I never got as far as the disk drive variants, the next PC in the house was a Sanyo MBC-550, which was the strangest near-IBM clone ever. It was 2nd hand and relatively cheap, the reason being it was OK on dos based software that stuck to the BIOS routines (like Wordstar) but hopeless on everything else, due to some weirdness with the graphics card in it.
I see the Microbee's come up occasionally on Ebay but they are just a bit expensive for something I would only play with briefly and then put back in the cupboard.
We had a 16k tape only bee before the disk one. I loved that they had battery backed SRAM. You could turn it off and come back later and your program was still there.
I just had a look, and didn't find anything, but I have a sneaking suspicion I have a copy of your game on one of my games compilation disks.
The battery backed ram was a neat feature, almost entirely necessary as the cassettes were a major time waster (although that might have been the cheap cassette player I was using). I modded my Microbee to have a switch on the battery backup so you could save the very expensive battery when I wasn't using that feature. There was another crazy home-grown box hanging out the back based on a project kit you could buy that had several EPROM sockets on it, so you could have the WordBee and EDASM proms available. From memory it switched between the roms by switching out the leg that had power going to it, with a very carefully soldered prom socket on a ribbon cable heading into the back of the bee via that big unused expansion socket. My soldering skills were severely challenged by that simple project.
> From memory it switched between the roms by switching out the leg that had power going to it,
Somewhat more likely that it had constant power and ground to all chips and switched the output-enable pin on the EPROM you wanted to be active. (Many chips are not spec’d to have inputs driven many volts above the power input level, hence the output-enable/chip-select pins.)
I also look back to projects that taxed my abilities at the time (software and hardware) that I wouldn’t even notice as being part of the project now. I’m only reminded when I see my kids come up that similar curve.
That does sound more likely. There was a rotary switch on that single line to the eproms, but the kit did come with a warning you shouldn't switch them while the computer was running. Was certainly a lot easier than levering out your expensive eprom. In retrospect it was a stupid way to distribute software, but the microbee couldn't fit the word processor and assembler in memory at the same time.
Oh yeah, I remember that the battery was an odd size and expensive. I think it was 4.5V(?). We had a battery holder for some AAs hanging out the side.
I feel like our 16k bee had more than one ROM in it. I think you could boot into word bee by doing <reset>W and basic with <reset>M
I dont have the 16k bee to check. I kinda wish I did. The disk ones were more serious computers at the time, but I'm strangely more nostalgic for the tape ones. I think there's less magic associated with the tapes.
Ugh those tapes. At one point I set aside the tape player that came from the chemist (Hanimex?) and purchased a special "computer tape player" from somewhere (may have been Tandy) that was supposedly optimised for computer use. It was worse. Trying to fiddle with the tape head azimuth to read some 3rd party tape using a set of headphones was not the ideal way to spend an afternoon. I don't miss cassettes as data storage.
good times....