BBC Deals & Offers

Has anyone ever seen the Kane from Citizen Kane... Third Man is better if you ask me!

The hid a Mike in his bed lol

Awesome Welles

For the time it was ground breaking due to the way it was made. This was the first 'modern' film due to new editing techniques, lighting, set design (you could see the ceiling!) etc. If you are interested in the history of movies, this is a good watch.

Anyone got a spare code, pm me (lol)

Lol happy trolling. Maybe go and eat a dictionary or something. Just for some evidence though, and excluding my own use, I teach in an art and design and performing arts college where the IT suites for the graphic designers, animators music techs, are all Macs as well as all the freelance associates all using their own.

No they wouldn't and that is a common lie anyway, come back with somebody better than that nonsense. You are still a technophobe.

Ahh I thought it was big black c%+& background. Cold from me

The way I see all Apple devices is mediocre hardware at premium prices. What you're actually paying for with Apple isn't the hardware, it's the "premium" brand name and the fine-tuned software. Apple devices run so well on mediocre hardware because the software is designed to run specifically with that exact hardware setup, no variables considered. Microsoft and Android can't do that, because there are just too many hardware combinations out there that run those operating systems to be able to do so.

It depends on your definition of mission critical. VxWorks is specifically geared towards embedded systems. I work for a financial company, and all our services run on Linux variants (AWS, Digital Ocean, self-hosted) - including the mission critical Java services. We've just been acquired by a very large Chinese payment company, which also runs nearly all of its services on Linux variants.

Just the standard one. I've also got a Pocket Go 2 and an LDK Horizontal.

What one do you have?

Snapper's on there: http://bbcmicro.co.uk//game.php?id=2474 I remember Acornsoft releasing unlicensed (but near arcade-perfect) copies of several of the big arcade games of the time, but then having to give them different names after action from Atarisoft. So Pac-Man was renamed Snapper and the ghosts became monsters. Planetoid was an almost perfect copy of Defender though (and the reason I bought a BBC Micro), and Rocket Raid / Arcadians were similarly impressive copies of Scramble / Galaxians respectively.

I've got an Rg-350 emulation device and it plays BBC Micro games. Downloaded loads of games for it.

Thanks

Thanks (y) Just bought 4 blu rays for £8 Frozen Planet Wonders of the universe Life Earth

Omg... That's cheap... I remember when they first came out, they were soooooooooo expensive

They don't seem to allow guest check out and want birthday etc etc

I went for Wonders of the Solar System. Thanks for posting.

I think they are saying you get the seeds but dont get other things like gloves etc , she misspelled "items" and so says "times" instead in this part -------> other times seen

So your email confirms you won't get the seeds you get at the newstand as they are more expensive. But you might get cheaper ones 'where applicable'. So people saying you won't get the seeds you see in the shops are correct then. Thanks for providing this evidence of this.

For those that are cancelling, are you doing it as soon as the £5 is taken or after the 5th issued has been received?

Yes you do, from an email i got. Thank you for your recent email. Subscribers copies normally include seeds where applicable but would not normally include other times seen in Newsstand copies which are usually more expensive. If there is anything else that I can help you with please don’t hesitate to contact me. For and on behalf of BBC Gardener’s World Tina Kendall Email Customer Services

Just received this about the seeds as some people have said they are not included. Thank you for your recent email. Subscribers copies normally include seeds where applicable but would not normally include other times seen in Newsstand copies which are usually more expensive. If there is anything else that I can help you with please don’t hesitate to contact me. For and on behalf of BBC Gardener’s World Tina Kendall Email Customer Services

Ahh, we finally agree on something (lol) it is a very generous offer. Have a lovely bank holiday everyone.

We got there in the end so how about updating the deal to highlight the truth about their generous offer?

Thanks Tapi, I agree, it's a little ridiculous. Thanks for pointing it out.. it must be on desktop though as I still am not seeing on my mobile, nor my email from them to take up the offer. Thanks for sending the link (y)

Also, worth pointung out its just the plug in. Anyone hoping this is a free music production package look elsewhere.

I'm not sure why you're both arguing, one of you seems to be appreciative of the freebie and is a musician, the other is the poor guy who just posted the deal. But just to quieten it down. The site does say "BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover out of your budget? Log in (or create a new account), fill out our questionnaire, and we'll send you a FREE download after 14 days. Alternatively, you can buy and download now." On the page after clicking 'or free' Not sure why you're nitpicking over what it says, but hey hopefully that helps. Also, I think with the founder that op mentioned (haven't watched it all tho)

Thank you so much. My son has recently discovered the joys of Dr Who and is now obsessed. This will break up the moodiness from homeschooling! Heat from me

Heat (y)

Out of this world. Heat added

Tremendous! <3

I've been trying to get through this since last summer. I was listening to it on trips to the caravan, with my headphones on when the kids had gone to bed. I think I'm still on series 2. Unsure it's my thing. It's really good in parts and then I get a bit bored in others.

Thanks OP. Podcast says it's available for 60 days. The other downloads don't show at time limit.

Mr Ee was a classic. A mate of mine had Microvitec monitor and it looked superb on that. I’ve spent a good few hours playing Dangerous and it is good but only in single player mode. Like you multiplayer does nothing for me at all. It was a great scene then as well. We used to knock about with the Gremlin and Alligata guys in Sheffield. If I remember Alligata we’re above Superior Systems on West Steer and Gremlin was upstairs on Carver Street. A mate of mine worked in Datron over the road. Had some proper laughs in those days.

It was probably TL:DR for most people (I kept adding stuff to it after the initial post, which didn't help!). Loved the BBC Micro and Archimedes - probably the two finest machines to exist in the 1980's, even if they were both overpriced (but worth it, IMHO). It was the fact that they didn't have anything "naff" about them like so many of their contemporaries did (the ZX Spectrum being the worst - literally everything about it was awful and yet it sold in bucketloads because it was cheap). Actually, all this talk of disk protection reminded me of a commercial disk copier progam for the BBC Micro that would display a picture of a pirate if you tried to use it to copy itself. Rather than bother cracking the protection (which I'm sure I could have done), I think I just worked out that if you write protected the disk with a protection label mid-way through it loading, it wouldn't detect its own copy protection and would let you copy itself :-) Hey, no point in wasting time cracking it if a sticky label does the job for you! Getting back to Elite, I did play it for a quite a long time to get my £14.95's worth, but I never became "Elite". I think I did try it on or two other platforms later on and, no, I haven't bought Elite Dangerous before you ask (would be nice if they had a Linux version since I consider Linux the sort of successor spiritual home where ex-BBC/Archimedes owners would end up at) - I just don't like multi-player games (so Steam Proton works well for me in Linux - anti-cheat for multi-player is the last major hurdle and I don't care :-) ). Another BBC Micro story from me: I wrote code to "ROM-ise" any BBC Micro game - you could then run it with a star command and it would display the game name on boot (like Disc Doctor and others did). I got an EPROM blown of Mr Ee! (what a great game that was) and could just run it with *mree and it would instantly start. Linux users can reminisce with xmris of course, which actually looks more like a conversion of Mr Ee! than of Mr Do! :-)

Haha fantastic memories I really enjoyed reading that thank you... Took me right back yes the Captain Pugwash was Frak! and it was a great rendition too ! What did he say he would do whip and do nasty things to whoever copied the game ? ! My time with the beeb set me up for a life time working in IT but I wish I could go back to those times. They were special, magical even. Seriously I was disappointed when I had finished your post ever though of making your memories more permanent ? I would pay to read them :-)

It was many, many years ago, so my memory's a bit hazy on this! Computer Concepts' Disc Doctor ROM was an essential toolkit (I loaded it into sideways RAM) - a 6502 disassembler, a memory editor and a disk editor were all helpful. If a game checked for a bad sector, I'd patch the code to skip that check. If it actually loaded data from a "special" sector (formatted differently from normal to prevent copying), I'd let it load the data, patch it to return control and the *SAVE the data out to another disk. I'd then patch the loading code to load from a normal file instead. I suspect one of these 2 methods is what I'd have done with Elite. I will point out that The BBC Micro Advanced User Guide was a mandatory book to buy at the time - excellent documentation on the OS that proved invaluable when patching games and writing 6502 on the machine in general. I had a 6502 programming reference book (I forget its title - black cover with orange heading on the front) and "The BBC Micro Compendium" (Jeremy Ruston's "banned book" where he naughtily documented an entire disassembly of the BBC BASIC ROM - talk about copyright infringement!). Didn't really need any other books on the BBC Micro at the time. You might like to know that Jeremy's documentation of how the BBC BASIC expression evaluator worked was used as a template for a C-based version I wrote for UNIX/Linux systems called calc (which I didn't realise at the time was also the name of a GNU program...slaps forehead). My funniest experience was with Acornsoft Revs - the author had written a sophisticated way of intercepting *LOAD to load from special sectors. I was worried about patching it until I realise that you could just patch to return control and literally type a *SAVE command to save the chunk of memory loaded to by the custom *LOAD! Once I'd then removed his interception of *LOAD, everything loaded from normal files and I was done. I often found that tape protection was more sophisticated than disk protection, even though you were often paying a lot more for the latter and 99% of the time the disk version of the game was identical to the tape version (Elite was indeed one of the rare exceptions to this). Authors would load (or just check for) extra data on tape that wasn't copyable via *LOAD/*SAVE - you'd just patch that load/check out in most cases. I even used that technique in a slightly ironic way in a commercial tape copier I wrote, so that one of the few things it couldn't copy was itself :-) The most interesting tape protection by far was used by Ultimate's Knight Lore - it used precise timings of the 6522 VIA chip to decrypt data. I had the code for the crack completed in a matter of hours, but unbeknownst to me, one line of it was wrong and this messed up the decryption. After many code reviews on and off, 2 weeks later I found the fix and all was good. I was excited to see what new tape protection Ultimate would come up with in their next game (I think it was Atic Atac) and was massively disappointed that *exactly* the same code I wrote to crack Knight Lore worked on the sequel too, so it was literally a 10 minute crack. Biggest letdown ever! As you can probably guess, many BBC Micro games (outside of the much quoted "classics") were more fun to crack than actually play. I was never defeated by any BBC Micro copy protection and this trend continued for a while with the Archimedes I had (I cracked Zarch quickly, wrote a modder that could give me infnite everything and got to see the end screen probably way before the guy who a won a prize for that! Was tempted to enter the competition for that as a cheat laugh, but was worried they might expect me to play it at expert level!). It only stopped when the first compiled stuff came out for the Archimedes - I think it was a Magnetic Scrolls adventure. It used one of those "type this word from a page in a manual" protections and the ARM code the (presumably C) compiler generated was so bloaty/spaghetti to follow (yes, text compression was involved too) that I gave up on it. A good job the game wasn't much cop anyway! BTW, I suspect I was only person to "pirate" (ha!) the Captain Pugwash theme tune from one of Orlando's games (was it Frak or Zalaga I dunno) that he'd buried in a BASIC game loader as an Easter egg for copy protection crackers, convert it to 6502, make it interrupt-driven in the background and then have it optionally play in the background on a tape to disk copier I wrote :-) What a payback that was and it made me chuckle...

Being a bit of a beeb nerd .. I thought myself Beeb BASIC and then onto 6502 Assembler. Interested to know how you went about cracking the protection on Elite.