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BBC Micro and Acorn Electron

G

gladders

Member
Joined
Oct 7, 2015
Messages
35
Location
London
Hey all, I was wondering.

I know the Acorn Electron is a scaled-down, budget version of the Micro, using a similar BASIC and architecture.

Naturally, it would be difficult for the Electron to play games designed for the Micro.

But can the Micro play games designed for the Electron no problem? Or does it need to be specifically made for the Micro?

Basically...if I buy a Micro, have I pretty much bought an Electron-compatible machine, or do I need both machines?

Thanks :)
 
The Electron has some severe quirks; so I'm mostly sure that an specific Electron game won't work in a Beeb; but I suppose there're no Electron only games, all of them have its Beeb version.
 
Generally speaking, Electron games are re-written BBC titles (there were a few Electron-only games - I'll come back to that). BITD, it was common for a game released for both machines would have the BBC version on one side of the cassette, and the Elk version on the other. Trying to run the Elk version on the BBC would normally work, but would often be faster - in some cases, too fast to actually play!

The handful of Electron-only titles that were released (I've got a list somewhere, but no names spring immediately to mind) could be converted (often without a huge amount of programming know-how) to run seamlessly on it's big brother, but the games themselves were often so dire that no-one really bothered, unless it was purely an I'm doing this to see if I can do it kind of "bedroom / after-school computer club" endeavour.

If you can lay your hands on enough cash for a BBC, go for the model B, but watch out for exploding caps in the PSU - dramatic, but not fatal (apart from the stink!), and try and get a DFS-equipped version.

Matt
Southsea
 
Also, if you can find one I'd suggest that you look for a BBC with a Western Digital 1770 floppy disk controller rather than the Intel 8271. It's quite annoying that the DFS for the 8271 has to load a program to format disks rather than a ROM resident command :)
 
One minor argument against that advice is that the original Disc-based version of BBC Elite did not work on non-8271 disk setups because the copy protection made use of some specific quirks of the 8271, or so I seem to remember. It may possibly also apply to other original items of disc-based software although I'm not aware of any.

What's the current state of play with HDD / CF card / SD card software storage solutions for the BBC B?
 
jltursan said:
Pretty good, I've one of the kits from Retroclinic (http://www.retroclinic.com/acorn/kitide1mhz/kitide1mhz.htm) fitted in my Master and it runs flawlessly.
Click to expand...

I had a quick look: I have to say that looks like pretty good value for money: The equivalent setup for my Atari ST (using SD cards rather than CF) cost me not much shy of £90.

It does work brilliantly and even at that price costs considerably less than an original Atari ST HDD with the required host adaptor / interface did back in the day, but it looks as though BBC owners can get the equivalent for almost half the price.
 
Yep, indeed it has great value for money. It's easy to install and has an easy browsing of the file system, really cool. In fact, although I have one I'm tempted to purchase another one for my Beeb.
 
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