Date   : Wed, 21 Aug 1996 13:38:40 +0200
From   : Robert Schmidt <rsc@...>
Subject: Re: [BeebEmul8] BASIC and OS ROMs

Simon Christian wrote:
> Can anyone send details of how I can obtain images of the BBC B BASIC and
OS ROMs.
> I have a copy of !6502Host on RISCOS 3.1, is it possible to extract the
ROMs from this program?

In theory yes.  Darren Salt wrote a program for this (riproms.c
available from my pages), but it has been reported not to work
correctly, i.e. the files it produces are not identical to "real" ROM
images and they don't work with emulators.

Otherwise it's just a matter of saving the contents of addresses &8000
to &BFFF as basic.rom and &C000 to &FFFF as os.rom.  My software page
has a utility to save a given ROM to file.

A piece of babble (I'm a bit hung over and don't feel like working): my
BBC came with a Norwegian version of the OS 1.2 ROM (named "NOS 1.2").
The only practical difference was that characters []/|{} were replaced
by our peculiar national characters.  However, for some reason,
Ultimate's Alien 8 and Knight Lore (tape versions) refused to run with
that OS ROM, and those were the *only* programs I had problems with.
They both just hung after loading.  Does anyone have any idea why?  I
guess there must have been some code differences in the ROM too.  Wish I
had my BBC so I could dump the ROM and try it on the emulators.

--
Robert Schmidt <rsc@...       > 
Software Developer / Vingmed Sound tel +47 67124237 fax +47 67124355
Private tel +47 22352293 WWW http://www.nvg.unit.no/~rsc

It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.