BBC printer port (ever used for anything else?)

From: Graham Toal <gtoal_at_gtoal.com>
Date: Sat Sep 18 20:15:41 2004

The only thing I remember the printer port being used for was some cheap-assed
eprom burner, and a weird 9000Hz sound sampler. Usually manufacturers had the
sense to use the 1 Mhz bus.

I really wouldn't go to much effort to bring it off-board in your ACW. I
doubt you'll ever get a chance to use it.

By the way I'm borrowing Joe Rigdon's US Beeb so I can recover the code
on my BBC 5.25" floppies, which is where the sideways RAM loading code
you were looking for is stored. Unfortunately I did't have any copies
of it on the Archie disks (which had been easier to restore).

My experiments with fitting a 5.25 drive to a PC and reading the
files that way were a complete disaster. The first attempt scored
gashes in some floppies until I noticed, then after buying an identical
(but working) drive on eBay to replace the bad one, I found that
the code I had to read the disks just plain did not work reliably.

I tried several PCs, including old ones, knowing the problems with
incompatible disk chips.

I was also unable to get the disks working under any Beeb emulators.
(Unlike with the Archie emulators which worked a treat with 3.5 disks!)

Once I get the US Beeb and can read the disks native, does anyone have
any good suggestions on how to read and transfer disk images to Unix
over a serial line? Remembering that I'll have to bootstrap any process
by typing the code in to the Beeb. I guess I should start wiring up
a Beeb<->PC serial line right now!

G
Received on Sat Sep 18 2004 - 20:15:41 BST