Just wondered whether anyone is actively involved in the BBC Micro emulation in MESS?

In it's current state it doesn't recognise .dsd floppy images (double sided disc) and trying to *CAT a .ssd causes MESS to lockup.

Also, what's the criteria for adding items to the software lists?

Tape: I could possibly contribute .wav of some of the earlier games on tape if required, mainly Acornsoft and Micro Power.

Floppy: I don't have much original software on floppy, maybe still have Elite, Fortress and 3D Bomb Alley. The rest are deprotected 'backups', or transfers from tape.

Much of the BBC Micro software was tape only, as tape protection was harder to copy than floppy. I don't think there was anything I didn't manage to crack back then so I'd consider my tape to floppy transfers cleanly reverse engineered, ie. not modified in any way.

EPROM: Have good ROM dumps of much of the software that was available as a ROM, such as WordWise, Disc Doctor, etc.

What do the four Cartslots represent in MESS? I would expect them to be the four on-board ROM slots, but two of them should default to having BASIC and a DFS installed. The Model B seems to default to using the Watford 1.44 DFS, is it posible to revert to Acorn 0.9 DFS?

I also have the official Acorn Speech ROM if required for dumping?

Anyway, let me know if there's anything I can contribute with any of of this.

I see there's been quite a bit of work recently done of floppy support for various systems. I'd appreciate it someone could do the same for the bbc driver as in it's current state it is unable to read ANY floppy formats.

the problem is absolutely nobody seems to be working on, maintaining, or updating the BBC driver, which I have to say is surprising for such a popular key system, but there you go.

the only guy who seems to know how the system works is the original author of the driver (which is also the person who partially modernized the code 1.5yrs ago), i.e. Gordon Jefferyes.
lately, he does not seem particularly interested in MESS, though...

Haze: it was largely unknown outside of the UK until emulation and the Internet. I remember during the 80s we'd hear about PC-88/98 and the X68000 in US magazines, but UK/EU systems basically didn't exist outside of the Timex/Sinclair 1000.

Hmm it did get exported tho, but I guess not to much cheer.

It was the *main* system in schools here when I was growing up (before the Archimedes, although even they all had some level of emulation software to run many of the old apps)

It actually survived in the science/technology depts (the irony..) long after even the AA machines were gone and replaced by Windows PCs as well simply because of the number of peripherals you could plug in to them and scientific software to make use of the results.

All the Acorn systems seem poorly represented in MESS tho

Well, there's your chance to work on a computer system for a change from the consoles Haze

I'll pass

they were systems I used in school, not systems I owned and with computers it really helps to have owned them and know the software inside out.

Well, that may change in a not too distant future

I've been sending Acorn Archimedes romp dumps and software for some time so there are some building blocks to start with.

If I had about 2 more clones I'd look at the BBC and the Atari 8-bits because it pains me to see 6502 systems suffer (the BBC in particular is screaming for the slot system). But I don't so I can't.