BBC Games
Although it cost only £235 ($400) and was 6502 based like
the Apple II, the BBC micro had more in common with the Macintosh. It
had its equivalents of QuickDraw, the sound manager, and an INIT
loading mechanism. It supported cassette tape, floppy disks of various
capacities, hard disks, and had a network file system, with the option
of a quarter megabit CSMA network (called Econet) built in on the
motherboard. It supported multiple additional slave processors of many
different kinds, including the Acorn Risc Machine—the world's first
dollar-per-MIPS processor ($27 for 27 MIPS)—which has now finally
reached the USA in the form of the Apple Newton and the 3DO. Its
incomparably good BASIC taught me to use functions, procedures,
recursion, local variables, pointers, while loops etc. so that for
years I never understood the Goto Considered Harmful
debate—but then I had never used one, or a gosub
for that
matter. It had inline assembler, like modern C compilers, but still
provided Operating System calls to do everything, with dire warnings
that IBM PC style poking the hardware would cause your program to fail
on multi-processor configurations or on later versions of the BBC
micro hardware. I offer my gratitude to the geniuses who created this
machine which gave me my start in the computer business.—Stuart
Cheshire
The Acorn BBC, fondly called Beeb by its fans, was introduced in
1981. It was designed specifically
to meet the specs of the BBC Computer Literacy Project, hence the name.
It had the usual 6502 processor and 32kB RAM
It was one of the most expensive micros of the time, but also one of
the most powerful. It had 80-column text, various graphic modes with
up to 8 colors (with 8 additional blinking colors
) and resolutions
up to 640×256, and generally
high computing power. It had no sprite graphics, so many of its games
were 3D or concentrating on realistic physics.
Remakes
| PC Remakes of BBC and Electron Games |
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| Space Adventure |
|
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| Hunchback |
|
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| Repton 3 Electron |
|
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| Repton ADL |
|
BBC/Electron Links
