New Zealand Vintage Computer Forums

Hello all,

I'm a long-time Acorn and BBC computer user (ever since I was a kid actually!). Now working as a software consultant and playing music by night. I recently discovered my old BBC Master Compact that we got second hand from our local school, and I'm on the lookout for other Acorn & Beeb stuff.

Great to see this sort of forum is going well on the net, hooray for vintage computing!

George

Hi George and welcome to the forums.

As chance would have it I'm playing with a disk-based BBC(b) right now! Just experimenting with omniflop (for XP) writing double sided 80 track images back onto disk for the real thing. This worked a couple of years ago with an older PC but I'm having problems with my newer XP box. It seems to format the DFS disk ok, but the BBC can't read the image once it's written on. I suspect the disk controller is a little too modern to write the necessary format.

I have the older (original) PC next to it to my newer one. I'll try that tomorrow. I'll need to use OmniDisk rather than Omniflop though as this machine now has Windows 98 on it, not XP. Right now though, I'm off to bed though!

I like the BBC machines. Well engineered and easy to customise with add on ROMS. Shame they are so underrated.

Ah rightio... I've never tried that but always wondered how it would work with PC floppy drives, i.e. if they can write the 40/80 tracks OK. I assume that software you described does complete low-level formatting and imaging?

Yes, it does.

It certainly worked well with my other machine which is quite remarkable considering the format is single density. Not many PC disk controllers can do single density according to conventional wisdom although the author of omniflop feels a far higher % of them actually can!

Anyway, more testing tomorrow.