What a wonderful system the BeeB was, in a way it single-handedly revolutionised the home computer market on its release in the early 80's. I owned two, one for programming and games, the other (a Master) running an early music sequencer called 'UMI' - one that Vince Clark regularly used on stage.
Over the years I gathered a huge collection of software for the BeeB, but during a clearout found that neither system worked any more and so I looked for an emulator on the web. It was only then that I discovered how popular this old system was and that there is a wealth of stuff available on the web for it. So, I am only really adding my small part to the huge volume of effort and work that has already been done.
To use my system you will need a BBC Emulator for your PC - I have only used BeeBEm so other emulator users will likely need to modify these instructions. You will also need to download our Beebaid ROM (written by a friend of mine, John Durrant, sadly no longer with us) and copy it to the Beebfile directory of BeeBEm. If you want to use our Disk Indexing System you should download my Index Disk, unzip it and place this in the BeeBEm Discims folder. The collection of disks is organized into six zips each (except for the last) containing 10 double sided disk images. These are downloadable through the links below and should be unzipped into the BeeBEm discims folder:
| Link | Contents | Size |
|---|---|---|
| BBC Images 1 | Contains disks 01 to 10 | 862K |
| BBC Images 2 | Contains disks 11 to 20 | 599K |
| BBC Images 3 | Contains disks 21 to 30 | 883K |
| BBC Images 4 | Contains disks 31 to 40 | 917K |
| BBC Images 5 | Contains disks 41 to 49 | 707K |
| BBC Images 6 | Contains disks 51 to 64 | 1108K |
Once you have the zip(s), unzip into the BeeBEm discims folder, activate BeeBEm and use the File/Load Disc 0 option to load a disc image. Then key M/F12 or *MENU 0 to display our menu of the disk image. You can then just press the appropriate letter to run the program you want. (*MENU is one of our Beebaid commands - use *H.H. to see a list of Beebaid commands with a very brief description).
Note that we extensively used the *SHIFT and *DOWNLOAD commands available in the Beebaid ROM to get lumps of the games into the right places in memory. Many of the more complex games will not work correctly if Beebaid is not in the Beebfile directory as described above. (One or two of the discs are incomplete - they were very old and I had problems reading them - one game in particular, Lode Runner (LODERUN) only partially works - I would love to have a full working version of that one!)
Finally, I have received a couple of emails from people who have had problems running our Beebaid ROM with later versions of BeeBEm. I run version 1.02 which Beebaid runs fine with - I don't know why it doesn't work with later versions... maybe someone out there can sort this out one day? Anyway, if you do have problems, you can get version 1.02 here (218K).
We wrote the Disk Indexing system when it became impossible to manage all the programs that we had in the collection. If you load in the Index disk and run A.INDPROG (Shift+F12 has the same effect), press 'S' and then Return, it will list all the programs in the complete collection with their disk reference, enabling you to easily find things. The 'S' (search) option also allows you to enter individual program names and search for those; keying for example 'ELI' will find all the ELITE programs in the system.
There is a manual for the Disk Indexing System which one day I will try to get uploaded. In the meantime, pressing the 'H' key gives a screen of Help that lists all the commands you can use. There is also a manual for the Beebaid ROM which again I will try to get uploaded one day - until then, use *H.H. (*HELP HELP) to get brief help on all the commands.
If you have any problems with any of my stuff (not with your emulator) e-mail me and I will do what I can to help. I take my hat off to the people out there who have done so much work to keep the BeeB alive.
Here are some of the best links my research turned up. There are probably many many more sites but these contained all the essential stuff that I used.
| Site | Description |
|---|---|
| The BBC Lives | The primary BBC Micro web site and an excellent starting point for all things BBC Micro. |
| 8 Bit Software | The home of the BBC Micro and Master Computer public domain library. There is a huge amount of stuff here, games, articles, reviews, magazines, educational software, ROMs, compilers, well, the lot really. |
| The BBC Micro Games Archive | A site containing huge amounts of stuff from history of the Beeb, hiscore tables but mainly a huge archive of games. |
| Resources for Retro Computing | Piles of links to other BBC and other Acord/RISC computing sites. |