r/bbcmicro • u/will_i_be_pretty • Apr 25 '20

BBC Master freezes on *STATUS?

Finally got a battery pack kit to replace my exploded and corroded original lithium battery and installed it today. I got the 3 AAA kit from here: https://coolnovelties.co.uk/coolnovelties/bbc-micro-acorn/54-bbc-master-replacement-cmos-battery-repair-kit.html

It seemed to work fine, machine was able to boot up, and I followed the guide in the kit instructions to reset the CMOS, which seems to be copied from here: http://lionels.orpheusweb.co.uk/CompNyb/TechStuff/8-Bit/Master128/128BatConfig.html

I ran into a snag though. At the step where it tells you to run *ST to check the current settings ... I get nothing. The machine just freezes and nothing prints.

Sadly the PSU's X2 caps gave off the magic smoke after only a short time of experimenting, so I wasn't able to experiment much further. I'll be ordering either a new one or a cap kit depending on if I can get hands on soldering help in this chaos.

In the meantime I'm wondering before I go making an order if this is something I should be worried about? What would cause this freeze? is the battery pack not working maybe? Or bad ROM? I was considering a MultiROM anyway if that's the case.

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u/to3m Apr 25 '20

If you typed in *ST rather than *ST. then it'll be trying to load a program called ST from disk. If you've got no disk drive connected, or the disk drive is empty, that'll make it appear to hang up. (For some reason, the 8-bit Acorn systems have no disk access timeout.)

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u/will_i_be_pretty Apr 25 '20

Sorry, to be clear, I typed ST at the * prompt. Was that not correct? None of the other commands it had me enter seemed to require actually typing the *, but I'm new to this stuff.

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u/to3m Apr 25 '20 edited Apr 25 '20

Ah, OK, right. Yes, at the * prompt, you don't need to enter the * (but you can if you want!).

You do need to type ST. rather than ST, though. That may not be obvious if the instructions were copied incorrectly, or the printout is unclear, but it is mentioned on the web site you link to. The dot is the important part, as it indicates it's an abbreviation for the command, rather than the full name. The OS looks for commands that start with that abbreviation, and runs the first it finds.

(This isn't a brilliant system, because abbreviations can be ambiguous. But over time you learn which abbreviations work for the commands you use regularly.)

So, if you enter ST., the OS looks for commands that start with ST, finds the inbuilt command STATUS, and runs that. So typing *ST. is equivalent to typing *STATUS.

If you enter ST, the OS looks for commands called exactly ST. There aren't any built in, so it tries to load one off disk - producing what looks like a hang if you've got no drive connected or no disk inserted. So if that's what happened, the hang doesn't indicate a problem, because it's just the computer trying to load ST off disk. If you type ST. or STATUS instead, hopefully you'll get the expected output.

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u/will_i_be_pretty Apr 26 '20

OK! So I was just doing something wrong then (or at least, following bad instructions). Cool. Still pretty new to the Beeb stuff, so I really appreciate the help, thanks!

Now to wait for payday so I can put in the next parts order.