Date   : Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:31:53 +0100
From   : dm.hunt@... (David Hunt)
Subject: mystery ROMs

> On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 21:29 +0100, Jonathan Graham Harston wrote:
> > > Message-ID: <1245267804.29153.128.camel@...>
> >
> > Phil Blundell wrote:
> > > collection of B21 boards.  So far I've come across two that I don't
> > > recognise: according to *HELP they are VTOPS 1.11 and Churchill
> College
> > > ROM 2.00.  Does anybody know anything about those?
> >
> > Can you upload them somewhere, or post a dump of the first 256
> > bytes or so?
> 
> Yup:
> 
> http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/philb/roms/vtops.bin
> http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/philb/roms/churchill.bin
> 

The Churchill College ROM is utility and menu. Put it into a language ROM
position and switch on the Beeb and you're presented with a Churchill
College Menu that allows you to format and verify discs, reset the Beeb, set
up a printer by sending it some control codes (probably to reset it back to
defaults), reset the Beeb and go to some other ROMs that would have been in
the machines at the time.

The VtoPS ROM identifies itself as a VIEW-TO-POSTSCRIPT CONVERTER from
offset 0x2fd4. Looking at the contents of the ROM I see a very early PS
command set. So I guess this allowed people to print on early PS printers to
a limited extent.

Dave