My “wake the Electron Up” project reached a decent point today. The PSU I got from eBay last week had a twitchy plug on it, so it was not quite powering up the machine. A trip to Maplin to get a replacement, and some of my (somewhat) less than professional soldering later, and this is the result:


It's Alive! by hairydalek, on Flickr

Here’s a picture of the hardware.

IMG_2419 by hairydalek, on Flickr
That’s an Acorn Electron, with the Plus 1 and the Plus 3 (floppy disk drive) add ons.

I am happy. The next obstacle is to get the disk formatting software, which is not on the system but came on a Welcome disk, from the emulator on my Mac to the machine. This may involve some typing as I can’t think of another way to get it across.

Oh that's properly awesome.

Big smile here - well done sir.

Actually, if you can make something work I'm really keen to find out how. I have maybe 1 or 2 disks formatted to the Acorn standard and they're quite full. I'd hate to have to upgrade from my trusty BBC model B just because I can't buy formatted disks

*emails an old Acorn enthusiast friend to see if he still has a copy*

The only thing I can think of at the moment is to copy (manually) the code from the emulator to the Electron using *DUMP <filename> - this gives you the hex for the file. A BASIC program on the Elk would need to read this data (held in DATA lines), poke the code to memory (at the correct location) and then call it. Hopefully it will run and format me a disk. I can then save the data (phew) and then re-run the program, but this time saving the code to disk set to execute - so a *EFORM command will run from the disk.

That’s the plan. It’s a precarious job as I don’t have any other way to save the program at the moment. I’m not sure if the MiniDisc recorder will act as a decent cassette substitute. I’ll have to do some tests.

However, this is not ideal. I may be able to format a disc (and even get software transferred) using my RISC PC which currently in storage. It may come home to help its elder relative. Just having an appropriate formatted disk will help immensely.

Right now, I only have black & white from the Elk. This is because I’m not using the RGB output or the co-axial connection (lack of leads in this department right now). I do have a lead which is connecting the monochrome output to the TV.

Could you transfer it using RS232, or is that on one of the other plus packs?


I was wondering how you connected what looks like a TFT to the Electron?

I still have my 14" CUB 8 colour RGB (3 bit TTL) monitor so no problem in that department. I even made a CGA adaptor for it so I could use it on my very first IBM compatible, which worked great except for the lack of that 4th bit making every colour "bold".

I need to take a few pictures of my own. There's 30 years of computing history in my cupboards, loft and garage

It’s a TV, and as well as SCART and HDMI, it has AV in sockets - Video, Audio L&R. The Elk has video out, as well as RF UHF and RGB. I’m using the Video AV to connect it to the TV. RGB out uses a DIN style plug, so I’ll have to source a lead which connects that to a SCART socket, or (for real 1980s authenticity), use the TV’s ariel tuner.

The TV, a 37" Samsung, really displays the Elk’s output well - no obvious signs of overzealous upscaling. The text is sharp and clear, and even MODE 0 (which BBC Micro folk will remember is very tight on the screen) is handled well. It’s like using a proper monitor, and not a TV!

I was just going to ask what kind of collection you guys have got; by all means lets see photos of your museum.

Now that is real compatibility across the decades

Not everything I have has been photographed. Some are deeply buried in a cupboard at my parents’ house. I hope to be able to rescue that particular part of the collection when my dad’s recovered more.

Anyway, here is what I have:

Acorn Electron (with Plus 1 & Plus 3 expansion boxes)

BBC Model B, along with Floppy Disk controller, drive, Acorn Speech circuit, Graphic Extension ROM (IIRC), AMX Mouse, Music 500 and more (at parents’ house)

Acorn Archimedes A305 - heavily upgraded too. 2MB RAM (it had to be sent off for that to be fitted - it involved a lot of soldering), scanner & video digitising hardware (that was truly early digital photography - and it was not as good as it sounds), and an internal hard drive (250mb IIRC) (at parents’ house)

Acorn RISC PC - this was left to me from a friend’s dad. It’s got an X86 card inside, which means it will run Windows 95 as well as RISC OS. This machine has an ethernet card, which means I _should_ be able to get online with it.

ZX81, plus a 16K RAM Pack, and some games on tape.

Z88 - Cliver Sinclair’s oddly BBC Micro compatible portable. It had BBC Basic built in, as well as an implementation of PIpeDream - which was standard fare on the Acorn Archimedes platform. This is odd, as Sinclair likes to plough his own furrow when it came to computers.

Let’s not forget the Newton 2000, the Apple eMate or the PSION Organiser II.

I do intend to photograph these. I may get the ZX81 out of storage as it has an RF lead, which should connect the Electron to the TV. The RISC PC may be coming home too as it may help with disk access for the Electron. I need to reorganise a cupboard here. It may become the computer storage unit.

ITS A REPLICA! ITS NOT EVEN YELLOW! ! ! !

Nice one.

Actually today I re-installed Virtual A5000 to play Elite. Not as cool as having the hardware.

Eh?

The Plus 1 has a printer port and a joystick port. No RS ports. It may be possible to squirt it at the RPC using a PC formatted disk and copying the data to an ADFS disk. If I can extract it from the disk image the emulator uses, then that will be a big hurdle crossed.

There are these if you have a BBC Micro:
http://shop.ebay.co.uk/?_from=R40&_trks ... Categories

Word of caution from the people at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. If you have a BBC Micro and have not switched it on for a long time, it the PSU may blow. They can be repaired, but apparently a capacitor can burn out.

I want to spark them up so I can show them working, but in rough chronological order:

Sharp MZ80K (£400 c.1984, bought by my parents)
<never forgotten failure to buy a nice sleek Jupitor Ace for about £20 goes here, because my parents were too insulted that I thought it was more fun than the Sharp>
Acorn Electron (£30 second hand, bought with pocket money in 1986)
BBC Model B with various disk drives (gifted to me in need of repair, can't remember when! It works, but there's a faulty PSU capacitor which has to "warm up" - I really need to change it one day!)
Original rubber Spectrum (knackered, suspected fault with the custom chip thinger because it just throws garbage out)
Amstrad PC1640 8086 PC with 640K and 40MB hard card, still working but in my Mum's loft. Given to me by a friend after she finished typing her MA on it c.1992
Various 8086 Oliveti and V20 laptops. The laptops work, but the Oli's need a special Bios boot disk which I can't source...
IBM PS2 - a 486sx 33 with 1Meg RAM and 100MB HDD I think. Perfect condition with original IBM keyboard, monitor and licensed Windows 3.11

The newer kit is boring...

Heather, just realised
I have a copy of quickmail server for os 9 if you want to run it as a mailserver.

I'll list my museum tomorrow as I don't want to type it all out on miphone.