The BBC Micro Trivia Quiz

Answer: Acorn

Acorn beat some strong competition including Sinclair to win the British Broadcasting Corporation's contract.

Answer: AMX

The mouse came with a software bundle including art and DTP software -this put the price in the region of seventy pounds.

Answer: RS423

The serial port does not use the more common RS232 standard as used by PCs but the more robust RS432 - designed to carry signals over longer distances. Both standards are however compatible with each other and beebs can communicate with PC over a seriallink with no problem.

Answer: The Tube

The BBC Micro was originally developed as the Acorn Proton - a twin processor machine, which was then scaled down to meet with the requirements of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The Tube was a hangover from the Proton's architecture which allowed a second processor to be 'bolted on'.

Answer: BBC Master 512

The Master 512 was an upgraded BBC Master with an internal 186 second processor. This beast boasted 512k of PC RAM - a lot in 1986. It suffered from having to cope with completely non-standard hardware, most evident to the user in the keyboard (fewer and different keys) and the display (slightly higher resolution than the then current CGA and mapped in a rather more oddball manner).

It also needed a tweaked version of DR-DOS to boot from, adding another level of incompatiblity with MS-DOS systems.

Despite the jumble of technologies, as a PC it was still not a bad machine, capable of running programs such as the GEM suite and even, with the right drivers, Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Answer: WHILE - DO

BBC BASIC remains to this day a very powerful and well structured language, however a while loop was not included. Gosub was a very rarely used command on the beeb as the BASIC provided far more powerful Procedures and Functions.

Answer: Kenneth Kendal

The BBC spoke in a true BBC accent, however there was very little it could say with it's limited vocabulary of around 160 words and part-words, it also involved sending you computer to an Acorn dealer to get the two chips fitted. Other hardware devices used more realistic synthesis techniques, but by far the most succesful way to make the BBC talk was Superior Software's !Speech program.

This program used some very clever machine code to create a very high pitched frequency in the sound generator circuit, which was then modulated with the appropriate speech. !Speech could cope with more or less any word you wnated to sling at it, but it had to be spelled fon-et-ik-lee.

Answer: Mode 7

Mode 7 was the teletext mode - it utilised a character generator chip unused by any of the other screen modes and was used in adventure games where RAM was at a premium and of course in conjunction with the Teletext adaptor for viewing pages and downloading telesoftware.

Answer: OS ROM, BASIC

Using a full 16K for both the OS and the language ROM left only 32K for the 6502 CPU to address RAM. Not all this RAM was available for putting programs into - a sizeable chunk was taken up in screen memory and another chunk by OS workspace, this could leave programmers working in high-resolution modes only around 8k to play with! In case you are wondering DFS and ADFS are disk filing systems and LOGO is the programming language used to command robotic turtles.

The BBC was capable of accessing up to 16 ROMS, by paging them in and out, although the board only had space for 5, so third party manufacturers soon started to produce cards which had the extra sockets mounted on them.

Answer: bob's board

You'll only find this out if you start pulling chips out of their sockets! I've found this on issue 7 and issue 3 boards so I'm assuming they all say this - let me know if I'm wrong.