Paul Bussey

2026 09 : Falkirk, Business Hub – The I.T. Crowd (Scotland)

September 26, 2026 by Paul Bussey

Another day of learning, sharing, repairing and connecting with each other.

Thanks everyone for continuing to support the I.T. Crowd (Scotland).

Michael (firthmj) working on setting up Econet Elite.

Stephen (theCellarTroll) finished repairing his Archimedes A7000 (I think third time lucky)

Gary (Ramtop) sharing his thoughts about making a larger plus 1 (shown is his +1 mini here) for the Electron with a few more bells and whistles

Recreation of the Enigma by Gordon (GordonDragon)

Derek (WalkerWorks) with his amazing looking Electron, built from the ground up.

Paul (Tosk) testing original disk and cassette software with a Master 128 and BBC Micro

Ken (KenLowe) checking a dodgy original software disk, sector by sector

A Raspberry Pi-powered Domesday system by Chris (Crivett95) – we all looked up our home towns as they looked in the 80s.

Ian (IanJeffray) who built from scratch an Archimedes A5000 this week (a world first!)

Paul (Tosk) running the BBC Master Welcome Tape on an Acorn data recorder (kindly shared from DaveLecky)

Paul (Tosk) testing original tape software for the BBC B “Lord of the Rings Game One”

2026 07 : Falkirk, Business Hub – The I.T. Crowd (Scotland)

July 30, 2026 by Paul Bussey

On Saturday the 4th of July, we had an excellent full day Saturday session at the Falkirk Business Hub.

The day started off with a BANG as a BBC Master had a RIFA capacitor failure. I would have loved to have caught that on camera, but I was busy running around the room turning on the air conditioners in the room to prevent the fire alarm going off!

Peter brought in an Acorn Atom and together with Ken gave it a careful check over to try and get it functional again.

The Atom was generally healthy, but we had trouble getting a screen output – it’s now since been repaired and is up and running.

Part of the donated computer stash (thanks to Andew Stanley) to the group was given a home to some of our group members. Alasdair took ownership of this Amiga 2000 (often used for video editing/creation) which had a beast of a power supply.

We had the Amiga 2000 boot up to the first stage – so in working order.

Fred was present (admin of the Scottish Amiga group) and had an Amiga up and running showing Workbench (I think).

Ken was hard at work including installing an Econet kit for a BBC Master

Chris’s brought in his completely 3D printed turtle and showed a BBC Micro rwith an Econet module receiving a live teletext service

Michael demonstrated his coding project to do with file formatting/file transfers from PCs to BBC Micros

I received A BBC Master 128, one of the machines from the kind donation of Andrew Stanley that I’ll be cleaning up and putting to good use. Thanks to Steve and David to get this up and running with the keyboard repaired plus a special original Acorn travel bag passed onto me from Dave.

2026 07 : Falkirk, Business Hub – The I.T. Crowd (Scotland) – Mini Meetup

July 30, 2026 by Paul Bussey

Great mini-meetup with Peter Guthrie.

I finally found Acornsville in Aviator …

Peter tested his Atom’s memory and we also tested some original Atom software, attempting to load on tape:-

I cleaned up my BBC Master’s case and keyboard

All in all, a good day of tinkering

2026 03 : Falkirk, Business Hub – The I.T. Crowd (Scotland)

March 30, 2026 by Paul Bussey

IT Crowd (Scotland) – March Meetup Roundup

Falkirk – Saturday 28th March 2026

There’s something quietly special about a room full of old machines being brought back to life—especially when they’re surrounded by people who understand them.

Our March IT Crowd (Scotland) meetup delivered exactly that: a relaxed but deeply engaging day of tinkering, troubleshooting, sharing ideas, and—just as importantly—enjoying the company of fellow enthusiasts.

A Room Full of Living History

From the moment things got underway, the room filled with that familiar blend of discussion, keyboard clicks, and the occasional victorious “it’s working!”

Setups ranged from neatly restored systems to open-case diagnostic workbenches. There’s always a contrast at these events between machines in pristine condition and others mid-surgery—and both are equally fascinating.

Archimedes, A-Series and Modern Bridges

A highlight was seeing an Archimedes A420 running happily alongside modern hardware, with RISC OS still feeling surprisingly usable. There’s something enduring about that desktop—clean, efficient, and unmistakably Acorn.

We also had an Acorn A4 laptop fitted with an in-development Ethernet card. This kind of work—quietly pushing these machines into modern connectivity—is exactly what keeps the platform alive rather than just preserved.

BBC Micro, Repairs, and Upgrades

Several BBC Micros were in various states of attention—from fully working systems to machines undergoing careful repair and upgrade.

One setup featured an IntegraB board, showcasing just how far the BBC Micro can be extended.
Another machine was being tested after upgrades—always a tense but satisfying moment when it springs back to life.
Elsewhere, a “poorly” A3020 had been partially dismantled, with components laid out for diagnosis.

These hands-on moments are where the real value of the meetup shines—shared knowledge, second opinions, and that collective persistence to get things working again.

Electron Experiments and Custom Hardware

The Acorn Electron also had a strong showing, including:

A Plus 1 mini expansion
A custom sound card project

This kind of development work is particularly exciting—it’s not just restoration, it’s reinterpretation. New capabilities being built for old machines, often with a level of ingenuity that rivals anything from the original era.

Why These Days Matter

What stood out most wasn’t any single machine, but the spirit of the day:

People bringing along projects in progress
Others offering advice, parts, or just encouragement
A shared understanding that these systems are worth preserving—not just as artefacts, but as working machines

There’s also something refreshingly analogue about it all. No pressure, no rush—just time spent understanding how things work.

Looking Ahead

These smaller, focused meetups continue to prove their value. They’re easy to attend, easy to contribute to, and always productive—whether you come with a problem to solve or just curiosity.

If you’ve got an Acorn machine (or any retro system) sitting idle, consider bringing it along next time. Chances are, someone in the room will help you get it running again.

And even if not—you’ll still have a good day talking about it.

Thanks to everyone who came along, brought hardware, shared knowledge, and helped make the day what it was.

Riddles in the Dark : Goblin Cave Adventure

March 22, 2026 by Paul Bussey

Copy and paste the program text in the file below to Owlet

GoblinCaveAdventureV5 Download

Surviving the Darkness: A Guide to “Goblin Cave Adventure”

Picture this: It’s the early 1980s. The room is dark, save for the warm, phosphor glow of a CRT monitor. The mechanical clatter of your Acorn BBC Micro keyboard echoes as you frantically type “KILL NASTY GOBLIN”. You are playing Melbourne House’s legendary 1982 text adventure, The Hobbit.

What made that game so magical wasn’t just the graphics or the prose; it was the fact that the world felt alive. Characters didn’t just wait for you in rooms—they wandered, they fought, they got lost, and they died while you were off doing something else entirely.

I wanted to recapture that exact feeling. I wanted to build a game that felt like a lost cassette tape from 1984, but with a modern twist: infinite replayability.

The result is Goblin Cave Adventure, a procedurally generated, living text adventure written entirely in authentic BBC BASIC II.

The Motivation: 32KB of Living Ecosystem

My goal was simple but technically daunting: Could I build a procedurally generated maze, an auto-mapper, a real-time command parser, and an ecosystem of autonomous NPCs that loot items, unlock doors, and fight each other… all within the brutal constraints of the BBC Micro’s memory?

Because BBC BASIC II lacks modern luxuries like multi-line IF…ENDIF blocks, the code is a beautiful, tangled web of single-line logic, clever array management, and Mode 7 Teletext trickery.

But the effort was worth it. The cave system is a living MUD-lite. If a wandering Goblin hits a locked door, he’ll turn around—unless he happened to find the matching key on the floor a few turns ago, in which case he’ll unlock it! If Gandalf crosses paths with the Great Goblin, they will fight to the death. If you are a room away when this happens, you might just read: “You hear a lock click,” or “A scraping noise echoes down the passage.”

It is a game where you are not the center of the universe. You are just trying to survive it.

How to Play: Surviving the Depths

Your overarching objective is to clear the caves of darkness. There are 5 hostile enemies (Gollum, the Vicious Warg, two nasty Goblins, and the Great Goblin). If you can eliminate them all, you win.

The Interface & Stats
At the top of the screen, you will see a fixed, non-scrolling yellow HUD tracking your vitals:

HP (Hit Points): You start with 20. Take a hit, lose 1 HP. Hit 0, and you die in the dark.
STR (Strength): You start at 4. (Hint: if you find and TAKE STING, your strength jumps to 6!)
ENEMIES: The number of bad guys left alive. Friendly dwarves and Gandalf don’t count—and if they kill a goblin for you, this number will tick down!

The Commands
The parser is forgiving (case-insensitive) but strictly 1980s. Here is your survival toolkit:

Movement: N, S, E, W, U (Up), D (Down).
Look Around: L or LOOK.
The Auto-Mapper: Type M or MAP. This is a massive quality-of-life feature! It pauses the game and draws a complete Teletext map of everything you have explored on both the Upper and Lower levels.
Inventory: I, INV, or INVENTORY.
Item Management: TAKE [ITEM] and DROP [ITEM]. (e.g., TAKE STING, DROP KEY).
The Ring: WEAR RING grants you 10 turns of invisibility. Enemies will not ambush you, and if you attack them, they will thrash blindly in the dark! Type REMOVE RING to take it off.
Doors: Four colored doors (Golden, Curious, Iron, Red) block your path. Use OPEN, CLOSE, LOCK, and UNLOCK to interact with them (assuming you have the right key!).
Combat: Type FIGHT, ATTACK, or KILL (e.g., FIGHT GOBLIN).
Spying: Type NPC at any time to pull up a debug screen showing which NPCs are alive, dead, and exactly what items they have looted from the map!

The Real-Time Twist
While it is a turn-based text adventure, it is also watching the clock. If you sit at the > prompt for 30 seconds without pressing a key, the game will automatically execute a WAIT command. The world will tick forward, enemies will move, and you might suddenly find yourself ambushed by a Warg while you were sipping your tea!

Ready to Descend?

If you want to step back into 1984, fire up a BBC Micro emulator (like BeebEm, B-Em, or JSBeeb in your browser), paste in the code, and type RUN.

Keep your wits sharp, let the dwarves do the heavy lifting if you can, and whatever you do… listen closely to the noises in the dark.

2026 03 : Cordoba, La Zona – Retrobytes Mini Meetup

March 22, 2026 by Paul Bussey

At this month’s Retrobytes meeting at LaZona Coworking , something seemingly simple ended up attracting a lot of attention: printing again from a ZX Spectrum.

Using an Alphacom 32 , I printed a long list of Mythic Map ‘s code along with some of the game’s graphical output. Even surrounded by modern monitors, adapters, and several different machines on the table, watching the BASIC code slowly appear on thermal paper still has something special about it.

Mythic Map is a project that explores procedural map generation and simple adventure-style navigation on the ZX Spectrum, with the idea of traversing a generated world rather than following a fixed map. Printing the code and some of the visual output fit perfectly with that way of working from the 1980s, when reviewing a program on paper was completely normal.

Multiple demonstrations at the same time

The atmosphere in the morning was very typical of these Retrobytes gatherings: several technical conversations happening at the same time around the same table.

While the Alphacom 32 was printing meters of BASIC listing, I also showed a small demonstration of 3D wireframe graphics in BBC Micro , using simple lines and basic perspective.

Meanwhile, José showcased an impressive modern 3D racing game for the ZX Spectrum, a recent competition winner, demonstrating just how much the machine continues to amaze today.

Natxo also brought his own Sinclair BASIC version of Mythic Map , which led to a comparison of different ways of approaching the same idea within the limitations of the Spectrum.

Francisco was also at the table during the session, on a morning where someone was constantly moving from one screen to another, commenting on a technical solution or asking about a specific connection.

Sinclair ZX Printer vs Alphacom 32

The first truly iconic printer in the Sinclair environment was the Sinclair ZX Printer , launched in 1981 with a price of £49.95 , which today would be roughly equivalent to 210–230 euros .

It was a printer that was very representative of the Sinclair style: small, ingenious, economical and quite different from any other option of the time.

Their system didn’t use ink or thermal paper, but rather electrical spark printing on metallized paper. Small electrical discharges burned dots onto the paper, allowing the printing of BASIC listings, simple graphics, and screen captures.

Its advantages were clear:

very small size
relatively affordable price
direct connection and easy use with Sinclair machines

But its limitations soon appeared as well:

I needed special metallic paper
The print quality was limited and degraded over time.
the mechanism could be delicate
It generated a lot of electrical interference.

Although technically very original, over time it began to be seen more as a curiosity than a truly practical printer. Sinclair eventually lowered its price to maintain interest, but even so, it ended up being withdrawn from the market relatively soon, partly because other thermal or dot-matrix solutions offered greater reliability and practical utility.

The Alphacom 32 , which appeared shortly afterwards for around £59.95 (about €250–290 today ), solved many of those problems.

When using thermal paper , it offered:

cleaner and more uniform printing
quieter operation
easy to replace paper
greater overall reliability

Furthermore, it gave a feeling much closer to a practical home printer than to a technical experiment.

That explains why it remains so interesting today: compatible thermal paper is still readily available and many units still function well with basic maintenance, usually printhead cleaning and power checks.

Viewed together, both printers represent two very different approaches to early home computing: the Sinclair as a brilliant experiment and the Alphacom as a truly usable solution.

It still has something special.

Printing from an 8-bit machine is no longer practical, but it completely changes the feel of the software: the code becomes something physical.

This was especially noticeable when seeing the Mythic Map listing spread out on the table alongside Spectrum demos, BBC Micro graphics, and other machines from different eras.

And perhaps that sums up these encounters quite well: one machine starts printing, another displays something unexpected, and in the end everyone ends up looking at the same thing.

If you are interested in participating in events like this, you can contact Retrobytes: it’s always a good time to share machines, projects and conversation about classic computing.