For the second year in a row, Acorn Computer enthousiast Roland Leurs organized a 3-day ABUG meeting in the Netherlands. I joined on Saturday and saw a lot of familiar faces - it was a lot of fun!
Diagnosing a faulty Econet interface
I brought one of my Acorn BBC-B computers to diagnose and hopefully fix the Econet network interface - I could not get it to work with my PiEconetBridge. You can see the optional Econet hardware installed in the top left corner of the mainboard.
We connected my Beeb to a known-good Econet network and enabled NFS via ‘Ctrl-N-Break’. Clock was detected, station number was correct - so in theory, it should just work. But we saw the same error message I got while using my bridge.
After more coffee and troubleshooting, we narrowed it down to the SmartSPI ROM (for the MicroSD card interface). Once we removed that ROM, the Econet interface sprang to life - success - and thanks, Igor!
Now, armed with a Beeb with working Econet, I can revisit the setup of my PiEconetBridge at home.
3.5 inch 720k floppies, anyone?
Timo spent a good amount of time with a GreaseWeazle - not a scary animal, but a great tool for reading and archiving old floppy discs. I now have a nice stack of MF-2DD (Double Density, 720k on a PC) floppies for my Archimedes.
Books
One of the club members, Aad, was giving away a stack of books from his collection. I managed to get a proper manual for WordWise Plus (my favorite word processor back in the day), some Archimedes / RiscOS manuals as well as a reprint of The New Advanced User Guide. More stuff for my collection ;-)
Thanks to Roland Leurs for organizing, and “Big Ben Club” for sponsoring this event! Hopefully we’ll all meet again next year.