Last Updated 5th May 2019
The BBC Games Archive - digital memories
Last Updated 5th May 2019
So, you've found the site, the memories have come flooding back and you're longing for a blast on Zalaga or Snapper, what do you do? You download the games of course! But wait? What are these strange files inside the zip's? They're raw bbc files thats what, and you can't just execute them like any other file, so here's my guide to running games from the archive.
An emulator I hear you cry! Of course! Yes these little beasties allow you to run your old BBC games on your spangly new P4 3.2ghz system, thereby turning your £1500 beige box into something from 1981! Wait, thats not as bad as it sounds you know, you do get to play Exile and Elite again and all that stuff after all!
Ok, so where do you get one? Well, the good news is there's loads around that'll emulate the bbc, the bad news is:
Alternatively, check out The BBC Lives! for a wider selection of emulators.
BeebEm - Has now assumed its place as the 'daddy' of Beeb emulators, this one has been ported to loads of differen OS's and machines, and is just about the most complete emulator available.
pcBBC - Once the top dog of the emulator seen this now seems to have been abandoned, and all that is left is the 10 minute demo edition. Its a fairly complete emulator but you may have trouble running it. Don't expect a Windows interface though, this thing runs in good old DOS.
MESS BBC Driver - a very promising emulator using the MESS engine.
There's less selection for Unix/Linux and I would go for XMESS, its really the only complete emulator available for Unix.
XBeeb - An old bbc emulator, you'll be lucky to get anything running on it.
BeebEm for Unix - a direct port of Windows BeebEm 3.5, seems to work very well!
I don't use a Mac so I can't really recommend any emulators, but here are what are generally considered the best Mac BBC Emulators:
For MacOS 9:
Horizon - thats in a stuffit archive which i'm assured you Mac people all know about.
For MacOS X:
There is a reworking of Horizon for the new OS at:
http://www.bannister.org/software/horizon.htm
The files you get from this website are all raw bbc files with their headers attached. What you need is to convert these files into a BBC disk image file. I will explain how to do this:
You are now ready to play the games!
With your favourite emulator running, you need to load in the disc image. This should take a couple of seconds, then what you need to do in the emulator is type '*CAT' to get a directory listing. You should see the files you put into the image. To run one type CHAIN "filename" where filename is the name of the game you wish to run. If you get the message 'Bad Program' back, then try *RUN filename. If neither of this work, the file is probably not runnable by the emulator. Most games have a loader program with them so chances are you are trying to run a data file and not an executable.
Enjoy the games!
(C)2009 C. Boylan