Considering just how many people had BBC machines in the Eighties, and considering how many peripherals and expansions were manufactured for those machines, it's no surprise that new libraries of "stuff" keeps being discovered. The Yorkshire Boys, it seems, didn't only create Retribution X (a megademo which I raved about when it was discovered in a dusty box in 2010). No, they were actually quite prolific demo creators and it seems as if they only submitted their final releases to Joel Rowbottom's Mad Rabbit PD library. Retribution X was one of 24 demos they created for the Beeb in the early Nineties.

In 2022, Joel made the entire Mad Rabbit PD library available in full and, whilst there were some hitherto MIA PD titles on there - such as the game Nectar Collector! - most of the library turned out to be stuff that was already in the 8BS and BBC PD collections. Indeed, the first thirteen Yorkshire Boys' discs had already been found and preserved by 8BS from elsewhere and we had all assumed Retribution X was their final huzzah.

Anyway, so much for the history. The more important question is "Are the discs any good?" Well, yes, although they are pretty "much of a muchness" hence why I've decided not to review each one individually but instead to write this overview of this new "stuff" instead.

So, first things first. How do we actually categorise The Yorkshire Boys' "stuff"? Well, the vast majority of it is "sampled sound", a type of demo that was very big in the early Nineties. If you weren't around during this period, it is hard to describe. Certain things - popular music, radio jingles and film clips became instantly iconic. Arnold Schwarzenegger saying "I'll Be Back" in the Terminator, for example. Or MC Hammer rapping "U Can't Touch This". Some computers of the early Eighties, the BBC being among them, fitted with suitable hardware, could 'record' from an external source like a video or television. The problem was that the sampled sound, even if only a few seconds in length, was a big file for the time. You could sample a short quote from your favourite film star but it would fill the whole of the BBC's memory and after you'd listened back to a very crackly version of it, you'd likely conclude this was a bit of a pointless enterprise and go back to playing Exile.

The situation wasn't exactly helped by the fact that the hardware needed to sample was both expensive and, all things considered, a bit crap. You really needed to be a bit of an eccentric to actually want to sample stuff in the first place, not to mention attempt to later compress the audio you'd manage to grab. Each time you compressed a file, you'd make it smaller but you'd also lose some quality. And so sampling on the Beeb never really took off. It was more popular on machines which had more memory to play with - the Atari ST and Amiga, for example.

The Yorkshire Boys' stuff is therefore pretty unique in the respect that a lot of the library is sampled sound. You can listen to your BBC shouting "Loadsamoney", playing Betty Boo soundbites and a whole slice of Nineties' oddments. And the samples are compact in size and intelligible. Bearing in mind the BBC's limitations, how is it possible?

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Well, the answer seems to be that all of the heavy lifting for all of these demos was actually done on an Atari ST. Henley, who is the author of all of them, used an Atari ST to sample the sound, used its processing capabilities to reduce the file size and maintain the quality and only then managed to copy it down to the BBC. Genius!

If you're an intrigued eccentric therefore, you've now got seven "sample discs" to wade through, a few other longer samples... and three Yorkshire Boys' Mixmania sample mega demos. The samples are usually short bursts of sampled speech whilst the Mixmania demos are intricately programmed music demos incorporating samples, scratch effects and regular four-channel BBC chiptunes. These later demos last a long time - roughly three minutes each - and, when you consider they're running on a machine with just 32k of memory, are extremely impressive.

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As for the rest of the library, well, there's all the usual staples: clipart, animations and sampled pictures plus a program which bills itself as a Desktop Publishing package and includes a number of font faces. Initially I was quite excited to boot this up because, many years ago, I wrote a very similar program to add text in my own custom fonts to pre-designed Mode 4 screens designed with Impact's The Art Studio package. Henley's version appeared, at first glance, to be a much better version than mine, with a lot more fonts and a more flexible cursor positioning system.

However, after playing with it for a while I found it had some serious limitations. For some reason you can only print your text in the top half of the screen. And, if you load in a picture, the bottom half of it is randomly erased occasionally. So you'd really need to know your way around the *LOAD commands and saving out strips of memory to get anything out of it. Shame.

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There's the almost obligatory PD disk full of clipart too. Again, if you weren't around in the early Nineties, you might wonder who on earth would want a hundred or so Christmassy themed 64 x 64 black and white pictures. The answer is that when most printers were dot matrix jobs and newsletters and fanzines were produced by one man working alone, they were actually pretty useful at livening up the Christmas issue.

I haven't seen The Yorkshire Boys' clipart anywhere else and it seems to be converted from a selection of high quality Atari ST clipart.

The library also includes the Joseph Lavery Collection, which was originally created as a slideshow of what could be achieved with AMX's Super Art package. If you haven't seen this, it's well worth a look. Nowadays we're spoiled by beautiful artwork on the Beeb... but this collection of pictures were actually designed on a humble Model B - not converted to it from a more powerful machine.

There's a few not-so-impressive offerings. A selection of lo-res digitised pictures from old analogue CRTs haven't aged well, and the disc full of Mandelbrot images is boredom personified. There is a disc full of interesting animations however, such as a man blowing smoke rings and a coke can with sunglasses dancing a jig.

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Overall then, it's a bit of an eclectic collection. I was never really interested in sampling back in the day, even finding speech synthesis in games rather tacky. However, like with most PD collections, you might well be able to appreciate the finished product even without any interest in the scene it emanated from.

Henley, who wrote almost everything that The Yorkshire Boys produced, describes himself in the Credits of Megamix 3 as an "unemployed student, 18" making him 46 today. I wonder if he still follows the BBC demo scene... He'd doubtless be amazed by what groups like bitShifters have got the humble Beeb to do!