Date : Wed, 03 Jan 2001 13:53:35 +0000
From : Paul Wheatley <p.r.wheatley@...>
Subject: Re: VFS: (BBC Video Disk) : Doomsday Project
>> Chris Thornley <C.J.Thornley@...> writes
>> Does anybody have any documation on the VideoDisk Player you could hook
>>up
>>to the BBC. I belive it was used for the doomsday project. The player as far
>>as Ican rember was a heft beast with BNC A/V Outputs, SCSI, RS232 control
>>ports.
>> Does anyone have a rom image of the Video Disk Filesystem rom (I belive
>>this could be fitted to a BBC Master) and know if it used specially
>>formmatted video disks? or what you could instruct it to do either via the
>>scsi or RS232 port?
I'm fortunate enough to have a working BBC Domesday system in the office
and am actually working on a long term digital preservation project at the
University of Leeds called CAMiLEON (a little more info can be found at the
URL in my sig). We're looking specifically at emulation as a preservation
strategy and our plan is to produce an emulation solution to run the BBC
Domesday software.
To answer your questions in turn...
We have little technical documentation for the Domesday kit, but we do have
the original manual and some publicity material and limited technical material
on the LVROM player from Philips (who made the laser disc player). I'll see
if we can get this stuff onto the BBC Documentation Project web site. There
are some more detailed internal documents produced by Acorn that I'm attempting
to track down...
The video disc player is indeed a beast, with many kilograms of bulk and
all the ports that you mention. Unforntuantely its not the most reliable
piece of kit and not many working ones still survive. Ours still runs (touch
wood) but you do have to open the case and coax the eject mechanism if you
want to swap or turn over the disk!
I don't currently have a ROM image of the VFS, as none of the PD ROM grabbers
seem to run on our Master. One of the next things on my list of to-do's is
to write a grabber than runs on the Master and extract a copy of the ROM.
Ben Newsam wrote:
>One of my BBC Masters has a vast (50 way!) ribbon cable sticking out of
>the back,
That description matches the SCSI cable on our Master.
> and I believe it contains some ROMs to do with video disks.
>I'll have a look. Mind you, I still haven't hooked up a serial
>connection to a PC so it will be a while before I can e-mail a ROM
>image.
I believe there is only one Domesday specific ROM inside the system (the
VFS), although we do have a cartridge (for insertion in one of the slots
on the front of the machine) that contains one chip. Apparently this came
with the original Domesday kit (I have seen an identical cartridge with
another, non-functioning Domesday kit). Our guess is that its some kind
of video chip. Another part to the puzzle is that our Domesday system won't
start up with the cartridge in place (not sure if its faulty or not). Does
anyone have any idea what this may be? Could it be a cartridge that was supplied
with all Masters, and is not actually anything specifically to do with Domesday?
As a final note, if anyone has any further information on BBC Domesday, anecdotally,
digitally, or otherwise, please get in touch. All help much appreciated!
Paul Wheatley
--
Camileon Project Officer
http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/
0113 233 5830