I work with ARM for work, I have my bbc in my webcam background and it destroys any attempt of having a sensible business call with those guys

My first computer in 1983 was a BBC B. it got upgraded to twin floppies with an external powersupply, a 128k sideways board and PASCAL ROMs. Oh, and a printer. When I changed to an Olivetti M24 the BBC went on loan to another student, just for PASCAL programming. I got it back eventually and kept it in storage until 10 years ago. Then I had to get rid of it because I had no place left for it. As I could not find anybody interested here in the Netherlands, it got binned. Seeing your shows, I should have kept it.....

Right on commander! I'd not heard of the Tube thing before. I see the whole Pi thing as an extension of those pioneering days in the 80s. I've got 3 now, very addictive for tinkering.

BBC-B, sweet memories of times long past. Excellent.

I remember we had one of these on a trolley that they used to wheel around the junior school so different class rooms had access to it. I don't remember anything about it but the memory of it being wheeled about was burnt into my 8 year old mind for life. Then it was blooming wall to wall Rm Nimbus at senior school

Great content. Very pleasing narration. Videos don’t drag on and on. You’re doing a great job. Keep up the excellent work.

When I was at school, and it was mostly all BBC Model B's, I used to enjoy my time in the computer room and do remember it fondly, but I didn't have all that much respect for the machine - it was so expensive, only had 32K, the screen memory organisation seemed difficult to work with, it had no hardware sprites, I couldn't redefine the characters in text mode 7, the bright colours melted my eyeballs, consequently many games were seeming a bit 'rubbish' to me (although I did play Thrust a lot!). HOWEVER... Today, I absolutely get what the designers went for, my focus is less narrow, and these machines now command my total respect. Now, sorry for the long comment, but I also remember an older pupil who had hooked up an Atari 800XL to his BBC, I remember a ribbon cable and I'm pretty sure he had an edge connector jammed into the cartridge port. I believe he was accessing the floppy on the BBC from the Atari and I suspect that he was using the tube interface to do this. Having a cartridge inserted would clear an address window in the Atari memory map for the tube FIFOs, and they are both 6502 machines, so it all seems viable. I'd love to have known/know more about this, it would be fascinating to hear more from the student, but I can't even remember his first name after ~35 years.

Blimey, this takes me back. I was one of those fortune souls (or jammy gits, take your pick) who managed to browbeat his father into buying a Torch Z80 Disk Pack. Cost £800-odd, IIRC. It comprised a Z80 co-processor on a PCB that I had to shoehorn into the Beeb, so it could run CP/M and the included huge office suite applications - the instruction manuals weighed a ton. However, the headline figure for this particular 14yr-old’s fevered brain was the main chassis, which housed two (count ‘em, TWO) 400k floppy disk drives. To be fair, each drive was 2x200k if memory serves, 200k per side cos, oh yeah, each drive had two heads. Have a guess how much time I spent poking about in CP/M and the office suite before consigning the whole shebang onto a dusty shelf. There I was, age 14, with not just one pisspot BBC 100K floppy drive, but two Torch drives! The amount of ‘work’ I was going to be able to do with them! The amount of game floppies I ‘backed up’ for and from friends! On balance, of a lot of expenditure just to play Elite and Aviator, but for a just a short while I was Cock o’ the North in my school’s computer club :) Here’s a linky to the brochure... chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Torch/Torch_Z80DiscPack.pdf Great job you’re doing on your Frankenbeeb by the way, love your channel!

The fact the BBC had/has such a wealth of connectivity was its most underrated aspect. Nothing else was like it. I loved my model B so much and it allowed me to learn not only coding but also hardware control of external electronics. What else had built in d/a and a/d like it did at the time? From traffic lights to turtles and sound to light convertors and everything in between. Such a wonderful machine. Great video. Thank you for the journey down memory lane.

There also exists slightly smaller PiTube boards that fit on the underside, with a pi zero, directly into the tube connection. At the same size there are also boards that emulate, with a pi zero, the original SCSI harddisk. Some of the more advanced co-pros could use a real hard drive. It makes the x86 co-pro, for example, much more useful.

Great video, again. From the default 6502 co-pro screen, typing CALL &2000, will list all the available Co-Processors.

That's really cool, I never knew that the BBC Micro had that much flexibility!

Very interesting and cool to see. Might have to do the same with one of my Beebs, am sure one is good working order and ripe for some extra kit added.

Really enjoyable video, the BBC certainly was a clever bit of kit!

Brilliant - there's something very satisfying about a BBC/Acorn machine with a modern ARM processor attached - the difference in price (£299 in 1982 is worth about £1,128 and the Pi0 is about a fiver!!). Other interesting ideas - could you use a Pi02W instead? Is there a way to make use of the WiFi somehow? Endless possibilities, would love more vids on this topic 👍

Interesting that Retroclinic got mentioned in this video. I got a modified Beeb from them back in 2010 which can take a USB flash drive for storage

Don't get me wrong... I like a nice Beeb (and yours certainly is very nice) but there's still that shiver down my spine at the sight of a 380Z. My last year of school was truly halcyon days with TWO 380Zs in Computer Studies and a Beeb over in the physics lab.

Fascinating.

Am in the only one that has a 3 second dance to the intro music each time?

Hey if you're looking to connect your beeb to a hdmi screen it or set it up for direct capture, you could look into the rgb to hdmi project, it uses a pi zero aswell and works pretty spot on.

I'd love to see the 6809 with OS 9 (or NitrOS9)

The deputy head at my school had a BBC Master 512 on his desk with an 80186 co-processor running DOS. It seemed so cool back in the day!

"No, not the subway..." Says you; I have to leave in two hours. And the subways here get... weird. But seriously; very interesting video. Retrocomputing is bestcomputing.

Is it possible to do anything at all with the RPi's 1GHz CPU?

So, I noticed a 286 emulator in the co-pros, so clearly it would be cool to see the BBC running DOS or even windows 3.1 (not sure you can get a mouse working though...)

Could you use a second processor to increase RAM on the beeb virtually by using the SSD within a program? I'm thinking animated sprites.

Does the 6809 copro run Flex? My mate who "did einginiering" at college used 6809 copros with Flex and it sounded well cool.

I had Technomatic Multiform Z80 2nd Processor that cost £299 back in the day but it connected to the 1Mhz bus and not the Tube.

wow - so the pi can emulate all the ever known tubes? i was expecting it to just be a single processor

I've got a BBC in my parents' loft. Always fancied getting it out and restoring it. I probably won't ever get round to this, but I always had a vague idea for a project to build internet connectivity for one, e.g. a Twitter client. If I was trying to do TCP/IP and JSON parsing on the machine itself, I'm sure I'd need a Tube just to get enough system resources to get it done! (I wouldn't want to do this project by writing a script to run on a Pi that feeds data to the beeb in a simplified format. That seems a cop out to me. I'd want to be able to hook the BBC up to ethernet, and have all the software side of things written in native 6502 code.)

Man would I like to have this setup.

The x86 coprocessor can't run MS-DOS but runs DOS Plus from Digital Research. It aims to be compatible with MS-DOS 2 and it runs its own version of GEM and not MS Windows. The graphics aims to be compatible with CGA.

can the arm processor use it's HDMI output?

Proper nerd stuff! I like! :)

No ECONET?

Wasn't the base design of the BBC actually a front end for testing other processors and then it was grown and used for the BBC contract? I think. If memory serves........

The down vote(s) are from ZX Spectrum owners.

Putting the Pi on top of the RAM might not be a great idea when it gets to summer. The model B is notorious for overheating RAM which manifests as graphics corruption and random program crashes.

56mhz80 but only 32kb fast dual ported video ram no next support...

1:06 - that's so cool, i always say collecting stuff just to put it on a shelf is pointless, and regularly use my old classic macs PCs and UNIX machines to play games and do basic tasks that don't need modern levels of performance. a dusty machine is a sad machine..