Reviving elderly BBC Micros

Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> writes: That's true for the common Acorn DFS, but you may of course be lucky and find that you've got a better DFS (e.g. the Watford one) or a utility ROM with a format command in one of your machines -- try *HELP. Failing that, J. G. Harston has a neat little format program that's short enough to type in: http://mdfs.net/Software/BBC/FormDFS.txt Note also that if you've got a serial cable, you can easily make the BBC accept input from the serial port as if you'd typed it (*FX 7,6 and *FX 8,6 to receive/transmit 4800 baud, then *FX 2,2 to receive from the serial port), so you can get large BASIC programs over to the machine. XFer is a good candidate for this since it lets you transfer disk images back and forth over the serial link. One version's available from here: http://regregex.bbcmicro.net/ DFS format is FM with 10 256-byte sectors, so you should be able to format and write a disk with ImageDisk or similar. Here's an ImageDisk file of an 80T DFS disk: http://offog.org/stuff/bbc-80t.imd I'm not sure if writing with an HD drive will cause any problems for your BBC's drive reading it, but if so then you may be able to connect your BBC floppy drive to your PC -- I had to fiddle the jumpers on my Mitsubishi MF503A 80T drive to make the disk change signal active low when connecting it to a PC. You may also enjoy the bbc-micro mailing list: http://lists.cloud9.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/bbc-micro Thanks, -- Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org> <http://offog.org/>