Quote:
Originally Posted by Halcyon
Chris, I hear those old BBC's are worth a bit now. I actually remember using them with the truly floppy 5 1/2" floppies.
Like you I've found my Mac's to go a long way. They hardly ever got slowed down and always performed well.
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They’re worth something in working condition, which is quite rare now. Some of the electronics are known to degrade with time (serious retro hobbyists know which components and how to replace them - so a defunct BBC can still be brought back to life with the appropriate skills and a soldering iron).
Seriously degraded capacitors can explode so I have no plans to plug mine in again, unless I happen to find myself at a convention of some kind where it could be done under controlled conditions (this is unlikely).
My BBC shipped without the optional Acorn DFS but as games got more ambitious and disk-only add-ons became a thing, I pestered the parents and got a 5 1/2” floppy drive with a self-install DFS circuit board from Watford Electronics for Christmas, in around 1986 IIRC. Watford was one of the regular multi-page advertisers in all the main magazines at the time. I got Repton 3 for Christmas that year and having the disk drive made the game editor add-on a breeze. I also got my hands on a ripped-off copy of Elite (disc version) which had lots more going on than the BBC tape version.
The Watford Electronics 5 1/2” floppy drive was cheap and we got what we paid for …. It worked well 90% of the time but if you used it too intensively something inside would jam and knock rapidly against the outer metal casing in a very alarming manner
