Many moons ago, when silicon clock speeds could be counted by man, I had written some software that looked innocent, that booted from floppy, that played a game, but really walked through the ROMs and EEPROMs plugged in to the BBC looking for anything of interest, and then would dump said ROMs, if they were not recognized as anything standard, to the floppy disk. "My little ROM reaper."
At a trade show I hopped around a few booths, showing off some of my work, putting the floppy disc into various Beebs, usually with the permission of the people who worked the booth (usually). Letting a random person run their software from floppy on your computer at a tradeshow? It was the fashion back in the day.
My software dumped those ROMs quietly as I worked my patter on the sales person. Even the British Army BBCs used for recruiting succumbed to my little ROM reaper. They didn't have anything of interest in them.
For reasons unknown, at one booth, my game crashed, and dumped out some text, "reaping ROMs...", and in my youthful bravado I brushed it off and worked some more patter. One of the onlookers was a sales person from another booth who was very technical, a hardware & software developer and I don't think my patter worked on him, but that person worked for Morley. We got to talking about what my software was _actually_ doing. Which lead to some work for me.
I played only a small part in this particular device. There were other devices of theirs I played a larger part in, i.e. the Beeb RAM disc peripheral, and their never released 10MB Winchester. Which still sits on a shelf in my office. Which I conveniently forgot to return. Also there were other accessories from other manufacturers I had a small hand in for the BBC; the Digigraph, a light pen, a mouse, a genlock (used quite literally by the BBC (BBC Wales)) and a robot arm to name a few.
> The main difference between this and some of the others is that it is tuned digitally via the BBC
You're welcome. I recall that one feature, and a few late bug fixes, were my sole contribution to that project.
That is so awesome! The digital tuner is extremely useful. I think the only thing I wish I could do with it is bung in the tuning hex code instead of seeking or loading from disk. But that is a minor niggle and it works really well :)
Also, that may be your sole contribution, but I suspect that work is the majority of the diff from Acorn's ATS. That and switching the I/O to I2C via the user port.
At a trade show I hopped around a few booths, showing off some of my work, putting the floppy disc into various Beebs, usually with the permission of the people who worked the booth (usually). Letting a random person run their software from floppy on your computer at a tradeshow? It was the fashion back in the day.
My software dumped those ROMs quietly as I worked my patter on the sales person. Even the British Army BBCs used for recruiting succumbed to my little ROM reaper. They didn't have anything of interest in them.
For reasons unknown, at one booth, my game crashed, and dumped out some text, "reaping ROMs...", and in my youthful bravado I brushed it off and worked some more patter. One of the onlookers was a sales person from another booth who was very technical, a hardware & software developer and I don't think my patter worked on him, but that person worked for Morley. We got to talking about what my software was _actually_ doing. Which lead to some work for me.
I played only a small part in this particular device. There were other devices of theirs I played a larger part in, i.e. the Beeb RAM disc peripheral, and their never released 10MB Winchester. Which still sits on a shelf in my office. Which I conveniently forgot to return. Also there were other accessories from other manufacturers I had a small hand in for the BBC; the Digigraph, a light pen, a mouse, a genlock (used quite literally by the BBC (BBC Wales)) and a robot arm to name a few.
> The main difference between this and some of the others is that it is tuned digitally via the BBC
You're welcome. I recall that one feature, and a few late bug fixes, were my sole contribution to that project.