games: BBC Micro: Going retro

Those of you who were alive and in the UK in the early 80s may well remember a very influential documentary on TV called ‘The Mighty Micro’ in which Christopher Evans, not the ginger media prick, the one from the National Physics Institute, predicted the coming micro-computer revolution and emphasized the impact it would have on our lifestyles, industry and the economy.

In response to this, BBC Education started the BBC Computer Literacy Project. They wanted to make a TV series demonstrating the various uses of a microcomputer. Clearly for this, they needed a microcomputer! So they put together a desired specification and put the commission out there to see what they’d get.

They had talks with a number of manufacturers, including Sir Clive Sinclair, but ultimately it was Acorn, whose team pulled an all nighter to get the Proton up and running for their presentation to the BBC the next morning, who won the contract. Thus the BBC Micro was born with its high quality, eminently usable operating system, and great extendibility. There were 4 models in the series, the A, B, B+64, and B+128, followed by two further series, the BBC Master and Archimedes, with a further 8 models between them.

It’s damn cool what these things could do given the specs compared to today’s PCs. The Micro A had just 16KB of user RAM and the B a whopping 32, both running on a 2MHz 6502 processor. But there was a lot of cleverness, like clocking the RAM twice as fast as the CPU and alternating access between the CPU and video display circuits to eliminate speed penalties.
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Throughout the 80’s there were a number of educational TV shows featuring the Micro and how to use it, and it also frequently appeared on Tomorrow’s World, Doctor Who, Gamesmaster and other staples of my childhood TV diet.

The Micro was released in 1981 and although it was pretty expensive, it was incredibly popular, and remained the school computer of choice until the early 90s. Acorn had anticipated selling around 12000 units, but eventually over 1.5 million were sold.

Probably one of the most popular BBC Micro games is of course Chuckie Egg, that bizarre platformer where you play a chicken and must collect all the eggs from each level, avoiding your avian persecutors, to progress to the next. So simple and yet so addictive!

And then there’s the massively influential space trading game Elite by Acornsoft. This game rewrote the rules for micro computer gaming and came up with something highly original instead of the usual arcade re-hash. You play as Commander Jameson and must accumulate credits and upgrade your ship by trade, piracy, asteroid mining, bounty hunting and military missions. With 8 galaxies, each containing 256 planets to explore, you better set aside some serious downtime for this classic.

And of course, I’ve been playing Cylon Attack, based on the original Battlestar Galactica series. The ship design, taken straight from the show, is damn cool and the object of the game is to blow up all the Cylon ships and return to your base ship. You have to be quite tactical with refuelling and not leaving your base ship vulnerable too long. A fracking good game.

So there you have it, the wonderful BBC Micro and how to reproduce her in all her glory.

For the best of the rest:

Gondolin:
In most cases reviewers are sent a micro on loan for four weeks (though I have known cases when the period was four days!) and they have to find out all about it just as quickly as they can. I’ve had my BBC Model B for nine months and have been able to take my time to discover its good points (and to learn to live with its bad ones!) In fact the BBC Micro I’ve used for most of this period was one of the very first to be sent out and was recently swopped by Acorn for one with the latest MOS, complete with a disc controller card. I’d grown attatched to the old model for one thing, its non-switched mode power supply meant it had a super hot spot that kept me warm all last winter - but, more importantly, it had been entirely reliable and had done me good service. However, with the lastest MOS I’ve got access to all the BBC Micro’s many sophisticated features so I’m not complaining!

BBC:
More than 26 years after Cambridge company Acorn and the BBC united to produce a computer to help educate the UK about the IT revolution some of the principal creators of the machine have gathered to remember its legacy.The casings may be slightly worn and the manuals a little dog-eared but a handful of BBC Micros were fired up at the Science Museum on Thursday as part of a Computer Conservation Society event to mark the legacy of the BBC Micro, know fondly as the Beeb.