I thought a summary of recent BBC Micro-related activities might be in order, so here goes:

New DOSFS ROM Released

29th August 2001
The internet has opened up a wealth of archived BBC software which can be downloaded at no charge. However being able to transfer this software to the machine presents a serious problem because of the need to jump the gap from the PC to BBC micro.

The DOSFS ROM solves this problem by allowing the BBC micro to read and write PC format floppy discs including those from PCs running WINDOWS which permits much longer filenames.

The DOSFS ROM is available now, priced at 15.00 GBP which includes ROM manual and postage to UK destinations - for more info visit http://www.sprow.co.uk/bbc/dosfs.htm

!DFSReader Updated

15th September 2001
DFS reader is a desktop program for RISC OS (see http://www.riscos.com/) to read and write Acorn DFS format floppies written on the BBC micro. It appears alongside the normal filer icons on the iconbar and behaves just like any other RISC OS filer.

Originally written in 1992 I have now taken over development and recently made a number of handy updates and enhancements as well as a large number of bug fixes.

!DFSReader is free to download along with a number of other RISC OS utilities from http://www.sprow.co.uk/bbc/riscos.htm

Note that this program is for RISC OS only.

8M Ram Disc For The BBC Micro

12th March 2001
Having released both the RAMFS software and circuit diagrams in February 2001's issue of EUG to build an 8M RAM disc, anyone who still hasn't had the nerve to build it on strip board can now order a ready made board!

Depending on whether you feel happy soldering surface mounted components, you may want to go for a ready made and tested board or start with a partly assembled kit to finish yourself.

The RAMFS software gives you high speed, solid state, silent data storage with peak data rates exceeding 20k a second.

For details, go to http://www.sprow.co.uk/bbc/ramdisc.htm

Beeb Utilities Updated

Ongoing
Recently updated titles include:

1. RDPHROM - utility to read the contents from the speech system 'PHROM'
2. TRAPVEC - utility to report any accesses to a given vector (handy for software debugging)
3. FPGAIT - utility to upload images into field programmable gate arrays (handy for hardware designers
4. SETATTR - utility to retrospectively set a file's load/exec addresses (useful if these were lost when sending programs by email)

All of these updated (plus the not recently updated) titles are available to download for free from http://www.sprow.co.uk/bbc/software.htm

As ever, feel free to contact me with any comments or suggestions. Let's hope the next quarter is as exciting as this one was...

Robert Sprowson
info@sprow.co.uk