BBC Micro Flopy Discs

LucianH

The recent thread on the old Acorn computers (https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/3210280) brought back some memories of many an evening hunched over my old BBC Micro.

I have just had a rummage in the loft and found my old 5 1/4 floppies; many of which had programs wot I wrote. I'd love to be able to try and run these on the Beeb Emulator and I was wondering if anybody knows what is needed to be able to get the data off these disks onto a Windows XP based PC.

fwor

If you don't have the hardware (i.e. a 5.25" drive and - just as importantly - a PC with the necessary interface card), your only viable option is to send them to one of the data transfer specialists to have the files transferred to a CD/DVD.

You might get lucky finding very old PCs on Freegle, but most PCs old enough to have that type of floppy drive will have been binned years (decades?) ago.

spenderdave

See http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/bbc/xfer-conv.php3
There are various routines available that can read BBC format disks on a PC, the most well known one is Beebdos. I have played with these in the past. There are a number of problems though, the most serious being that you must have an 5.25 in floppy. Although some of these programs can read 80 track high density disks, there are none that I know of that can read the popular Solidisk format, which I used all those years ago.

Once you have managed to read them, I strongly recommend Richard Russell's BBC Basic for Windows, which is actually now a very advanced program with direct interface to the Windows API - see http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/index.html

Sadly my old BEEB is very sick and will not boot. But I had loads of fun years ago, great machine.

LucianH

spenderdave wrote: »

Sadly my old BEEB is very sick and will not boot. But I had loads of fun years ago, great machine.

I know the feeling. I powered mine up a few months ago after not using it for more than a decade. It made that wonderful beep and came up with the boot screen. I managed to type in about two commands before there was a loud bang and a cloud of smoke and then it was no more :sad: