Category Archives: Acorn
Articles about Acorn computers
Acorn BBC Master and Electron Cartridge Breakout
This project provides a simple breadboard adapter/breakout board for prototyping cartridges for the Acorn BBC Master and Acorn Electron 8-bit computers. The design consists of two PCBs, the first plugs into the computer’s cartridge slot and the second is designed to plug along the edge of a standard 2.54mm pitch breadboard. The two boards are […]
SmallyMouse2 – Universal USB to Quadrature Mouse Adapter
SmallyMouse2 is a universal USB to quadrature mouse adapter for many 8-bit and 16-bit retro computers and allows the use of modern USB mice on machines such as the Acorn BBC Micro, Acorn Master, Acorn Archimedes, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and many more. Unlike most existing mouse adapters, SmallyMouse2 implements a fully USB compatible interface […]
60W Acorn BBC Master power supply upgrade
The Acorn BBC Master 128 computer (and variants such as the Turbo and 512) come with a 35W switched mode power supply unit. For general use the power supply is sufficient, however for applications where more peripherals are required or for machines where the power supply has failed, this project demonstrates how to fit a […]
USB to Quadrature Mouse Adapter
SmallyMouse is a project that creates a USB mouse adaptor for 8-bit Acorn computers including the BBC Micro and Master series machines. SmallyMouse can emulate the two most popular user-port mice made for the BBC – the AMX mouse and the Marconi RB2 trackball (as used in the BBC Domesday project) and provides a small […]
Acorn Econet Clock V2
Continuing on from my first Acorn Econet Clock project, I received some good feedback and advice from other Acorn enthusiasts and decided to make a slightly more complex version 2 of the clock. The original design was simplistic enough to be built on stripboard however, this revised design is built on a custom PCB with […]
Acorn Speech PHROM TMS6100 Emulator
This project creates a TMS6100 speech PHROM (PHrase Read Only Memory) for use with the TMS5220 Voice Synthesis Processor in an Acorn BBC Microcomputer. Whilst it’s still possible to purchase TMS5220 ICs from sites like Ebay, the TMS6100 was a mask-programmed ROM that Acorn produced specifically for their speech upgrade and is therefore difficult and […]
Acorn Econet Clock
This project creates an Acorn Econet clock suitable for use with Acorn computers from the 1980s and 90s. The Acorn Econet network is an EIA-422-B based network that is driven by a differential clock signal. In the network topology the clock generator is a separate unit that is daisy-chained into the network bus and ensures […]
Valiant Turtle
The Valiant Turtle is a floor roving robot made by Valiant Technologies and was a popular education robot for teaching geometry and programming during the 1980s and 1990s. The robot was first sold in 1983 and was often used with the LOGO programming language. I started writing this article in 2009 when I obtained my […]
Restoring an Acorn A3000 computer
Released in 1989, the Acorn BBC A3000 computer was the last of the BBC branded machines Acorn produced and as a ‘cheaper’ all-in-one unit and was the machine most Acorn loving Brits had for games, programming and a whole host of other applications in the early 1990s. At the time of writing (March 2009) there […]