Modem Emulation - an RC2018/09 prologue

Most of you will know by now that I'm really into preserving the memory of Prestel and Viewdata systems generally.  I run www.viewdata.org.uk which, while a bit long in the tooth, is going to get a massive update "soon" ...   But today I'm going to talk about hardware.

Some time back, I fired up my old viewdata BBS "Ringworld" - this operated on a collection of BBC Micros - one per connected user - and an Acorn A5000 acting as fileserver.  I connected these to the internet using a motly selection of modems, ATA telephony adapters, and serial terminal adapters.

The long shot was, for a user dialling in, the call was answered either by the exact same modem it always had been, connected to a SIP ATA - the digital data was transformed to analogue, before being turned back to digital by the modem.  This always seemed like a poor idea to me. What would be better is if some bit of software answered that digitised telephone call, looked at the whistles and warbles, and turned it directly into a sequence of ASCII bytes for delivery to a telnet port.

I had found an program called iaxmodem that allowed an asterisk based PBX to emulate a modem, but it was focused on faxing, and I just couldn't get it to work with the V23 dial-up I wanted.  But it was close.   I spent the next few years, off and on, searching for changes to that, or SIP based alternatives, with no luck.

In the meantime, John Newcombe decided to write his own viewdata host service, called Telstar, in Python, and that can be accessed via a raw-socket. (like telnet, but without the features!)  There's not a lot of software out there that can talk both Viewdata display protocols and connect to a socket, however.  Richard Russell wrote a example viewdata client that could do it, and you can connect from BeebEm if you load up a suitable comms package and set the RS423 IP parameters. 

There have also been a couple of projects to produce a "WiFi Modem" that, basically, looks like a hayes-compatible modem that you connect to via RS232, but it in turn connects to your WiFi, and onwards to a telnet port out on the internet.  This is great for things like BBC Micros, Commodore 64s, etc., where you can just swap out your period modem for this new device.   Not so good for dedicated terminals, or e.g. the ZX Spectrum VTX5000 where the modems are built in.

Then, out of the blue, an old friend, Darren Storer, posted on the BBC Micro facebook group (I think it was there..) that he'd set up a dial-up number for Telstar, and could people test it.  It took me a week or two to get there, but I pulled out a terminal, dialled the number ... and it didn't work.  Not at all.  I did, however find out the software he was using ...  asterisk-Softmodem.  This was exactly the sort of project I'd been looking for all those years.  But, it didn't work for him/

I pulled the code and had a look, and could see nothing wrong.  So, firing up an asterisk server, and installing it, I tried to debug.  The first issue was my terminal was not locking onto the carrier, so I added a t(-10) to increase the volume, and that sorted that!

Next problem, I wasn't getting much data on screen - many characters were just missing!   This was somewhat easy to diagnose, as I had an inkling after seeing how you configured asterisk to use softmodem - you specified the number of data bits, being between 5 and 8.  The example had it as 8. Now Prestel, and of course the terminals, all used 7 bits with even parity. What I was seeing was the terminal being sent 8-bit data, and of course interpreting that as most of the characters having an incorrect parity bit, and ignoring those!

Now, I can set a software terminal to 8bit data, but not the termnal - there  is very little you can configure as a user on these things.  Because the project had no support for parity it looked like a dead end, but that wasn't going to stop me - I'd waited years to find this, and wasn't going to give up now!

Delving into the code, it actually turned out to be a nice simple and straightforward bit of programming.  Adding parity support turned out to be fairly easy... I've published the modifications to my own github fork and submitted a pull request to send them back to the original author.

So now, I can dial into Telstar, CCL4, or anywhere I want to set up a number for!

If you want to try it, the number for Telstar is 0333 340 3311 (from outside UK, +44 333 340 3311). Calls cost the same as an 01 or 02 and are included in any inclusive minutes you may have. Call s are free for A&A customers.)

I can't guarantee that number will stay up, and it may not work from time to time if I'm tweaking things, but if it turns out useful to you, please let me know in the comments below!

Trying hard

It's six weeks since my dad died.  It's been .... difficult.

Then the suicide bomber at Manchester Arena last week.  Targeting kids, and the parents waiting to pick them up.  Kids!  One casualty was only 8!!

My daughter is 10.  Had her music tastes been different, it's possible we would have been there - she reports one of the kids in her class actually was at the concert; school sent round a letter saying several pupils had been there, but all were safely accounted for.  It's only a couple of miles away, I saw some of the ambulances rushing in that night!

So that hit me hard.  I spent the next few days feeling stunned. Shell-shocked, I guess.  Fighting back tears all the time.  Just like most people in the area!  I've been glued to the TV News, glued to Twitter, had local radio on in the car and kitchen... watching the local paper websites..  It does seem that the Police have a handle on things, which is gratifying, and they are making progress tracking down all those whom have connections with the bomber.

To try and recover, I've tried throwing myself at various unrelated projects. Here are some of them -

• Finishing the stuff I started for Retrochallenge..
• Cataloguing and Imaging the vast number of BBC Micro floppies I have
• Adding BBC Micro SSD/DSD/ADx image support to TC4Shell
• Getting a VPN client working on my Sophos UTM 9 firewall
• Planning content for the new viewdata.org.uk (but not yet writing any..)
• and watching some TV!  (Well, netflix..) Normally I hardly ever watch TV..

Each works for a bit, then I get distracted, interrupted, or just dispirited.  So I swap to something else. Right now, I don't feel up to doing any of them..  I've tried ignoring the news this evening, as there's not been anything new anyway.. but that's not helped either.

Strangely, Mr Biffo wrote a piece this week that resonated with me. It's one of the reasons I'm writing this... I was hoping it would help.

I'm not much of a sharer.. this is new to me,  So, I'm going to leave this here. If anyone wants to jump in help with any of those projects, feel free to get in touch.  Apart from watching Telly - the Mrs is happy to do that with me!

Stay safe, people.  Love you all.

Retrochallenge 2013

In a fit of madness, I decided to re-enter this years competition.

If you cast your mind back, I entered last time with the intention of sorting out my "man cave" as the attic was described, in order to get the viewdata BBS back up and running.

Unfortunately, building work interrupted matters, and I didn't get very far.   More unfortunately, the building work stalled, and I still don't have a safe floor up there, so pretty much everything is still in boxes.  A year on.  The tale of what happened and what went wrong is going to make a great story at some point, but not yet.

So, this year, I've been hoping to get something working under emulation.  The ideal would be an emulated modem that can answer VoIP phone calls, and pass the user to an emulated server of some sort.  Modems and VoIP are reckoned not to work very well, but that's the "modern" types. V23 has no problem at all, as I proved when using the real stuff over it.

The trick is going to get a software modem working at such a slow speed!  IAXmodem uses SpanDSP, which proports to support the old FSK modems, including V23, but I've not yet managed to get it working.  Part of the issue is that the whole thing is geared up for faxing, so assumes some level of intelligence from the far end.  V23 modems, particularly the 25 year old ones, don't do anything intelligent!

So, that's the task this month.  Getting iaxmodem (initially) to answer a call from an ancient terminal.  Then I'll hook it up to a BBC micro emulator and run the BBS entirely virtually.

I'm acutely concious that over half the month is over, and I've not done anything yet!

Long term goal is to find a backup of the original Prestel software and databases, run up a GEC mini-computer emulator, and actually run the real thing.  But so far that's been elusive.  Anybody know of any surviving discs or tapes from Prestel itself?

Retrochallenge: Starting position..

The Attic

Well here we are.  My starting position at getting the viewdata BBS sorted out..

Top shelf - misc DIY stuff, but there's a spare electron shoved in there.

Middle shelf - two VoIP adapters & firewall, elderly modem rack, two terminal servers running off old PC power supplies since theirs died, and a NAS box and external USB drives that is nothing to do with this!

Bottom shelf - ancient mono monitor, three BBC Micros, two magic modems, quad-video switch.

On the floor: various spare beebs and ARM machines....

On the right, another two beebs, a Tandata viewdata adapter sat in a touchscreen for a CUB, atop a portable TV, and lots of more stuff!

At present, in use: one VoIP box adapter, the magic modems, and two beebs.

Out of shot is an Acorn A5000 which runs the econet fileserver and a RISC PC, sharing an old 14" monitor.

Previously, I did have two beebs on modems and two beebs connected to one of the terminal servers accepting calls from the internet, allowing four users but only two by each method.  The aim is to use the modem rack and terminal servers to answer the phones, with as many beebs as I can get working connected to other ports on the terminal servers. This will disassociate the link between access method and bbc micro, and allow more people to use the system.  Should they want to.  

At the moment I'm lucky to find even one person visiting ....

Anyway, I'm hoping I'll be able to tidy this lot up as well as getting it working again!  As you can see, it'll need it!

Retrochallenge

OK.. I'm going to try and get something done for Retrochallenge 2012 :-)

 I'm currently a year into a redesign of viewdata.org.uk, so will try and finish that.

 I'll also try mend a couple of machines and get the viewdata BBS connected back up to the Internet.
 (This is running on BBC Micros and Magic Modems from the 1980s - you can still telephone it ...)

 I might have to finish rebuilding the hobby room so I'll have space to do this...

Follow this specifically using the retrochallenge tag on this blog.

With luck, I'll at least get something part way done in the time.... :-)

Down again..

Sigh. Just a quick note to let people know that The BBS is down at the moment, at least for Telnet access. The Beebs are still going fine, but the somewhat younger iolan+ terminal server has died. I think it's a PSU problem, as it makes a ticking noise with a matching pulsing power LED. Unfortunately, it's a built in PSU, so it's going to take some time to get round to diagnosing and fixing that.

Top 5 hit!

I've just discovered I had a hit with a programme I wrote! :)

Back in late 1986 I sold something called "The Beeb Editor" to Micronet for their telesoftware downloads. For my Viewdata site I've been processing the Autumn 1989 edition of LogOn magazine, sent out to all Micronet Members, and just discovered it was number 4 in the top BBC downloads. 3 years later. I obviously missed this first time around.

I've actually still got the contract in my file (in my mum's name, for some reason, but signed by me,) but I have not got a clue what the program actually was any more. I'll have to have a good search through my discs to find a copy and see.. Worse, I don't recall receiving any payments for it, either..

Making old data visible, easily!!

Many years ago I was heavily involved in the viewdata industry - working for Micronet 800 and then producing software for other Prestel ISPs, running my own viewdata BBS, etc. I therefore accumulated rather a lot of viewdata pages, and managed to recover these from an old backup a few years ago.

As part of a separate project, Vewdata.org.uk I wanted to display these images. As they were saved using a BBC Micro, I loaded them up in a BBC Micro Emulator, under Windows, took a screen capture, pasted that into Photo Editor, cropped it, saved it out as a GIF, and finally uploaded it to the web server. I then had to add the image to whichever gallery it belonged in. As you can guess, this is fairly labour intensive, and gave rather variable results.

Being a firm believer in "let the computer" do the work, I started this side project to condense all this into as little work as possible. What I wanted to acheive was to reduce the steps to: 1. Upload original saved screen file to the web server. 2. End.

I think this has now achieved this, and more so! There are currently two scripts in the suite - vl.php (viewdata lister) will scan a given directory and construct a web page bsaed on the files it finds. vv.php is used as an image source for each file, and this reads the files and constructs a PNG or animated GIF, as appropriate, and returns it to the client.

As a side-benefit of having the original save file available, it's also possible to provide a text-only version of the frames! I hope this will make things more search-engine friendly.

You can find the files here.

At the time of writing, you can find a sample page here that shows the results that can be acheived for a random selection of pages from Prestel, Teletext and some LAN based services.

Please add any comments or suggestions below.

Ephemeral Coding

I was thinking, last night, about the many programs I've written over my time, and I suddenly realised that the vast majority of them are now completely redundant, and that sort of saddened me. All that time and effort now feels wasted and my efforts are completely forgotten. So, just in case anybody is interested, here are some of the things I've either been paid to write, or were major unpaid projects, that are now of no use whatsoever:

Programs for use with the Prestel viewdata service:
SuperSub - to assist main IPs manage their Sub-IPs.
MailboxMassacre - bulk email handling software.
StopPress Viewdata terminal - the only implementation I knew of that correctly handled double height characters.
AutoF - moderated "bulletin board" and message handling system.
Various modules for the Autonomic Viewdata host.

Programs written in the BOS operating system
Almanac - Room booking and management system mainly used by Local Authorities.
Syrian - took over this EPOS system and almost completely re-wrote it.
COMP - poor mans' IDE for BOS Cobol/SpeedBase, handling macro for recompiling different versions of a project.

Programs written for use with WorldsAway (V.1 of what is now vzones "Dreamscape")
Various game hosts.
Various client mods to add functionality.
Clone server, written in VB. (And to be clear, I had NO access to any existing server code: it was written simply by seeing what the client did when I tried to talk to it.)
Clone client for UNIX, only good for "parking" an avater.

Web Applications
Various PHP based applications to solve puzzles that were being run on the Quiz Call TV channel.


I'm sure there are lots more, but that's what I remember for now.

What's most irritating, is that I can't actually think of anything that I've written that's likely to still be in use, apart from some code contributed to other peoples' projects. (e.g. the econet code in BeebEm.)

Sorry

Just a quick note to apologise for not actually getting to RR and for no BBS. I had some family issues, compounded by my not planning to be away well enough.

I'm absolutely gutted not to have been there, and so sorry to everybody expecting me. It seems that Dave didn't get my message, either, which didn't help. I'll do better next time!!

The Ringworld BBS

We're getting closer to a fully working system. Well, I've less than a week before Acorn World when it's got to be on show!



Here you see three Beebs all up and running the host. I just need to find another plug for the second modem, but the first is up and running. It's a little untidy, sorry, but I've been busy building master battery packs !!

If anybody wants to try dialing in, the number is 0161 660 8192. 1200/75 V23 and viewdata mode ! I can't promise 24/7 availability, but it'll be up as much as I can until the show, then during it of course.

Telnet access details to follow ..

Econet and furry batteries.

Firstly, I think I'm going to disable keyboard navigation on Opera, after yet again managing to press something that sent me forward or back a page and lost all I typed when I came back here. Let's try again.

OK, it's been a while since we had an update.

I've replaced my econet network cabling with some of PhilB's brand spanking new econet socket boxes. If you're into econet, then I really must recommend these. They link together with standard Cat5 fly-leads or cable, and have built in terminators where required.

That didn't help with my A5000 econet problems, however. Indeed, shortly afterwards the blasted thing wouldn't power up at all.

I put a plea out on comp.sys.acorn.misc and very soon have three offers of replacement machines. They really must be a nice bunch on there!

But a but of reading up has enlightened me to a standard problem with A5000s - Acorn, in their infinite wisdom, decided to solder Ni-Cad batteries directly onto the motherboard. You would have thought they would have learned their lesson with the exploding battery packs on the Masters. Anyway, after 15+ years, these batteries grow fur, and leak battery acid all over the place, wrecking tracks and burning the legs off chips..

So, with two replacement machines here, plus my original, I have three fury batteries, and none of the machines will work properly. I clean out Maplin of tagged Ni-cads (they don't have anything remotely pin compatible, so I'll have to solder them in on leads.) and rip out the batteries and clean up as best as I can the boards here. One looks like it's had it, with a fair bit of damage. The second required one track repair, and that is now firing up to the desktop. The third, my original machine, looks OK, but still won't power up. I'll have to get back to that.

Next task is, of course, to rebuild a whole machine. I'm going to use the SD-IDE drive I got from Mark at retroclinic, which is already formatted. I just need to work out how to copy disc-to-disc on a machine with only one IDE interface, as it is reluctant to co-exist with another drive.

I may have to set up another fileserver, fire up the A5000 with the hard drive, and copy everything off across the econet, then copy it all back again. Assuming the econet works now .....

Econet ...

More on my econet blues.

I've now got a stable econet running with two Model Bs and two Master 128s. Wahay!

It seems that the network socket boxes I made myself some 25+ years ago were misbehaving. There was no strain relief on the cables, so some of the messing about recently tugged the cables, and introduced a short inside one of them. I guess all the dried out sellotape inside wasn't enough to insulate them any more!

So, one problem down. I've got a working econet between the Beebs. But the lot still goes down as soon as I plug the a5000 into it. Station not listening. Sigh.

Interesingly, with the A5000 powered off, the econet runs fine. If I set *Stations running repeatedly and power up the A5000, I get a valid reply from it, briefly, before it actually starts booting up, but as soon as it does, the econet dies.

I've also tried running netmonitor as I connect the A5000, and it seems that it's throwing all sorts of junk onto the lines. It doesn't look like valid packets, just garbage, enough to crash netmonitor, but it's something to investigate. Since I've now tried multiple econet modules, and the only thing between the module and the econet cabling is L8, I'm going to try bypassing that (the Masters don't have this, so it can't be essential, since they use the same econet modules) and see what happens...

Wish me luck!

Edit: 30th July. I made a little adapter to plug onto the pins on the bottom of the econet module rather than allowing it to mate with the motherboard, bringing out the connections to a DIN, so bypassing L8. Made no difference. Damn.

Console Combat 2009

This weekend was the weekend of Console Combat. A chance to get together and play lots of old games in a City Centre Manchester Pub! Games aren't really my thing, but it was around the corner, and there were to be some Beeb people there, so I thought it would be best to show my face!

It was a fairly quick visit, I'm afraid to say. I had my youngest with me, and whilst she enjoyed a 3D Pacman on the A3010, squeeling with delight when we caught a ghost, most of the games were still a little complicated for a toddler to have a go at herself. We did enjoy a bowl of chips and a drink, though, and she was quite attracted to some cocktail arcade machines!

Apparently we missed most of the Beeb people, but I got a quick chat with the Beebmaster Ian, and a longer one with Dave Moore. He's got ambitious plans for the Acorn World show later in the year, but more on that at a later date.

Hope to see you all in September!

Edit: 30th Jul 2009
Thanks to Arcadian at STH for posting some more pictures here.

Econet woes..

I've posted before about my problems getting the old-style Econet back up and running. I'm still having problems.

I'm also limited by the machines I have available to test things out with...

BUT so far, I've got the following working.

• Station 103, a Model B. This one one of the ones I obtained recently. Along with my 6502dvd second processor this is running a Level 2 fileserver.
  
• Station 101, a Model B, pretty vanilla. This is one of my original machines that ran the BBS 20 years ago.
  

Both of these are working fine, talking to each other quite hapilly.

And because I now have a known working pair of machines, I can now determine that...

• at least one of the cables I was using to test things with, doesn't work.
  
• the Master 128, station 40, I was running the fileserver on before will only occasionally see station 103, giving variouslly Net Jammed, Not Listening or Not Present errors.
  
• the A5000 still can't see anything, nor anything it. Since I swapped over the econet modules in this and Station 40, it looks like both may be dead.
  
• ..as might be a loose module I tried, which came loose in a box along with two others, one badly repaired, and a pile of chis... I don't like swaping them about in Stn 40, though, as it's under a replay board that I have to take out first.
  
• a Master 128 from the recent haul behaves exactly the same ...
  

So, I've got two Model Bs working, but nothing later. If I had at least one Master that was working 100%, then I could start swapping modules about to test them.

The only other econet-fitted machines are a Master with no battery pack (well, it DID have one, but it was a bit of a mess, and the keyboard has lots of dead keys anyway..) and a German Model B which has a dead PSU.

Time to drag out the other Masters that don't have econet fitted, see if I can get any of the modules working. After that, it's time to desolder the line drivers..

Sigh...

Rescued beebs!

Thanks to a lovely couple in Marple, I today collected a pile of ex-school equipment! Two Masters and a Model B were the least exciting bits - there were lots of software and manuals and documents about how the school econet had been set up. 5 seperate networks with at least three fileservers! I got two of the fileservers, but unfortunately no bridges.. also included, a pile of slightly rusty floppy drives, some with discs still in them, a Music 97, grafpad, light pens, some experiment boxes, and lots of spare chips ...

Anyway, photos are up on my nice new flikr account here.

Fustration 2

OK. Time for an update.

I connected the A5000, Model B and clock box all up with a known good T-piece and still they cannot talk to each other.

I swapped over the Econet modules in the Master downstairs and the A5000, which still didn't work.

I connected them all back up, using the new run of cable, etc. and fired up Level 2 fileserver on the Master, and the Model B can see it and logion!! Finally a result that tells me something - the Model B works, the Master works, the econet module in it is the one from the A5000, so presumably both of those work. And, the new cable run works! But the A5000 can't see the FS on the Master, and still neither can log into the L4 on the A5000. Drat.

So... it must be something in the A5000 that's causing me problems other than the econet module, which given the buffers on the module blow first if there is a line issue, means it most likely is a software problem.

Of course all this power cycling of the A5000 has thrown up more issues; the poor thing has two elderly hard discs in it, and the second one seems to be dying - I'm getting all sorts of strange transfer errors on power up, even before the "RISC OS / Acorn ADFS" banner appears. One thing after another ...

OK then, let's go solid state: I try to fit an SD-IDE adapter I got off Mark of retroclinic when we were at Byte Back and after some hunting for hform, got it formatting a 2GB SD memory card. But it keeps failing. A quick email to Mark and he reminds me that there's a 512MB limit on RISC OS 3.1 .. argh. I'd forgotten all about that one; used to hit it all the time with DOS machines way back when... (At least it didn't do what one client machine with a caching IDE controller did to me once - let me initialise a 1GB disc, and as we were copying data to it, as we hit the 512MB, looped back to the start of the drive and trashed the partition tables and directory...)

So, rather than limit the format and waste 75% of the 2GB card, I've found some 512MB mini-SD cards on eBay for 99p with free delivery, so ordered one of those. I've disabled the second IDE drive in the A5000 for now, as there wasn't anything on it I need at the moment, and I hope I can copy everything off it when I get the new card. I've got master/slave issues to work out on that yet ...

And then, once the A5000 is all up and running on the new drive, I can try and find out why it's not liking the econet any more..

Fustration

Don't you just hate it when things just will not work.

Some time back, I pondered running econet over 2 spare pairs in a cat5 cable that was already runinng ethernet from the ground floor to the atic.

After much discussion on the mailing list over the merits of running econet without the earth connection, I tried it, and it worked, and all was good. However, the Beeb was not really decorative enough to keep out, so has spent almost all the intervening time in the cupboard!

I finally made enough room in the spare room to get it set up on a desk there, but there was no direct cable from the atic where the filesever is to that room. After much swearing, I did manage to run another cable there, and duly crimped RJ45 sockets on the ends, and transferred the Econet DIN-Cat5 cables over. And it didn't work.

All I get on the Master is "Station 10 not present" drat. It's got a clock though...

So I try..

• Adding a crossover (by re-crimping one end) but that made it worse - didn't even see the clock...
  
• Visually checking all the connections at each end...
  
• Spending half an hour looking for the cat5 tester, then a little longer for a battery, just to confirm that the line is absolutely fine...
  
• Added the earth connections to the DINs, now I have enough wires to use...
  
• Set up a Model B in the attic, which also cannot see the server right next to it..
  
• Tried a new drop lead from the server to the econet sockets..
  
• Disconnected all the new cabling and brought the terminate upstairs, still no joy..
  
• Reset the econet station number on the server and tried another version of !Server..
  
• Power cycled the server several times doing all this..
  

And it still doesn't work..

All I lave left I am able to do is disconnect everything, link the B and the server and the clock together using T pieces and open up the server and re-seat the econet board.. it USED to work...

Sigh...

Miscellaneous Rants.

ok. I'm going to withdraw my custom from Sainsburys for the forseable future. I'm usually in there every day, for one thing or another, and spend about £150 a week!! But they peed me off last night. Closed the kiosk early, and lied about the time. That was just the last straw - there are loads of issues I have with them, but it was their "couldn't care less" attitude last night that was just too much for me. I've submitted a complaint to their careline, and we'll see if anything happens.

Two. I want to finish my work on BeebEm's AUN implementation. But Immediate operations and broadcasts aren't working. So I need to sniff some more network traffic between the real machines. Except the laptop I did it with last time won't stay on long enough to even boot without restarting.

Three. So I get back the laptop I lent out ages ago, and it comes back sans-PSU and with a completly dead hard disc, that looks like it might not even be the one I lent it out with. Brilliant. Not. Sacrifice the disc from an external drive to get the machine up and running, and reload Win2K. Now all I need are the drivers for the hardware. Which I had all nice and safe. On a seperate partition on the original hard disc. Argh. And it's an unbranded machine that I can't find diddly-squat about on the net, so it's gonna be an absolute pig to get sorted out. Just so I can use it for five minutes.. I might have to drag this one upstairs :-(

Four. Toddlers that wait exactly 25 minutes after you get to bed, just to make sure that you are actually asleep, before waking up and demanding milk...(actually, she's rather cute which more than makes up for this one..)

Five. Pets that seem to demand more and more care... What the hell am I supposed to do now the terrapins have gone and laid an egg in the corner of the tank?!

Six. Twitter. What's the hype?! Even XBMC now has a script to 'tweet' what you're watching at the time... I know what mine would say: Numberjacks, Bob the builder, Fimley the fire engine. See, it's not even me watching it most of the time..! (Thank goodness for the BBC iPlayer plugin!) Seriously, though, does anybody WANT to know what I'm doing from minute to minute each day - I don't know myself most of the time. I certainly don't have time to stop and tell the world..

Seven. Blog entries that ramble on about all sorts of crap.. oh, that's me. Drat.

Copying files between machines...

I'v almost got the BeebEm AUN Emulation working... but I wanted a copy of the Map file from the A5000 on the (windows) laptop. Now I'd previously played with trying to get ftp, samba and nfs servers working, but failed miserable. So how did I do it?

Run BeebEm and log it into the econet fileserver on the A5000, which still has $ as ADFS::IDEDisc4:$.

Created a new SSD file in drive 0, and un-write protected it.

*DIR $.!Boot.Resources.!Internet.Files
*Info AUNMap
(gave me length of file as 6E3 bytes)
*Load AUNMap 1B00
*Disc
*Save AUNMap 1B00+6E3

Ejected the disc, loaded it into DFS Explorer, dragged the file out to my desktop.

Simple ...
:-)