I've been busy behind the scenes working on a couple of projects recently; one of which is a Do-It-Yourself Guide to repairing the most common BBC faults. This includes things like "continuous tone on power up, screen blank" problems or when the machine says "Language?" to you. Rather than panicing, you can now simply visit the Cyber Doctor part of my web site at:
http://www.sprow.co.uk/bbc/doctor.htm
If that doesn't help then you start to panic!
Also, I've finally rustled up the PCB artwork for the RAM Disk project featured on EUG a few months back. So all of those of you who contacted me (or didn't!) registering an interest, or who didn't feel up to laying out the components on the strip board (like I did for the prototype) can rest assured that a PCB is on its way.
At the time of writing (late August), I don't have any final prices back from the PCB manufacturer but you could either wait until the next EUG or contact me individually. The board will measure approximately 3 inches by 3.5 inches and has space for up to 1 megabyte of RAM; the full eight megabytes supported by the filing system [Which was on the last EUG disk, RAMFS 0.87 - Ed] is available by making use of a 21-way expansion connector.
Also on this disk, you will find a new list of BBC things for sale and an updated version on my screen saver module (which I find submitted to EUG around 1997). This new one fixes a couple of problems with some monitors squeaking, the OSWord is now Tube compatible and the saver doesn't purge the VDU queue any more. More details can be found in the accompanying manual. As before, there is also a demonstration program ("U.SSTest") which uses the OSWord to set up the screen saver.
1st October 2000