I have much affection for this rather badly behaved BBC Model B. It was given to me by a friend in 2001 when I was just starting with Beebs again after seven or eight years in the PC wilderness.

It had been in his shed for over ten years but was in lovely condition; a very fine example of an Issue 7 BBC Model B.

At first I could not get it to work at all - just the continuous tone. But then I moved link 25 to the 16K position and it came to life.

Since then I have not been able to get it to work in 32K mode at all. I presume either the memory controller is broken or some of the 2K RAM chips are broken.

It is definitely a BBC B and not a Model A because it has all the sockets at the back and underneath and has the user 6522 and ADC converter on the board.

This was the first BBC I got the second time round. It was tape-only when it came to me and I went to the trouble of putting in an 8271 disc upgrade. I bought a floppy drive from 8BS (the User Friendly drive - see Station 1).

As I didn't have any other Beebs at the time or a Welcome disc or formatting utility, I had to print off the FORM80 utility as disassembled screen dumps from PC-BBC running on my laptop and then poke the individual bytes of data in the BBC one by one. Any crashes and I had to start again - there was no way to save!

After several days of trying, I managed to format a disc and it has been uphill ever since!

E-mail me if you can help me to fix it!

Click here to go back to Broken Things