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Interesting, good to see what PC games look like on a Master 512. Performance much better than I'd expect too.
I wonder whether CGA arcade games are playable on a Master 512?

On a related note - is there a list anywhere of games that got converted to the Master (or had documented hacks to make them work?) I don't know about a list, but I have the following (attached): Boffin - M128 patch by Rich Talbot-Watkins plus cheat (author unknown) Sim - M128 patch and infinite li...

There's also DoggySoft's Diss, a desktop disassembler. Demo here: http://www.doggysoft.co.uk/prog2.html.

Does anyone know whether the Samsung SyncMaster 510MP (or any other LCD monitor for that matter) will accept 15KHz video into the VGA input (as well as the SCART one). The reason I am interested in this is because it would be useful for games on 32-bit Acorns. I suppose I could make a VGA->SCART ada...

I'd be interested to know if all of the 6.5GB is available in the A3020. I think you can technically do this as a bit of a cheat, I bought a couple of c. 1.5GB drives off E-Bay a few years ago which were formatted on an A7000 or A7000+. It appears to work in the A5000 even though the maximum disc s...

I have a 3 button serial mouse. It's switchable between 2 protocols (can't remember which, sorry, don't have it to hand at the moment) and one of the protocols works with RiscPCs. However, it's much less smooth than my proper archimedes mice, as if the mouse movement is being sampled at a lower rate...

Elite does play, but goes into a type of widescreen mode, any ideas to get it running on a normal screen ? If your monitor supports TV resolutions (sounds like it does from what you said about using it with other old computers) you can do "*CONFIGURE MONITORTYPE 1" to fix this. The GUI eq...

Basically SanDisk customer support said that my CF card doesn't support being partitioned. That's weird! I thought that partitioning an IDE device simply involved writing partition table data to a location near the beginning of the device (i.e. it's just writing data as far as the device is concern...

Another alternative is to run proper RISC OS in emulation and intercept the windowing calls allowing them to be drawn into the Linux desktop, WinRisc[2]/Virtualbox/Parallels style. The upside is that applications which rely on modules and RISC OS's, ah, lax security model should 'just work'. If I h...

You can choose the screen resolution in Spheres of Chaos. Not sure whether this is available in all versions - it might not have been implemented in early versions of the game.

If you don't get it working with the real hardware then these somewhat convoluted steps using a PC and an emulator (e.g. Arculator) might work: 1) Connect the HD to your PC and make an image of it (e.g. with dd under Linux) 2) Make an image file the same size as your CF card 3) Start Arculator with ...

Change the emulated model to Master 128 (Hardware -> BBC Model -> BBC Master 128 on the Mac version of BeebEm). I couldn't get the menu to work (the pointer wouldn't move), but I got Aqua Attack to load with the following commands: *ADFS *DIR WELCOME.GAMES.ARCADE CH."Aqua" You could also t...

Hi, We had a Master (non compact) and it came with Aqua Attack and Adventure, which sound like the games you're talking about, on the Welcome disc. The Master Compact welcome disc can be downloaded from http://www.stairwaytohell.com/essentials/acorn/BBCMasterCompact-WelcomeDisc.zip. Aqua Attack was ...

Interesting, I always loved !Draw so it's nice to have a way to translate files...although I haven't seriously used !Draw since I stopped using RISC OS as my main OS about 10 years ago :-( Thanks for releasing, especially with source (which makes it easier to use it on non-Windows OSes). Perhaps the...

You could try DiscKnight. It's another filesystem repair tool for RISC OS and it can create an undo file, which you save to another disc and can use to undo its repairs if they make things worse. I'd be tempted to image the old drive and attempt to repair the image in an emulator though, that way yo...

Here's a little RISC OS desktop proggy that I use to read/write floppy disc images. Sorry I didn't post earlier, could have saved you some time... By Richard Terry with modifications by me. Version history: 1.00: First release. Loads image file (up to 800k) into memory and writes it to a disk 1.01: ...

I don't think it's the same monitor, it doesn't have audio and AFAIK it never came with beebs, only with ARM-based computers. I got my first one with an A4000 and second with an A5000. I had to make an adaptor to use it with the beeb (similar to a Beeb->SCART lead, i.e. some resistors in series, but...

Oooh, I'm sorely tempted, I really wanted a copy of the PRMs back when I was at school. I had to rely on StrongHelp and reverse-engineering because I couldn't afford them - I once worked out how to use the Squash SWIs by compressing and decompressing things with !Squash and looking at the parameters...

AKF18s were infamous for "exploding" - mine didn't actually explode but it did make a loud bang once and ended up being returned 3 times! The dealer (Micro Power, Leeds) told me that there was a mod that Acorn did to improve reliability, so it might be worth trying to find out what that wa...

Cool! Reminds me of using ArcFS etc to cram as much stuff as possible onto Archimedes floppies. I've always been fascinated by compression, would have loved to have seen this back when I was first using Beebs.

What's the compression ratio?

There is an interesting interview with Rob Northern, who wrote copy protection systems for the BBC, Amiga and ST, at http://whdloadrules.tripod.com/rob_northen_interview.html . He talks about Trace disc duplicators being used to produce copy protected discs, so perhaps some protected disc formats ar...

I've got Star Battle to work on the Master - download it from here

Star Battle is a fairly simple but very fun 2 player game.

Unfortunately the version I linked to doesn't work on Masters, and I've lost the version I used to have that does.

I opened up my cable today and discovered that one of the solder joints had broken . After I repaired that my cable worked fine. So I'm going to have a spare SCART lead - probably not such a bad thing because the soldering in the one I've got now is pretty ropey.

Thanks Colin. Feeling lazy (and have heard good things on this site about the ebay ones) so I've ordered one from ebay. If it has the same problem then I'll try changing the resistors in my home-made one.

I decided to move my Master into the living room today, and connected it up to the TV using a SCART lead. The picture isn't great though, as you can see from the first and third photos. The problems only happen with white though, other colours are fine. The same SCART lead with the same TV and (I th...

You could also give Desktop Hacker a try. It lets you suspend single-tasking programs (e.g. games) and return to the desktop, and (among many other things) lets you save a screenshot as a sprite. I bought a CD-ROM with it on a while ago - can't remember which one but I can find out if you're interes...

I agree with Samwise - I prefer to play Elite with an analogue joystick but for everything else I use the keyboard.

Rich Talbot-Watkins wrote:ahh... here we go... turns out we don't need to worry about all that interrupt stuff. It exists only to hack a Mode 1 change without clearing the screen... so all we do is replace that bit of the code with our Master-compatible hack:

Brilliant, thanks very much

I had a look at your patch yesterday to see if I could get it working. I managed to work out what your patch was doing but that's about it. Today I had a look in the Master MOS 3.20 ROM for the equivalent of the code at &C300 in the OS 1.20 ROM, which looks like it sets up the VDU variables. I t...