Acorn BBC Micro ROM

Complete ROM Sets (Full Sets in One File) ROMs

Rating: 4.7/5

I will jump straight to the BBC B micro, which has DFS so that drives from an IBM computer can be used. Without the DFS one has to use a cassette recorder to store your games/files. The 5.25" floppy drives are used, and if one upgrades to the 1770 chip with the corresponding DFS software, then the 3.5' stiffies can be used instead. The CPU is a 6502, it has facilities for display to a TV or RGB output and then composite output as well. It has A/D converters for joysticks, serial port and a parallel port. It has a unique system of sideways ROM or RAM where one can plug in ROM's that give you a whole lot of new commands, if you use sideways RAM one can store such programs on a disk and load them when necessary. Some sideways boards can take up to 8 different 27128 EPROM's The Basic is unique in a way where there are machine code calls one can make while in BASIC and then a nice way of machine code programming with a built in assembler. These machine code programs can be done within a BASIC program as well. I have installed a speach program, with the associated chips that plug in on the mother board. The manual you get with the computer is excellent, and the software available is very good. There is a networking facility on the main board as well where 128 of these computers can be linked and they all can share a common printer. Screen resolutions can be changed, and with the magazines that support the computer one gets to know all sorts of fancy tricks. In a sort routine done in Win3.1 the BBC B was much faster, although the CPU was a 2meg on the BBC while the Intel processor on the IBM was in the gigs area. This is due to the fact that Windows has a heavy overhead i.e. Basic on the IBM is around 120kB while on the BBC it is only 16K The problem is....Disk drives and floppy/stiffies are no longer available, but there are Floppy emulators that use USB flash ram for storage. Make sure you get the formating program that will allow the BBC to operate, a normal emulator for an IBM wont work as the FAT files are different and the filing structure is different. Better versions were produced later on like the Master and the Archimedes, but one cannot beat the games written for the BBC B (Like Android for instance)