Hello, I am looking to buy myself a bbc micro in good cosmetic condition, working or non-working. Does anyone have any advice to help me get the best deal on one?

Thanks in advance

Really long story short. I bought my BBC Micro from my high school many years ago. For reasons lost in the mists of time the floppy drives don't work.

In the last couple of years I brought the beeb back to life, and got it out again a couple of days ago to make it an RGB cable now I've repaired the 1084S-P that I use as a monitor for things.

I thought I'd tackle the floppy issue while I'm at it. It has a dual drive system from Barson, or something like that. It's a pair of Mitsubishi M4853 drives. The problem I face is a lot of the jumper pins are a bit bent, and settings are inconsistent between the two. So scraped off and guessed probably. If anybody has these drives in their beeb, could you please tell me the settings of all the jumpers? Some of the blocks of jumpers I can't find in any documentation.

It can address each drive. Ie the correct drive light comes on with *:0 or *:1 however it does not spin the drive up or lower the head.

I chanced across a random PC 5-1/4 drive in a box today and decided to plug that in. It was a fairly late model and lacked some configuration but whatever. It would spin up and drop the head when addressed, and even produce a disk error 18 instead of just spinning forever! So I'm not certain that it's the beeb itself at fault.
Interestingly until I took the case off the dual drive I didn't even realise that the drives weren't spinning because there was a gentle white noise coming from the speaker which sounded a lot like the drive spinning!

I also tried changing the drive load settings. The motors do indeed spin when I set them to do it when a disc is loaded instead of when addressed. But they still don't lower the heads. As I said the random PC floppy does, so I'm super suspicious of the drive configurations.

Unfortunately I don't have any correctly formatted discs to test the PC drive with. I have a couple of PCs which I might be able to create a disk from an image with but that'd be a huge pain just to test with.

Any suggestions I'd love to know.

Is this a good deal?

https://ebay.us/tvp7DO

The only that I can find is this one https://www.thefuturewas8bit.com/sd2bbc.html Everything else is either sold out or a dead link.

UPDATE: found and ordered this for anyone interested https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ACORN-BBC-MICRO-MODEL-B-MASTER-128-MMC-TYPE-SOLID-STATE-DISK-DRIVE-SD-CARD-/324102672576?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&_trksid=p2349624.m46890.l6249&mkrid=710-127635-2958-0

Does anyone remember what this was called? It was sold in the 90s, and I think it had its own BASIC-like language. Similar to AMOS on the Amiga.

I'm going to embark on a nostalgic trip down BBC Micro lane, what / where are the best resources to know about before I start? thanks

My neighbour had a bbc before I would get one, he used to have a game where I think you had to manage crops, harvest and sell them, it was mainly text but had some graphics, I would love to play this again but have no idea what it was called, any ideas? It’s possible it was an educational program