BBC Micro - was Re: Altair 8800 name Was: Re: Altair 680 Expansion Boards?

[Toby Thain]

On 2016-12-23 2:00 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 23 December 2016 at 15:50, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
>> On 2016-12-23 12:16 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
>>>
>>> ...
>>> The BBC Micro, at another quarter or third over the price of a C-64
>>> but with a superb BASIC instead of CBM's abomination, was what the
>>> unfortunate children of very serious, very wealthy people bought. Not
>>> nearly so many games and not very good.
>>>
>>
>> The Acornsoft games were very high quality (hard to distinguish from their
>> arcade inspirations).
>>
>> But I was mostly interested in programming, so I loved our BBC Micro Model B
>> to bits. A far superior machine to the Apple and Commodores.
>
> I agree that it was a far superior machine. It had its limitations --
> shortage of RAM, notably -- but it was a great design.
>
> I'll have to take your word for it on the arcade games. TBH I was just
> repeating what I've heard -- which was wrong of me. :-( Sorry...
>
> The classics I've heard of, apart of course from Elite, were Repton
> and Revs, but there were others.

The Acornsoft games included clones of Defender (Planetoid), Scramble, 
Pac-man, and many others. They were all written in assembler by apparent 
masters of the craft and were highly sought after.

It's probably true that there were fewer independent games than the 
American platforms, but Acorn invested hugely in their ROM, cassette and 
disk software library (including a number of language ROMs).

--Toby


>
> I never owned or much used Acorn kit in the 6502 era. I only came to
> Acorn via the Archimedes, a machine which I loved.
>