A few months ago the
CAMILEON project achieved considerable
media coverage for its work in preserving the prestigous but ill-fated BBC Domesday. Although the UK side of the project is drawing to a close, the group is still interested in exploring the complicated
IPR issues that restrict the publication of the Domesday information to a wider audience.
The CAMiLEON web site has recently been updated with, most notably, a report on the IPR issues as well as many pictures of the DomesEm emulator in action. If you've never seen a working system this is your chance to discover what we've all been in danger of missing.
Not to be outdone, the Icon Bar's report on BBC Domesday has also been treated to a make-over. Look out for a detailed feature in the forthcoming issue of RISC OS Foundation as well.
A digital preservation conference is being organised by the Public Record Office in April, and the BBC Domesday project will be one of the highlights. Entry to the conference costs over £350 so a trip is unlikely, but you can be sure to hear of any interesting developments via your favourite RISC OS portal...
Links:
CAMiLEON's BBC Domesday pages
Updated Icon Bar report
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BBC Domesday snippets |
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moss (18:24 6/2/2003)
moss (18:45 6/2/2003)
tribbles (09:52 7/2/2003)
Horse (11:48 7/2/2003)
tribbles (13:10 7/2/2003)
Horse (13:30 7/2/2003)
tribbles (15:06 7/2/2003)
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John Hoare |
Message #91678, posted by moss at 18:24, 6/2/2003 |
Posts: 9348
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I really do love that Iconbar report :-) |
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John Hoare |
Message #91679, posted by moss at 18:45, 6/2/2003, in reply to message #91678 |
Posts: 9348
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From the FAQ: "Why does the Observer's article on BBC Domesday not correlate with the information on this web site? The Observer conducted a telephone interview with CAMiLEON Project Manager, Paul Wheatley, a the end of February 2002, resulting in a piece in the Observer on Sunday. The article is not a fair representation of CAMiLEON's views and the quotes attributed to Paul Wheatley are far from accurate." You see, *this* is why I don't buy newspapers. Even the 'reputable' ones print a load of bollocks. |
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Jason Tribbeck |
Message #91680, posted by tribbles at 09:52, 7/2/2003, in reply to message #91679 |
 Captain Helix
Posts: 929
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The only thing that I don't really like about the report is the stuff to do with SCSI. FWICR the Beeb's Winchester interface is a 1MHz bus to SCSI to ST506 adaptor, so basically the SCSI stuff was already present. Of course, I'm not sure about when that aspect of the project was started, and when the Winchester drive was available, so it could be that the Winchester drive was a spin off of the Domesday project (although the Domesday was only available for the Master, whilst the Winchester was available for the Beeb too - AFAIK). Note that looking at some old Beebugs I picked up a few days ago, the 20M Winchester drive was predicted to be £1500, whilst OS1.2 was available for Beebug subscribers for a shade under £6. How things have changed... |
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Horse |
Message #91681, posted at 11:48, 7/2/2003, in reply to message #91680 |
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Has anyone managed to make a USB interface for the 8-bit Acorn machines? That would bring on a whole lot of fun. |
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Jason Tribbeck |
Message #91682, posted by tribbles at 13:10, 7/2/2003, in reply to message #91681 |
Captain Helix
Posts: 929
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I've been thinking about it, but it's probably infeasible (due to transfer speeds). Also, looking at the USB specs, the stack is quite tricky to get right (and I'd worry about the memory footprint). |
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Horse |
Message #91683, posted at 13:30, 7/2/2003, in reply to message #91682 |
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Aren't there chipsets which could simplify things a bit - I'm not a hardware horse, so I could be blatantly abstracting from the real issues. As for the transfer speeds - you could possibly put the BBC/Electron memory, video and hardware on the end of a USB cable - would extreme buffering and/or DMA actually be required to make it all workable? |
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Jason Tribbeck |
Message #91684, posted by tribbles at 15:06, 7/2/2003, in reply to message #91683 |
Captain Helix
Posts: 929
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There are two types of USB devices - effectively servers and clients. Server chipsets are normally embedded as part of the Motherboard, or as a PCI interface. Neither of these are particularly useful. Client chipsets normally include a CPU of some sort, but you can't talk to other USB devices. Simtec did an ASIC for their USB chipset, which in theory could be used, but convincing them would be another matter ;-) |
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