Date   : Sat, 27 Oct 2007 22:52:03 +0200
From   : anders.carlsson@... (Anders Carlsson)
Subject: Master boot-up help

Hi.

Today I received a BBC Master 128 with a faulty power supply. I have
replaced it with another one, and now it boots up. I don't know if
the battery is still good. Will I determine this by making changes
to the configuration and see if they remain after recycling power?

I have a few issues though:

1) There is quite a lot of whizz from the internal speaker, much
more than on both my Model B and Compact. Perhaps this is normal?

2) After a lot of trial and error, reading various manuals downloaded
from "The BBC Lives!" and other sites, I have found out how to reset
CMOS and change default language to Basic. However, upon power on it
sits there, probably waiting for the floppy drive to boot so I have
to press CTRL-F-BREAK to go directly into Basic.

Here is a list of the installed ROMs, as per the *ROMS command:

ROM F TERMINAL 01
ROM E VIEW 04 (v B3.0)
ROM D Acorn ADFS 05 (v 1.50)
ROM C BASIC 04
ROM B Edit 01
ROM A ViewSheet 02
ROM 9 DFS 79 (v 2.24)
ROM 8 ViewStore 01 (v 1.5)
ROM 7 ?
ROM 6 ?
ROM 5 ?
ROM 4 ?
ROM 3 ?
ROM 2 ?
ROM 1 ?
ROM 0 ?

3) The floppy drive is an Akhter 40/80 drive. When I insert a disk, it
fainly spins up, but goes silent when I close the door. I have tried to
boot with DFS in order to issue a FORM40 or FORM80 command. Should it
be addressed as drive 0 or 1? No matter what I try, the drive does not
seem to respond. Both the floppy cable and the power cable are connected.
What is this a sign of?

4) Can I make the BBC bypass the floppy drive, and drop directly into
Basic without the forced break as above? I have tried a number of settings
to *CONFIGURE without much success:

*CONFIGURE LANG 12
*CONFIGURE FILE 13 (or 9 for DFS)
*CONFIGURE NOBOOT / BOOT
*CONFIGURE NODIR

I even changed MODE to something else, to see that it really takes effect
after power cycling.

Unfortunately, the PC that I have successfully written 3.5" ADFS disks
from does not seem to be as capable of writing 5.25" DFS disks, at least
not from my first couple of tries. I suppose if I manage to format and
write to a disk, I can use it as testing material.

Perhaps some of these questions are answered in a FAQ/manual somewhere,
but the manuals I found either were really simple or highly technical.

Regards

-- 
Anders Carlsson