Classic! Here's another nice use of the Beeb in The Adventure Game:tricky wrote:The Adventure Game often used one for the "contestants", here Johnny Ball and I don't know the other two.
Believe it or not - that's my Archimedes monitordgrubb wrote:Found one!
Doctor Who: Silver Nemesis (1988). Nazis hiding in South America use an Archimedes for calculating the return destination of a meteorite conveying a Time Lord super-weapon.
vlcsnap-2017-11-08-21h21m13s534.png
vlcsnap-2017-11-08-21h21m00s242.png
That's a great anecdote. I always assumed the BBC had somebody technical on staff to handle this sort of thing.noggin wrote: ↑Mon May 21, 2018 10:52 pm Believe it or not - that's my Archimedes monitor
I was paid for the day (my 16th Birthday!) to supervise the Archimedes and show the actors how to run the programme (I didn't write it - but I did modify it to make it easier to cue and recue (it just used the space bar to change from memory). It was a prime number calculation in Mode 7 followed by a routine loading a saved screen file in a different screen mode - created in Beebfont on a BBC Micro I think)
They didn't have a matching monitor - just an Archimedes with a Genlock board (to ensure it locked to the video cameras used to shoot the scene and avoid a shutter bar)
Why was I asked? Afraid I'm from a BBC family, and dad was an outside broadcast vision supervisor on that block of Doctor Who. As my parents were divorced, when dad had me I sometimes ended up on Outside Broadcasts...
They probably did on studio shows, but on outside broadcasts (which at that time Doctor Who was, rather than shooting on film on location) it was different. Plus it gave a 16 year old who had to go to work with his dad something to do.dgrubb wrote: ↑Fri Jun 08, 2018 5:55 pmThat's a great anecdote. I always assumed the BBC had somebody technical on staff to handle this sort of thing.noggin wrote: ↑Mon May 21, 2018 10:52 pm Believe it or not - that's my Archimedes monitor
I was paid for the day (my 16th Birthday!) to supervise the Archimedes and show the actors how to run the programme (I didn't write it - but I did modify it to make it easier to cue and recue (it just used the space bar to change from memory). It was a prime number calculation in Mode 7 followed by a routine loading a saved screen file in a different screen mode - created in Beebfont on a BBC Micro I think)
They didn't have a matching monitor - just an Archimedes with a Genlock board (to ensure it locked to the video cameras used to shoot the scene and avoid a shutter bar)
Why was I asked? Afraid I'm from a BBC family, and dad was an outside broadcast vision supervisor on that block of Doctor Who. As my parents were divorced, when dad had me I sometimes ended up on Outside Broadcasts...
lurkio wrote: ↑Wed Dec 14, 2016 9:47 pmClassic! Here's another nice use of the Beeb in The Adventure Game:tricky wrote:The Adventure Game often used one for the "contestants", here Johnny Ball and I don't know the other two.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3FIUiPSHrQ&t=98
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3FIUiPSHrQ&t=16m41s
Just watched "Castrovalva" on blue ray this evening, and the orange screen monitor that Nyssa and Tegan are looking at definately seems to be using teletext mode, it may have been a beeb, but as it's original air date was Jan 1982, they'd have been recording during 1981**, so possibly a little early for a beeb. But I do think it was used in later seasons.....
https://twitter.com/claytonhickman/stat ... 8353255425 thinks it might be an Atom that generated those screens, based on the "D" character not quite matching the Teletext one.Prime wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 10:36 pm Just watched "Castrovalva" on blue ray this evening, and the orange screen monitor that Nyssa and Tegan are looking at definately seems to be using teletext mode, it may have been a beeb, but as it's original air date was Jan 1982, they'd have been recording during 1981**, so possibly a little early for a beeb. But I do think it was used in later seasons.....
The problem with that being that the 6847 in the Atom was upper case only, and did text at 32x16, later on when Nyssa is reading about Hydrogen, there's a screenful of text of mixed case that's more like 40x25.sweh wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 10:55 pmhttps://twitter.com/claytonhickman/stat ... 8353255425 thinks it might be an Atom that generated those screens, based on the "D" character not quite matching the Teletext one.Prime wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 10:36 pm Just watched "Castrovalva" on blue ray this evening, and the orange screen monitor that Nyssa and Tegan are looking at definately seems to be using teletext mode, it may have been a beeb, but as it's original air date was Jan 1982, they'd have been recording during 1981**, so possibly a little early for a beeb. But I do think it was used in later seasons.....
keyboard - 6,7,8,9 correctly have & ' ( ) and if you look closely you can see ;+ and :*Code: Select all
$ bbcbasic
PDP11 BBC BASIC IV Version 0.45
(C) Copyright J.G.Harston 1989,2005-2024
>_
1970s Doctor Who makes frequent use of the BBC's ANCHOR character generator, but the earliest graphics that appear to be from a bitmap display are in "The Invasion of Time" (1978):Prime wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 10:36 pm Just watched "Castrovalva" on blue ray this evening, and the orange screen monitor that Nyssa and Tegan are looking at definately seems to be using teletext mode, it may have been a beeb, but as it's original air date was Jan 1982, they'd have been recording during 1981**, so possibly a little early for a beeb. But I do think it was used in later seasons.....
**and it's not like the BBC wouldn't have had other equipment capable of generating teletext.
Code: Select all
$ bbcbasic
PDP11 BBC BASIC IV Version 0.45
(C) Copyright J.G.Harston 1989,2005-2024
>_
I speculated about "Castrovalva" recently, as I watched it in September as part of my Dr Who 60th anniversary "firsts and lasts". It was recorded 15th-16th September and 29th September-1st October 1981 so probably just a little bit too early to have been an actual Beeb doing the TARDIS Index File.atsampson wrote: ↑Mon Oct 23, 2023 1:18 am1970s Doctor Who makes frequent use of the BBC's ANCHOR character generator, but the earliest graphics that appear to be from a bitmap display are in "The Invasion of Time" (1978):Prime wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 10:36 pm Just watched "Castrovalva" on blue ray this evening, and the orange screen monitor that Nyssa and Tegan are looking at definately seems to be using teletext mode, it may have been a beeb, but as it's original air date was Jan 1982, they'd have been recording during 1981**, so possibly a little early for a beeb. But I do think it was used in later seasons.....
**and it's not like the BBC wouldn't have had other equipment capable of generating teletext.
mpv-shot0001.jpg
"State of Decay" (1980) also uses Teletext (with some neat glitchy effects):
mpv-shot0007.jpg
I'm not sure if either of these are BBC, from "Arc of Infinity" and "Mawdryn Undead" (both 1983):
mpv-shot0002.jpgmpv-shot0001.jpg
But "The Five Doctors" (1983) definitely looks that way:
mpv-shot0006.jpg
I’m sure I can remember (which may mean I’ve completely imagined!) that at some point in the 1980s, Blue Peter ran a competition for creating animated idents on a home computer, to be used between children’s BBC programmes, and that I can remember a period when some of the resulting animations were regularly broadcast.Diminished wrote: ↑Mon Oct 23, 2023 11:23 am I definitely have my suspicions about the first of these 1980s Children's BBC idents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSgX4VVhdBI
I wrote to the BBC asking for a copy of some of the CBBC idents. They said “no”. And added (rather hazy recollection) that the code was such it wouldn’t be a useful teaching aid.Diminished wrote: ↑Mon Oct 23, 2023 11:23 am I definitely have my suspicions about the first of these 1980s Children's BBC idents.
They did run a competition and I remember trying to put together a very naive and thus hopeless entry on someone else's Beeb. Whether there are records of all this probably depends on whether, after the big Blue Peter competition scandal of the late 90s, they stopped the shredder or just let it chew through everything.
Thank you for confirming I’m not imagining this! According to Wikipedia, almost every episode of Blue Peter from 1964 is still there in the BBC archives (and I think the digitised archive is open to educational institutions), so it should be findable…paulb wrote: ↑Mon Oct 23, 2023 3:22 pm
They did run a competition and I remember trying to put together a very naive and thus hopeless entry on someone else's Beeb. Whether there are records of all this probably depends on whether, after the big Blue Peter competition scandal of the late 90s, they stopped the shredder or just let it chew through everything.
