BBCMicro.org

Acorn Atom Circuit Diagram

Toby Russell — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:09:52 +0000

With the recent arrival of an arrival of an Acorn Atom came a full circuit diagram.

I have photographed at a reasonable high resolution in case it is of interest to anyone else.

To view, just click on the thumbnail image to the right.

New Arrival: Acorn Atom

Toby Russell — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:11:40 +0000

An Acorn Atom (12K+12K) has just joined the collection. It burned a bit of a hole in my pocket buying it but working atoms are few and far between these days. The machine has a homebrew external 5V PSU and is upgraded to BBC Basic.

The machine came with a few games on tape, an original Atomic Theory manual and a BBC-Type Basic conversion manual.

I plan to expand the machine a little by building a homebrew serial card for it to allow me to transfer software to/from a PC.

New Haul – BBC B Issue 4

Toby Russell — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:51:41 +0000

I nabbed myself a bit of a bargin recently in the form of a BBC B (issue 4 motherboard) in its original box. The machine was described as faulty and came with joysticks and 24 games. I felt it was worth a punt as a number of the Acornsoft titles were ones I’ve not yet got plus the analogue joysticks are pretty sort after in their own right.

Machine arrived in the post this morning and amazingly works absolutely fine. Perhaps the Royal Mails loving treatment managed to fix the underlying fault (believed to be a failed PSU)! The machine is in fantastic condition with a very clean case and no signs of dust on the inside. It doesn’t have a DFS kit installed although I have a few spares machines which I could extract one.

My current plans are to install a 2GB CF drive using one of the Retroclinic kits and use the machine with the Music 500 setup I’ve recently purchased.

Creating an Uber-beeb

Toby Russell — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:22:16 +0000

To give me a nice workhorse machine for playing games and other retro activities, I decided to build myself an uber-beeb, expanded as much as possible.

The starting point for this is one of my BBC Masters which I’ve fitted with the excellent RetroClinic Datacentre which provides a series of RAM disks, the ability to mount DOS formatted USB keys containing disc images, and a CF IDE hard disk interface. At the same time I fitted a new battery and a dual switch MOS, both also supplied by RetroClinic.

The datacentre’s ability to mount USB keys solves in one easy step the problem of transferring files from a modern PC onto the BBC. Disk images can be downloaded from the various BBC websites and dropped onto a USB key attached to the PC. The USB key can then be moved over to the BBC and the images imported into one of the datacentres 4 RAM disks. The reverse process is also possible allowing real media to be backed up to the USB key.

For traditional storage, a pair of 5.25″ floppy drives have been added and for display a CUB monitor.

Next up will be to add a 65C02 internal second processor, a cassette drive, joysticks and a modem.