If I had known that there was a BBC Micro forum, I'd have joined one earlier
I never owned a Beeb back 'in the day'. I had a Spectrum, because it was a good deal cheaper and we could afford it. But...our school had an econet network of BBCs, so I got to use the machine in its most fun state - connected to *other* machines. Computers become infinitely more fun when they can talk to others!
So a friend and I wrote a multi user game - a MUD for the BBC Micro, on Econet. It was shamelessly ripped off from Shades which ran on Micronet - well, not entirely: the locations were entirely our own work, as was the code - but we borrowed a hell of a lot from Shades, like the levels, and how some of the spells worked, and we did borrow the Shifting Sands. It had both client/server and peer-to-peer network code (none of us had heard the term) - the server was a disused BBC-compatible Torch machine that no one wanted to use because the keyboard was different. The server kept track of game state. The client did things like display the locations. Some messages were client/server (such as starting a fight, or getting an item) and some were peer-to-peer, like a SHOUT command.
It was a horrible mish mash of 6502 asm and BBC BASIC. It's a wonder it worked at all, let alone as well as it did. It taught me a lot about networks. It taught me a lot about how others would meddle and try to do anything to break the security of networked code...
I now have two BBC Micros, one with an internal IDE hard disc, and an &E00 ADFS running from sideways RAM, and the other a pretty much bog-standard machine with an Acorn DFS and the intel disc controller.
I prefer the real hardware to emulators. Emulators leave something, well, lacking.
I also enjoy meddling with hardware, and the BBC with its very accessable user port is great for this. My current 8 bit project though is an ethernet card for the Sinclair Spectrum. Once I've got done with the Speccy version, I'll probably do the same for the BBC Micro (the hardware should be simpler, given that the BBC has sockets for taking sideways ROM, and won't need me to design a paging mechanism since it's built in). However, I'm not nearly as familiar with 6502 assembly as I am with Z80, so the software's likely to take a *lot* longer!
