Over the last few years, ABug have hosted a fascinating series of talks over Zoom on a wide range of retro Acorn and BBC Micro topics. We posted about a few of them last Christmas.
 
Just in time for this Christmas, ABug have been busy over the last few weeks posting some more of the talks to their YouTube channel, just in time for escaping from another load of Christmas film repeats on TV.
 
This time around, there's talks on a variety of topics, including building RISC OS 3.71 from its original source code, software presevation and rescuing data from old BBC Micro discs, stories from BBC Micro developers and more.
 
The full list of videos is on the ABug YouTube page (with more still to come in the coming days!), but here's a few of our favourites to get you started:
 

I was lucky enough to win a Raspberry Pi 400 in the raffle at the Wakefield Show. So I thought we could unbox it together and see what it is like....
 

Fans of RISCOSbits hardware will be pleased to hear that they have released a couple of addons for their Fourtress machines (which we have reviewed on TIB).
 

RISCOSbits have decided we need a special weekend day for RISC OS computers which we will call 'Stonking Saturday' (quite a conservative choice of name from them) and they have a special deal for just this day.
 

We've mentioned before the work of the Acorn Preservation Team to archive and preserve BBC Micro and Acorn software before it's lost to time and bit rot. As part of this effort, there will be a Software Preservation stand at this weekend's ROUGOL show which will offer a software preservation service. This is possible thanks to a generous offer of time and expertise from Paul Emerton (who you may remember from his excellent demonstration on BBC TV graphics and Acorn machines at the Centre for Computing History).
 
The idea is that you can bring along your BBC Micro or Archimedes floppy discs and if it's not already in the Acorn Preservation Team's archive, Paul will take an image of the disc while you wait and give the original back to you. If you take along a USB stick or SD card, a copy of the resulting disc image will be provided back to you (although be aware that the images of a single floppy disc can be up to around 85MB).
 
Imaging the discs will be made possible thanks to Paul bringing along his Greaseweazle - a small device that reads and stores the raw magnetic flux readings from the floppy disc (hence the large size of the resulting images). The advantage of imaging the discs this way is that it preserves the content exactly, including any special copy protection tracks from the original disc.
 
Even if you can't bring your own discs along, Paul will be available at the stand to chat and give advice on how best to store and avoid damage to both discs and drives to help preserve the life of both.
 

A couple of months ago, we told you about the Acorn Preservation Team, who are working to preserve the data from old discs before the data's gone forever.
 
Chris Evans and Phil Pemberton have written an in-depth look at how they were able to recover the data from some damaged discs that were otherwise unreadable using more traditional methods.
 
The post is an interesting look at how even when it appears the disc may be unrecoverable, with the right tools there can still be hope of recovering the data using more analogue methods at the magnetic flux level (and sometimes drawing peaks on a waveform manually!).
 
Also, as we noted in the previous article, the Acorn Preservation Team are still looking to help preserve any unique, rare, interesting and potentially historic discs anyone may have tucked away in the back of their cupboards before it's too late. They're not only working on BBC Micro discs, but discs for other formats and systems, too.
 
Links:
Recovering "lost" treasure-filled floppy discs with an oscilloscope - Chris Evans' blog
 

The need to preserve data from the BBC Micro days is becoming more and more urgent as time goes by since many of the discs are now well over 35 years old and many will be starting to degrade - if they haven't already. During this weekend's all-day ABug event, the Acorn Preservation Team gave an update on their recent project to recover the data from the original source code discs for several of Matthew Atkinson's games for the BBC Micro including Repton 3, UIM, Tempest and The Living Daylights.
 
The Acorn Preservation Team are also encouraging anyone who may have some old discs containing anything that is in need of recovery/preservation/archival to get in touch and loan the discs to them to help make sure the data isn't permanently lost. In particular, the team are interested in development discs containing sources, binaries, unreleased/missing/early versions of games and applications for both the BBC and RISC OS platforms.
 
In the case of Matthew Atkinson's discs, they were passed over to the Acorn Preservation Team a few weeks ago when they turned up here at TIB Towers after having been presumed lost by the author. It turned out that he'd in fact sent them to TIB back in the early 2000s where they were stored for the last fifteen years before turning up during a recent house move.
 
Once we'd sent the discs over to them, the Acorn Preservation Team set to work recovering the data contained within. This task wasn't entirely straightforward as some discs were showing the effect of their advancing age. One disc had damage that looked like it had seen an impact at some point in its life and sported a dent covering around 11 tracks of data. Despite this, the team were able to recover almost all of the data from the 22 disc set using a variety of methods including flux-level readings and analysing low level analogue signals from the discs. At the time of writing, only a handful of tracks from the dented disc remain to be recovered and are still being actively worked on. The data recovered so far has been provided back to Matthew Atkinson to have a look through and decide what he'd like to do with the soruces next.
 

Phil Pemberton and Chris Evans talk about the process of recovering data from Matthew Atkinson's source discs at this weekend's ABug event
 
The ABug talk from the Acorn Preservation Team will be made available through both the ABug website and their new YouTube channel in the near future along with a talk by Matthew Atkinson himself on the history of his BBC Micro and Archimedes development days.
 
If you have any old discs in need of preservation, whether BBC Micro era or Archimedes/RISC OS, the Acorn Preservation Team urge you to get in touch via the Stardot forums or the Software Preservation channel in the Stardot Discord Server before it's too late and the data's gone forever.