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The Average Pretender.
Between the British Broadcasting Corporation and Acorn Computers, some extremely fine examples of UK made microcomputers were born. The BBC Micro filled schools in the UK and has a great reputation.
The BBC Master range arrived in 1986 as an evolution of the original Micro and continued to do well. Then there's this wee job... the Master Compact.
In a more modern styled 'three box' format with what looks like a seperate chassis, a detached keyboard and a monitor... the Master Compact was actually a Master 128 shrunken to fit entirely inside the small keyboard unit! The larger chassis was actually the chassis of the Acorn FileStore E01 with some slightly different plastics and contained a solitary NEC 3.5" floppy drive and the power supply... the rest was empty space!
The Compact does offer a unique advantage though... it IS the smallest real BBC model available, if you ignore the box.
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Rockwell R65SC12 @
2MHz 128K RAM 3.5" double
density floppy drive Acorn MOS 5.10The pretend chassis like a big PC!
A Facebook Marketplace find! The owner had it listed as 'Riscpc parts', but the photos clearly showed a complete system. I gave him a heckle, he said it has no drives but is otherwise complete and I could have it free of charge if it's getting a good home!
I fully stripped the machine, removed the decaying battery and washed the whole board down before reassembling. A few caps had been knocked off the StrongARM card so I resoldered those then fired the machine up and bugger me, it fired into life quick sharp!
I fitted a new drive, installed RISC OS then proceeded to fettle about getting the networking functions working, proper CDROM support working and finally firing up the Aleph1 486 card. RISC OS is a very unique platform and is quite unlike anything I'd played with prior!
Sadly a common issue with RiscPCs is that the battery eats components and mine is no exception, there's damage to the audio amplification circuit meaning I no longer have working sound... for now. Once I get it fixed I'll be exploring what can be done with the RISC OS / Archimedes platform on stream.