Date   : Wed, 13 Sep 2006 16:53:47 +0100
From   : Littlefield Aaron <CALITTLEFIEL@...>
Subject: No, please don't! (tell about car boot finds)

Sorry if you find this boring Wouter (no bad feelings meant by the way), but
I find it fascinating to hear what people have found in the wild (so to
speak), I certainly wasn't intending it to be a bragging competition. If
it's any help the B+ I referred to earlier cost me a hefty sum (so it was no
bargain by any means!). 

The main reason I raised the issue is to find out how much stuff is still
out there, because all of my hunts around car boot sales etc have been
pretty dire. Acorn bits seem to be pretty sparse - and that's surprising
considering how many were sold. I just wondered where everybody else found
or obtained their hardware because other than flea-bay (which I admit is a
collectors playground), I just don't see (or hear of) Acorn machines
anymore. I'm sure there are plenty hidden away in lofts and attics - I'd
just love to get my hands on them, as I'm sure would many other users on
this newsgroup.

Regarding your query over magazines, I personally thought that the 'Input'
magazines were great. They tended to be more business like; I distinctly
recall being allowed to type out a bar chart program at school taken
directly from the magazine, but I found it to have decent content. It wasn't
your Acorn User or similar magazine with letters to the editor etc, but the
programs were useful.

Which games were the best? Barrage by Micropower has to be up there, I
played it last weekend!

Aaron


-----Original Message-----
From: Majordomo List Manager [mailto:majordomo@...] On Behalf Of
W.Scholten
Sent: 13 September 2006 16:04
To: BBC-Micro Mailing List
Subject: [BBC-Micro] No, please don't! (tell about car boot finds)

Littlefield Aaron wrote:

> Purely out of interest, what's the best Acorn item you've ever bought 
> from a car boot or private sale?

Hmm, I find this sort of topic very boring because it's usually just
bragging. I mentioned this a long time ago as well in a discussion about
prices on ebay, that that sort of thing really put me off a dutch
mailing list: lots of bragging how cheap they got item xxx, lots of
complaining how expensive yyy was on ebay. On my website I do mention
stuff I got for free or for a very low price, but only because I think
that's fair for the people who donate...

What I find much more interesting is discussions about things such as:

  - Which magazines (general and/or BBC micro specific) do you like and 
why? (the index of articles on BBC stuff in general mags is finally 
getting somewhere btw, starting with David Harrison's material I've been 
adding a bit. See my webpages. Updates/additions are welcome.)

  - Which listings in magazines are particularly good or useful? For
example, I fondly remember "the grid" from PCW, "WW1" from Practical
computing, "Hexplode" (PCW, also Beebug). Maybe because they were among
the first games I typed in, but I still think they're ok and quite good
for magazine listings. There are a few dupes, some listings appear in
multiple mags. Apart from Hexplode in 2 mags, I think "The grid" later 
appeared in Practical computing as well. This will probably be the case 
for many more listings.

  - Which games are the best? I'd like to see a list of top games that
you'd have to try to get a feel for what was available on the BBC micro
and its capabilities. There are a few thousand games IIRC, and I don't
think I've tried all of them. In 1984-1985 I only had perhaps a dozen
games and when I got my second BBC with Opus Challenger in 1995, I
suddenly had hundreds of games on discs! Took quite a while to try them out!

And now for something completely different. Here are my votes for 
"achievement in the field of the BBC micro in 2005/2006" :-)

  1. The PDF books by Christopher Dewhurst

  2. The new hardware by Robert Sprowson (speech, copro). Very
impressive, although to be honest, I don't see a point to using an ARM
copro (too far from the old stuff, might as well connect a PC via
serial/parallel cable and use that as a 2P, far faster still).

-- 
Wouter
---
BBC micro | Calculators | Classic PC games: http://www.xs4all.nl/~swhs/whs/



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