Date   : Wed, 22 Sep 2010 15:15:07 +0200
From   : rick@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: 32K Message

On 22/09/2010 08:58, Andrew Benham wrote:

> The '16k' and '32k' messages also include a bell character (0x07)
> which is why one gets a beep on a hard reset.

Yes, I forgot to mention that.

I think the symbolic "burrrrrr" is the noise generated by the sound chip 
when it is uninitialised (hence why a dead Beeb with reset circuitry 
troubles often does this noise endlessly), and the VDU7 beep is used as 
a way to clear the chip and set it to a working state.


It's all quite beautiful in its clever simplicity...

...these days we have a certain company that so completely fails to 
understand backwards compatibility that you're supposed to have at least 
three different versions of the ".Net Framework" installed (two of which 
I just deleted as being a useless waste of space, the oldest is only 
intact because (file) Explorer needs it).

Not to mention, to dish dirt equally, that nightly builds of the Linux 
system are available, but the LiveCD ISO image put up is so damn old 
that the first thing the system wants to do is download hundreds of 
megabytes of important updates. How terribly useless to download a 
LiveCD to drop onto an SD card with a 1Gb persistence file, only to find 
that little read/write partition is immediately stuffed with updates. 
How's about, like, a newer ISO?


Acorn took take and effort over bytes here and bytes there. Marginally 
more recently I recall Ricky Sarge once recorded a bit of the Binkley 
client (without sources, just the disassembly) to shave off around four 
or five instructions. Now we're at a situation where the updates/fixes 
says it'll add up to two hundred and sixty megabytes and we're like 
"okay, I'll put the kettle on".


Best wishes,

Rick.

-- 
Rick Murray, eeePC901 & ADSL WiFI'd into it, all ETLAs!
BBC B: DNFS, 2 x 5.25" floppies, EPROM prog, Acorn TTX
E01S FileStore, A3000/A5000/RiscPC/various PCs/blahblah...