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Games That Push the Limits of the BBC Micro
Games That Push the Limits of the BBC Micro
#Games #Push #Limits #BBC #Micro
“Sharopolis”
The BBC Micro, the computer from the British Broadcasting Corporation that helped bring Britain into the computer age. As well as worthy educational stuff it of course had lots of lovely games too, let’s see some that pushed it to the limits.
Colid Hoad’s…
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Tremendous video, and thanks for the lovely shout-out – you did the Beeb proud there 💪 For the programmatically minded, Mark Moxon's annotated source codes for Elite, Revs etc. are a goldmine, great to hear him get a namecheck 😀
bbc micro? isn't that an oxymoron?
grannies garden all the way
Can you post the link to Mark Marxton's website? It's not in the description.
The biggest effect the BBC had was for computer literacy.
That was it's purpose, to get the UK up to speed as a nation that was at the forefront of information technology.
And it worked.
Just in the videogame market it transformed the UK into the most important and successful gaming nation, absolute No. 1.
This continued through the 90s with the Acorn RISCOS machines but became a disaster once everybody switched to yhe Wintel monopoly and "IT lessons" became how to use MS Word and Excel 🤢🤢🤢🤮🤮
We lost a generation of programmers because of that.
Then what did we do?
We invented the Raspberry Pi and became one of the most important software and hardware engineering nations again
The fight is against successive governments looking to cut costs.
Currently the BBC is once again doing sterling work with the BBC Micro:bit.
I'm not a parent and don't intend to be, but if you are, demand that Computing lessons are real computing lessons
Our British citizens deserve more than a life of working retail and fast food 😢
23:58 ARM went on to total CPU domination.
Statistically every other architecture is a rounding error compared to ARM
It's a modern port, but take a look at the BBC Master port of Prince of Persia, it's a miracle impossible port
In defense of SubLogic's FS1, which I played on my C64, it had a comprehensive set of gauges and controls. And color. But managed, maybe 2 FPS from what I recall.
The Beeb was interrupt driven so you didn't have to poll the keyboard which was a super efficient way to operate. It ran like greased lightning. You were able to embed assembly inside BASIC programs if you wanted. Chuckie Egg was magnificent on it.
The Acorn Electron was slower than the BBC Micro, only one sound channel compared to the BBC Micro 3 or 4 channel’.It’s biggest letdown was not having Mode 7 (teletext style graphics)
From what I remember of Elite, by 1985, it had sold over 120,000 copies for the BBC Micro alone. At the time, that was over 25% of BBC Micro owners!
I remember playing Revs on my mates BBC Micro back in the day 🕹️
BIG
BLOCK
CHEVY
The only BBC that’s worth a mention.
As someone who played those games back in that time, you've picked out some gems.
The cheat mode excerpt from Sentinel clearly showed there's no ray tracing involved – just depth sorted polygon rendering (i.e. the painter's algorithm)
BBC Micro vs Apple IIe. Did you Brits get anything as good as Oregon Trail?
You said at 7:24 that you would put mark moxon's dissasembly in the description, but i can't find it there…
Excellent video. Thanks!
Isn't BBC Micro an oxymoron?
the 80s are so fascinating how you could have a different type of computer designed mostly for schools but still getting decent 3rd party support .but its quite strange because when i went to school in the late 90s we had no computers at all in school i had one at home that quite modern. but our school didn't have any until the year 2000 and then they kept the same computers until i graduated so i am not sure what to think about that era .
To b honest it's not that difficult 20kb video ram only leaves 12kb for a program!
Exile is still among my favourite games of all time. How they managed to fit it into the few kb available still astonishes me.
I found those expansion chips indeed cheating.
Firetrack – advanced gfx chip handling.
I like the way you mentioned the BBC taking off due to education, then the photo shows the schoolkids playing Pac-Man on it!
I'd never heard of Exile, looks great. I used a bbc micro in school in the 80s but didn't know it could run actual games, I never saw any!
Exile. My fave of all time. even now. Although I played on a C^$.
Thanks for the explanation of coding these games, you absolute legend!
You can see a lot of games make good use of hardware scrolling thanks to the flexibility of the 6845 CRTC. It really gives it a good leg up over other framebuffer based computers that didn't have this capability.
Too bad the color palette is so limited.
Good to see Elite a new kind running. I have only ever seen screenshots as it was jumped on for copyright at least a decade ago. It looked good 🙂
As far as I know schools got a discount on the BBC Model B compared to home users which made it a lot more appealing.
The BBC was designed for education, but for gaming the C64 ripped it to shreds on the vast majority of games along with a much larger library. The only time the BBC won was with pure processing power when the C64's custom hardware couldn't be utilised, mostly 3D gaming, also if they could use a higher resolution mode with just 32K it was another advantage over the C64, Revs was impressive on the BBC.
Like many middle aged Brits, we had BBC computers at primary school. They had a couple of computers, but nobody could use them because they were too expensive and they didn't want to risk breaking them.
Brilliant video, thanks. Best BASIC functionally of the time as it was tied in with the hardware and 6502 assembler. Schools had a 50% discount subsidised by the Government.
Microcomputer prices were deceptive because the base units were sold cheaply often without the necessary accessories to actually run them. For example the C64's base price unit was 199.99 but the datacorder added 44.99 and the 1541 disk drive was 229.99. Then you need to think about the cost of a colour TV (180-230) as most families only had 1 TV and the C64 wasn't really suited for sitting under a living room TV like an instant loading console. So realistically a basic C64 system would cost around 430-450 pounds with a the datacorder & TV/monitor or 660-680 with a disk drive. By comparison the BBC with cassette player & monitor would have been about 600 and presumably 800+ with a disk drive. So while the BBC was more expensive, the difference was nowhere near as great once you factored in the costs of the accessories you would need. It also shows just how good of a deal Amstrad CPCs were and why they were able to find success in the 8bit european market despite coming late.
The huh micro???
Oxymoron
Always great to see 80s computers getting showcased! This one was very interesting!
24:30 YESSS finally some PODD on youtube lol . respect ,that's like an 11/10 on the nostalgia scale
Great video, and as you say Colin’s channel is a must for any Beeb/Electron fans
Yikes, never even heard of this thing😂 I was expecting number muncher to max it out but these are pretty impressive for early 80s.
15:58: "Space dude marooned on a hostile alien planet is the basic THRUST of the plot…" – I see what you did there.
You mention that it's appropriate to have a version of BBC Elite with a Raspberry Pi co-processor, because of the Acorn connection, but you forgot to mention that David Braben, one of the co-authors of Elite, also created the Raspberry Pi…!
15:13 "…kind of like two BBCs strapped together…" I think I saw a Robert Mapplethorpe photo of that once.
Loved the BBC. I have 4 up and running at home now, on an Econet, just like schools had (well, almost – a Raspberry Pi is running the network server..)
And I played all of the original games shown here… but I was too stupid to be able to beat Sentinel, ever!
Plan B was the absolute pinnacle of BBC Micro gaming IMHO.
Is Elite wireframe or unfilled polygons? It looks to me like lines behind visible polygons aren't rendered in the rotating ship from the title screen
Half the fun of Computer Studies was playing a knockoff copy of Time Pilot furtively copied onto everyone’s allocated floppy disk until the teacher came in. Thirty odd years later and my son did the same thing but with .io games until they blocked the domain.
Another great 'Limits' video. Thanks.
I love my BBC B. Probably more than any other computer I’ve ever owned. I learned to program on it – I owe my IT career to it in some respects. I also loved the games – both Geoff Crammond and David Braben were gods to me for their pioneering 3d games.