Date   : Mon, 19 Dec 2005 13:06:39 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: Connecting a BBC Micro to a PC

Andrew Benham wrote:
> Jules Richardson wrote:
> 
>> Speed's the main problem - it's not blindingly fast at BBC serial port 
>> speeds. It's a shame there isn't a project around to cable up the 
>> BBC's 1MHz bus to a PC parallel port and transfer data that way!
> 
> Something like that would be *very* useful for backing up the 20MB hard
> disk on my BBC to somewhere else.  Trying to do a "streaming sectors"
> backup onto floppies is a right pain.

It would actually be my primary reason for some such software too actually. 
Whilst faster transfer would be nicer for floppies, I've finally found a PC 
that's happy with reading and writing FM data format as used by BBC floppies 
so can create disks directly. (Not that that helps most people, as a huge 
amount of PCs won't work with FM data)

I've got no way of backing up any of the BBC hard disks that I have though, 
and I wouldn't fancy running those drives for the length of time needed to 
transfer via serial (something like 10 hours I think I worked out) when there 
was maybe only one shot at getting the data off them...

cheers

Jules