Emulation: MakeUef & FDC

When you're finally ready to enter the world of Acorn Electron emulation on your PC, it can be difficult to decide on the utilities you are going to need. Of course it goes without saying that you need an Acorn Electron emulator utility, and we'll be taking a look at ElectrEm, the preferred choice, very shortly. From a conceptual standpoint though, it makes more sense to begin a series of articles exploring all of the utilities available with the 'tools' that allow the physical transfer of Electron games from the original to tape or disc.

But first, a word of warning to the complete beginner. Generally, you do not connect a tape recorder to your PC, press play on tape and load Electron games into it in the same manner as you do on a BBC series machine. Nor do you take the disc drive out of your Electron Acorn Plus 3 expansion and by means of some hi-tech jiggery pokery connect it to your PC and load games directly off it. This is just not how emulation works and you will probably not appreciate why until you have indeed read and operated an Electron emulator. Think about it this way though: if emulation required the PC user to use parts of the original hardware and to have the original software to boot, playing an emulated game would be a very laborious process, and one restricted to owners of the original media.

What you do instead is, by means of a utility program on your PC, create a file that is an 'image' of a tape or disc program. The image is saved to the hard drive of the PC and can subsequently be loaded into the separate emulator utility. Now, as you are all aware, large libraries of images are available already on the internet so it is usually unnecessary for the individual to create an image from an original tape or disc he happens to have kept from his Acorn days. Frankly, it is usually easier just to download the image of the game you want than to go through the rigmarole of making one of your own. But if you do have a hitherto undiscovered game in your collection and a burning desire to either play it again or share it with the world then you'll need one or both of the following utilities: MakeUEF and FDC.

These are not the friendliest of names and they give no clue as to their actual use. Be not discouraged - think of this article as an Idiot's Guide To Transferring Elk Software To Your PC and operating them should be a piece of cake. To get them in the first place though, you need to visit the ElectrEm homepage (for MakeUEF) and www.bbc.nvg.org (for FDC) and download them. Each is presently archived in the common 'WinZip' archive format meaning you download one file which is the equivalent of a 'bag' containing the appropriate utility, its user guide and any other data required to make it work. The next step therefore is to 'extract' the individual files from the 'Winzip' format and put them in a new folder so they are ready for use. If you don't have the Winzip extractor program then you also need to pay a visit to http://www.winzip.com and download it as well!

So what exactly do the names mean? Well, although it is far from obvious these days thanks to the Windows OS, a PC file has a filename and a three letter suffix. The suffix denotes the "type" of the individual file: for example 'Document1.doc' is a Microsoft Word document, 'EUGlogo.jpg' is a picture format, and 'index.html' is a web page document. The name 'MakeUEF' comes from the "type" of file the utility creates, i.e. the filename has a '.uef' suffix and UEF stands for Universal Emulator Format. The utility to "make UEF files" is therefore known as 'MakeUEF'. Now, as MakeUEF only creates images of cassette-based programs then perhaps a better suffix would be '.cas' or '.tap' but '.uef' is now established as the image of a BBC or Electron cassette and, for better or worse, we're stuck with it.

FDC is also a Msdos style utility
- Make sure you type 'fd0' (ENTER) before starting!

FDC creates images of BBC or Electron discs and stands for Floppy Disc Controller. Now, as users of the original machines are all too painfully aware, there are a large number of disc systems and disc formats. On the Electron there are single-sided 80 track DFS discs, double-sided 80 track DFS discs and single-sided 80 track ADFS discs. On the BBC there are many more. The good news is that FDC can handle and make images of them all: you simply tell it to create a '.ssd', a '.dsd' or an '.adf' disc image respectively. The bad news is that the disc drive with which your PC is fitted needs to be able to work with the FDC utility and the word on the street is that "newer" PCs don't. (Yet more bad news is that, because you're bound to have only a 3.5" disc drive on your PC, what happens if the disc you want to make an image of is a 5.25" one?!)

With MakeUEF downloaded, unzipped and ready to use though, the PC owner now has the ability to, if he connects a tape player to the 'Line/Audio In' socket on his soundcard, transfer Electron programs on tape to image format. Further, with FDC downloaded, unzipped and ready to use, just by inserting discs into the PC's disc drive, he can read and write Electron programs on disc to and from image format. In my mind, this last point has not been highlighted enough by any of the websites out there yet: You can download a disc image from any of the libraries and, using FDC, write that image to an Acorn Electron disc. That disc will then work on a real Electron just as if it had originally been created on one. I can happily recount that, apart from some initial problems caused by the inadequacies of the documentation that is supplied with each utility, I use FDC on almost a daily basis at the present: both to download and write new disc submissions to 8BS and to read and upload brand new disc games to http://www.acornelectron.co.uk/. It never causes me any problem.

I do not propose to give an indepth critique of the whole of each of these utilities because each does come with its own User Guide. However, as I noted in my article introducing the benefits of emulation (EUG #63), it is not uncommon for a splendid utility to come with a manual that takes a great deal of time to understand.

At the time of writing, although moves are afoot to remedy the situation, both MakeUEF and FDC come with User Guides that are nothing more than a list of commands and explanations of what should happen when each command is typed.

I personally struggled with each. With MakeUEF, the transfer process involves clicking the MakeUEF logo, going to the current directory and following the instructions set out in the manual. Each file of the program is loaded from tape and when the final block of the final file is reached, you will have a working .uef image of the cassette which can be loaded into and played on your Acorn Electron emulator. Or so goes the theory, at least.

Apart from the inevitable "Data?" errors which crop up on almost every block (I kid you not!), the User Guide completely fails to mention what you should do when the whole of the tape has been transferred. Trying to close the window brought objections from the utility that it was 'in the process of transferring' even though I knew it was not! Only by emailing the author (Thomas Harte, also author of ElectrEm) did I discover that the correct command was CTRL-X. Not without much hair-pulling and cursing does a transfer to UEF take place even armed with this information though.

With FDC, I was befuddled to find that after clicking on the icon, all commands I initially entered at the keyboard to read and write a disc brought nothing but the command "?Seek error". I hunted in vain through the elongated appendix of commands trying to discover what this meant. It wasn't mentioned anywhere so I wrongly assumed for several months that I must have one of those disk drives on my PC that was unable to read BBC/Electron discs. What I did not know was that FDC has default settings in place to try and read from an external disk drive (which was non-existent on my setup), and all that was needed was the command 'fd0' to change this to the internal drive. Or to put it another way, it was like the Electron trying to access Drive 1 when only Drive 0 was accessible. As soon as I realised this (Head-slapping time!) then everything else fell into place.

Armed with this information though, you should not fall into the same trap and FDC really is a doddle to use apart from a few minor niggles that trapped this PC-"beginner". These are as follows:

FDC "doesn't like" it if you don't format an Electron disc before you try and write an image to it so, assuming you've entered 'fd0 (ENTER)' and you are writing a ss 80T disc called 'd-count.ssd' then you should type 'format0 (ENTER)' and only then type 'write0 d-count.ssd (ENTER)'
Keep filenames short, ideally to seven letters or less. If they are longer you need to abbreviate them with an odd sequence of characters. This is a limitation of Msdos, not FDC, but it's certainly worth pointing out.
If the disc you are trying to read is damaged, FDC will stop and although it does not do anything so unprofessional as crash, it will sometimes refuse to read any other discs until you have exited it then entered it again.
If you're dealing with a single-sided disc, 'read0/write0'. If double-sided, 'read/write'.
Don't forget that an Electron cannot read the HD (High Density) discs used invariably with the PC. It needs the, typically blue, MD (Medium Density) ones and these are becoming harder and harder to buy new. (Your best bet is a search on "AMIGA DISKS" on eBay as this usually throws up whole collections of old magazine coverdisks for a few pennies each - all of which can be reformatted to use with an Electron!

If you want to fully experience (finally) that dream of having a several hundred strong disc collection for your Electron, then the FDC utility is a must have. The utility is free and so nothing more than your time is required to turn that dream into reality. MakeUEF, as noted earlier, is more difficult to use and the vast majority of Electron games have already been 'uef'ed and it is simply easier to download them. (There is apparently an additional utility to write .uef files back to cassette too, although I have never used it.)

Having both utilities does of course mean that you can, if you have an extensive collection of BBC series' memorabilia, share it with cyberspace without it ever having to leave your home. And those curious to know how the images prevalent on the BBC websites were created have now presumably had their questions answered.

In the next article, I'll finally be presenting a review of ElectrEm (the Acorn Electron emulator) which can be used to play all tape and disc images created using these two tools.

Dave E, EUG #65

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Emulation: MakeUef & FDC

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