Retro v the Flea

Subheading - "Flea infestation gets treated at the Retro Clinic."

So what is this up coming video going to say about the comparison between RetroClinic and E-Bay BBC Bs?

It will start with the Flea Bay machine. Fifty squids for a beeb that had been stored in a garage. It came with a dead spider thrown in for free along with some real estate in the form of webs attached at various points above and below the motherboard. There was also a chemical research plant in the form of a rust experiment on the UHF port. It was so brown that I could have mistaken it for ... well, something else that is brown and causes you to screw up your face in disgust.

All this necessitated removal of the mother board and a good clean ensuing. As usual, foam clean brought the case up a treat, as it did with the key tops.

Unfortunately, the tops were the only parts of the keyboard that came up trumps. The keys themselves were very sticky and some of them were wobbly on the inside; not delivering the crisp feel that a new keyboard brings, but you couldn't really expect perfect performance after being stored like that.

This was, of course, to be expected and I was pleasantly surprised that after a good bashing (very enjoyable after a hard day at work) all but one of the keys came back to life and a replacement key was easily sourced and fitted; such is the BBC's superb design.

Some of the wobbly keys remained but there was another problem lurking. Timing problems.

Despite passing a Watford Electronics Diags test, there was a hidden problem in the keyboard. This is easily seen by a lagging game of Defender, or a game of Arcadians becoming extremely jerky when the shift button is held down at the same time as guiding the craft.

The problem is somewhere in the chips at the top of the keyboard. I'm determined to find out which ones but, the keyboard has now been in and out of the machine so often that only a replacement will do; and trust me, for £15 a replacement, "tested," keyboard is a worthwhile purchase in this kind of case. A bit of foam clean and a tested board can be as good as new.

Replacement chips plus a handful of replacement keys will start to come close to this total anyway.

The power supply can be exchanged for £15 also. If you've got the courage to get the replacement capacitors then you'll be facing different mountings inside the PSU, so I wish you well with that battle.

There are two 6522 chips, one which handles the timing for the keyboard and audio, while the other controls ports like the User port. One died after about a week (the bright, "Beep Boop," started to morph in to a rather pathetic, drone on switch-on) and eventually it failed to start. The other one failed not long after. £14 for two new chips.

There is one to the right of the processor; I forget the number, but that is such a common one to fail that a replacement was waiting for the Beeb before it landed. I didn't wait for that to cause me any problems. Call it £1.

If you're using RGB then there is another £1 chip that you don't need to worry about, but if you're like me and are not only using composite, but are also using the header to make it colour, then this chip could, on overheat, send you straight back to mono again.

The problem with this chip is that it is soldered to the board so you're going to need to be handy with a soldering iron; and you might as well replace the diode to its left as well.

So all this comes to £100 once the failed parts have been replaced.

Another £25 needs to be added for the MMC system so that you are at least able to mount SSD images on the machine. The MMC system also pages at 1B00 which does give it a few problems when running some disk based games.

In terms of cash difference, that's £35.

But I tell you ... that £35 counts for nothing when I tell you what is in store for you on the RetroClinic beast ... and I'm not kidding. If I were to walk in to RetroClinic's workshop, I wouldn't be surprised to find the cast of, "Pimp My Ride."

A look underneath the motherboard reveals that the tag lines (used to patch the ROM sockets) are heat glued in to place and are neatly soldered and cut to the right length. The icing to this cake was finding a rubber sleeve around the ribbon cable which led to the data centre; to protect it from the solder points. Nice touch.

We'll take the issue 7 board and the Watford disk controller as read; it is expected from R.C. What isn't expected is the degree of work that has gone in to those sockets and it isn't fully appreciated until you stick *ROM in to the prompt.

14 - DFS 2.26
13 - RAM FS 1.0
10 - Basic
09 - EXMON II
06 - Combi ROM
05 - The BASIC Editor 1.32
02 - ADFS Controller 1.14b
01 - ADT 2.00

Those eight ROMS are a damn good foundation for any serious BBC. When you learn that they are delivered by the two chips in sockets 13 and 14, then it becomes even more of a surprise.

Yep, socket 12 is empty allowing for further expansion and socket 15 contains 32K of RAM (mine was a test for a RAM chip that has a built in battery that is rated to last ten years) in to which can be loaded either of R.C.'s ADFS controllers. A switch at the back disables the RAM chip if needed and when the battery in the chip finally packs in, you can change it for another; there isn't any soldering work to be undone. R.C. has made this really easy.

The only down side to this is that a ROM expansion board can't be fitted but, given what comes in here, I can't see many people having a serious complaint against that.

The location of BASIC in slot 10 is interesting as this allows another language ROM to either be installed physically in socket 12 or logically in RAM sockets 11 or 15 (although 15 is best used for the ADFS) and BASIC can thus be over ridden with another language by default without having to mess around changing chips and having the associated damage risk.

It is obvious that a considerable amount of thought and work has gone in to this ROM configuration.

Finally, we come to the DataCentre itself.

The *RAM command puts you in to a RAM drive environment that contains the traditional drives 0 to 3 (plus another little spare bit that I haven't really messed around with) and this is able to interface with the USB port.

The *EXPORT and *IMPORT commands are able to read and write SSD images from any Fat/Fat16/Fat32 device that is attached to the USB port. That means memory cards, memory sticks and even USB hard drives.

There isn't free flowing file data, it is a case of load an image, do what you need and if you want to save it again, then don't forget to export the image again before you switch it off, or you'll lose it.

The RAM drives aren't battery backed up so they die when the power does, but thrown in to the deal was a USB memory stick, so there's no excuse!

A more recent, full 16 bit IDE interface replaces the 8bit interface but like its predecessor is limited by ADFS to two half gig partitions on the CF card. This could be replaced with an IDE device if you wanted, but I can't see the point as there would be no really significant extra storage or performance gain.

It comes with a range of games and other software already installed. Right out of the box you can use this baby.

The ADFS that supports this is another bit of classic engineering. A standard ADFS is loadable (*YADFS) which has page at 1F00 but there is a second, re-engineered ADFS (*XADFS) which has been stripped of a few commands in order to bring page in at 1900. This delivers maximum compatibility with floppy disk game images.

As is traditional, the CF card contains one file which holds the images for, "Winchester," drives 0 and 1.

There was one issue I had with the R.C. machine, in that it suffered the same mono-overheat problem when using the composite. R.C. considers most people to be using the RGB port for display so this isn't on the regular test list.

While I had to do a replacement, I have found R.C. to be extremely approachable and if asked to change this chip with a socket then I dare say that they would most likely accommodate such a request; so if you think you're going to be making use of the composite, then ask them.

Supplied software comes with a CD that has pretty much everything you could need, plenty of stuff that you didn't realise you needed and shed loads of stuff that you'll likely never get around to loading in your life time.

The compilation and organisation of the CD is as well thought through as the ROMs. Overlook the gems on the CD and you will be missing out.

Lastly is the documentation. Freshly printed and well bound documentation covers the concise user guide, the DFS, the ADFS, the DataCentre, the EXMON II system and the ADT commands. A letter also accompanies to get you up and running quickly.

I do keep a standard, traditional user guide handy because I use the index a lot to look things up, but this isn't present in the concise user guide unfortunately.

CONCLUSION

The E-Bay machine being stored in the garage for that length of time, did damage which cost another £50 in repairs. Even though it still costs less than the RetroClinic machine, the amount of work put in to the R.C. machine far, far outweighs this cost difference, as well as the ability of R.C. to accommodate reasonable requests.

Part of the problem is that with an older machine, you never know when anything is going to fail or what it is going to cost you. That's part of the risk you take with a second hand machine that hasn't been stored very well.

But if you're wanting to do serious computing then R.C. is the way to go, because there are parts of it, like the ROMs, which unless you already have the kit and images to produce them, you're not going to be able to easily add this kind of power to a flea bay Beeb.