
this gone by doing let's just catalog we
can now catalog that disk and you see it
has a far they're called dust beat so
I'm simply going to type da space and
you can see it's now loading digital
recess
digital research Robert dose which was
an alternative semi compatible PC dos
system two-bath of ms-dos and I've seen
a couple YouTube videos of people
running this on original IBM pcs or very
early and IBM hardware and then we see
anyone try it on the BBC micro before
this is business slightly amended
version acorn did to give a dust
environment for bisa micro hardware so
it's now loaded with an a prompt so very
similar flows you didn't know any of the
rubbed off they still having still a
drive on Windows if you've got floppy
drives installed so we can simply ask
for a dir command directory and it will
now list the PC side or fat side of the
floppy and the files on it now I
mentioned gem I'm gonna sort the disco
graph basically gem was a graphical user
interface that was a rival to Windows
and dr-dos was arrivals ms-dos gem was
arrived with window
they could actually sort of run each
other's applications because it's all
came from the same kind of place which
is kind of cool
so we're going to put in second desk
because we've got to load multiple and
disks up we've got no hard drives we
can't call anything from a central disc
and I'm going to in a moment type check
those of you from remember and Windows
3.1 or 95 you may remember typing wind
to boot windows with eyesight gem this
will take a moment you can hear it
working
wasn't the fastest thing in a world
admittedly there we are it's now loaded
gem desktop I've attached to my BBC
micro a quest tracker ball this was used
for an art ROM on earlier BBC micro
machines this is plugged into the user
port on the visa micro which is why man
to boot a lot of things ah floppy disk
because I do have a an SD card reader
which plugs into the user port and
allows you to load data off SD card
straighten it abuse of micro but
obviously that's needed for a mouse and
we need a mouse to use this then we've
got to find some of Waveland data in and
so the gaps will be disc anyway this is
gem this is version 2 of gem which had
the crippled desktop and I've just
realised you can't really see that so we
just make a slight adjustment so yeah
this is the gem desktop so I hope you
can see that a bit better now I'm sorry
about that
this is gem to gem one had a more Mac OS
or early Apple system for Mac feel and
they were sued by Apple and have to
cripple their operating system and gem
too was results which is what this is
we're running the black and white in the
mode 0 you know we talked about that
high resolution mode gem really does
need to go as high resolutions to beeps
micro you can master which unfortunately
is still quite low and we lose our full
color ability you can run color on the
BBC micro version but you drop your
resolution as a result and then fonts
all kind of clock together and it's it
looks ugly in your color you get like
four colors and Goutham black all rights
not really worth it so I just running a
high resolution black away mode so I
mention the trackpad before we now have
a mouse which can move around and we
have things that we can
menu that we can pull down desktops we
can call things like desktop info
dialogues 1985-1986
desktop and we have disk drives we have
a B on this drive really with this you
should be running a twin Drive I'm
running a single floppy drive so if I
double click on B I will actually crash
the computer so a should work fine
though yes it does and you can see those
the territories of the boot disk for a
up here we have a director directory so
it's a drive gem apps and we're on the
apps is paint dot PP how much you're
gonna open and this will take a moment
again gen wasn't the fastest are
especially reloading off them double
density floppy there we go and we now
have a full painting and graphics
application so go to paint brush
selected I've got patterns and have a
match got some colors available and I
can then draw paint what I want
you've got to remember this is this is
quite impressive at a time especially
when you get the air color version to
work and doing this on a BBC micro tool
is quite something
and we got shapes as well so actually
weren't using a dollar machines cars
instead
and we got things like we can zoom in to
a statue of the text torn so don't do
that there we go so we can zoom in to
this or fine work the pencil tool to do
pixel painting and since remember doing
stuff like this with them not Mac paints
and claryce works paint like in the 90s
on the Macintosh and we have at home so
yeah it has that sort of fairly
conservative menus of save hours
abandoned clothes into typefaces type
sets we can click on the text on the
screen
get off the menus there we go texts I
like trying to do before we've got fonts
as well you look really quite impressive
and then we can save that spring got
painting so there we go gem paint
yeah 1986 so it could actually have
multiple windowing so you could have to
paint files in separate windows open at
the same time and it even does work on
BBC micro versions does computers we're
just now I don't think it's going to let
us opening two new files at once but if
we had to save files which any way of
doing it would be tougher twin floppy
drives why you need them because one dry
would have the application on it and
never drives up the files but I haven't
actually put mine a twin drive on this
today so that's why it's not working but
it's still very impressive the fact that
we're even able to run this and a recipe
is doing all the boot work is you know
impressive that will quit and slam later
that OH
abandon image yes
we'll go back to the desktop so there we
go that's a brief demonstration of my PI
zero assisted BBC micro co pro system
I've been Tom thanks so much for
watching this video I will have lots
more coming up on the Wi-Fi sheep
channel in the near future
bye for now
