Over the last few years, ABug have hosted a fascinating series of talks over Zoom on a wide range of retro Acorn and BBC Micro topics. We posted about a few of them last Christmas.
 
Just in time for this Christmas, ABug have been busy over the last few weeks posting some more of the talks to their YouTube channel, just in time for escaping from another load of Christmas film repeats on TV.
 
This time around, there's talks on a variety of topics, including building RISC OS 3.71 from its original source code, software presevation and rescuing data from old BBC Micro discs, stories from BBC Micro developers and more.
 
The full list of videos is on the ABug YouTube page (with more still to come in the coming days!), but here's a few of our favourites to get you started:
 

We've mentioned before the work of the Acorn Preservation Team to archive and preserve BBC Micro and Acorn software before it's lost to time and bit rot. As part of this effort, there will be a Software Preservation stand at this weekend's ROUGOL show which will offer a software preservation service. This is possible thanks to a generous offer of time and expertise from Paul Emerton (who you may remember from his excellent demonstration on BBC TV graphics and Acorn machines at the Centre for Computing History).
 
The idea is that you can bring along your BBC Micro or Archimedes floppy discs and if it's not already in the Acorn Preservation Team's archive, Paul will take an image of the disc while you wait and give the original back to you. If you take along a USB stick or SD card, a copy of the resulting disc image will be provided back to you (although be aware that the images of a single floppy disc can be up to around 85MB).
 
Imaging the discs will be made possible thanks to Paul bringing along his Greaseweazle - a small device that reads and stores the raw magnetic flux readings from the floppy disc (hence the large size of the resulting images). The advantage of imaging the discs this way is that it preserves the content exactly, including any special copy protection tracks from the original disc.
 
Even if you can't bring your own discs along, Paul will be available at the stand to chat and give advice on how best to store and avoid damage to both discs and drives to help preserve the life of both.
 

Archimedes emulator Arculator has been updated to version 2.1 with some very nice new features. The emulator can now emulate an A4 laptop or the A500 prototype and can also emulate more podules, including the Aleph One 386 and 486 podule, meaning you can now run DOS and Windows in the emulator.
 
Other podules now supported include Acorn ROM podules, MIDI podules, Oak SCSI interfaces and Computer Concepts' ColourCard. Support for disc images in the .hfe format is also now included.
 
  
 
Head over to the Arculator website to download the new version.
 

The need to preserve data from the BBC Micro days is becoming more and more urgent as time goes by since many of the discs are now well over 35 years old and many will be starting to degrade - if they haven't already. During this weekend's all-day ABug event, the Acorn Preservation Team gave an update on their recent project to recover the data from the original source code discs for several of Matthew Atkinson's games for the BBC Micro including Repton 3, UIM, Tempest and The Living Daylights.
 
The Acorn Preservation Team are also encouraging anyone who may have some old discs containing anything that is in need of recovery/preservation/archival to get in touch and loan the discs to them to help make sure the data isn't permanently lost. In particular, the team are interested in development discs containing sources, binaries, unreleased/missing/early versions of games and applications for both the BBC and RISC OS platforms.
 
In the case of Matthew Atkinson's discs, they were passed over to the Acorn Preservation Team a few weeks ago when they turned up here at TIB Towers after having been presumed lost by the author. It turned out that he'd in fact sent them to TIB back in the early 2000s where they were stored for the last fifteen years before turning up during a recent house move.
 
Once we'd sent the discs over to them, the Acorn Preservation Team set to work recovering the data contained within. This task wasn't entirely straightforward as some discs were showing the effect of their advancing age. One disc had damage that looked like it had seen an impact at some point in its life and sported a dent covering around 11 tracks of data. Despite this, the team were able to recover almost all of the data from the 22 disc set using a variety of methods including flux-level readings and analysing low level analogue signals from the discs. At the time of writing, only a handful of tracks from the dented disc remain to be recovered and are still being actively worked on. The data recovered so far has been provided back to Matthew Atkinson to have a look through and decide what he'd like to do with the soruces next.
 

Phil Pemberton and Chris Evans talk about the process of recovering data from Matthew Atkinson's source discs at this weekend's ABug event
 
The ABug talk from the Acorn Preservation Team will be made available through both the ABug website and their new YouTube channel in the near future along with a talk by Matthew Atkinson himself on the history of his BBC Micro and Archimedes development days.
 
If you have any old discs in need of preservation, whether BBC Micro era or Archimedes/RISC OS, the Acorn Preservation Team urge you to get in touch via the Stardot forums or the Software Preservation channel in the Stardot Discord Server before it's too late and the data's gone forever.
 

What better way to spend your free time this Christmas while we're not allowed to go anywhere than to sit back, relax and enjoy some interesting presentations on a variety of Acorn and RISC OS topics?
 
Since 2014, ABug - the Acorn and BBC Micro User Group - have been holding regular events featuring talks on a wide range of topics relating to Acorn and RISC OS computers, both as in-person events and more recently as virtual events. We've selected a few of our favourites in this article, but the ABug website has a lot more talks available to choose from.
 

Following an odd saga over the weekend involving Facebook group bans, deleted comments and generally hostile responses, the Cloverleaf project have this evening posted an update to their Kickstarter page noting that due to legal concerns, their previous promises of including a large collection of games with the project's rewards will no longer be fulfilled. Instead, Cloverleaf will provide a way to download games from other sources.
 
Previously, Cloverleaf had promised a number of emulators and "enough games to discover and play for at least 1 year" as well as illustrating their project's posts with pictures of popular games such as Doom, Lemmings, Elite, Myst and Duke Nukem 3D.
 
In the short statement on the Kickstarter project's updates page, Cloverleaf explained:
 

One of the surprises of the recent RISC OS South-West Show was the release of a new version of !Organizer. This is the essential Diary, Calendar, ToDo application for RISC OS. It resembles the traditional style Filofax calendar and everything can be configured/tweaked to suit you, from fonts and colours to which day you start the week.
 

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...
 
*cue Star Wars theme*

Finally, it's here[1] - the cloud service that absolutely nobody asked
for, nobody wanted, and nobody will ever need!
 
JFPatch-as-a-service is now available at https://jfpatch.riscos.online/.
 
Harnessing the awesome power of cloud computing to provide the astounding
ability to build ARM assembly in a format that hardly anyone but the
author ever used. In the cloud. Did I mention that it's cloud based?
Because that makes it cool. Marvel at the astounding ability to create
26bit RISC OS modules that no modern hardware can run. Be shocked by the
complete lack of speed of building.
 
[1] For a short period.

*cut to C-3PO and R2-D2 making their way across Tatooine's surface*
 
R2-D2: Bleep bloop bleep
 
C-3PO: What do you mean you've never heard of JFPatch? It was written last century by one of the greatest RISC OS programmers of the time, gerph, who also went by the name -
 
R2-D2: Bleep bloop bleep
 
C-3PO: - yes, that's right. It allowed him to create many software patches and utilities which he then shared for free with people over the Internet. A true hero of his time! Unfortunately things took a turn for the worse when -
 
R2-D2: Bleep bloop bleep
 
C-3PO: - yes, that's right. For many years nothing was heard from him, and much of his software was lost from the Internet. But now he's back, and he's brought JFPatch with him! How marvellous!
 
R2-D2: Bleep bloop bleep
 
C-3PO: Yes, I know that he hasn't said how long he's back for or what his future plans are, but in these hard times we need to be thankful for every good thing that comes our way.
 
R2-D2: Bleep bloop bleep
 
C-3PO: *stops walking* Wait, it's just a "trendy" closed-source cloud service which could vanish at any moment, and doesn't work when accessed using NetSurf? Well, f -
 
*hard cut to next scene*