- [Narrator] It's 2020,
a time where we're all staying home.
Luckily, we've all got our retro computing collections
to help try and keep us sane.
And if you've got a bunch of BBCs,
boy do I have the video for you.
In the first part of this video,
we looked at the history of Econet
and how it became dominate in UK schools.
And in this part, we'll look at how to make your own.
If you are interested in the history of Econet,
you'll see a link to that video in the description below.
Now, this video's gonna have two sections.
We're gonna show you how to build Econet
using actual Acorn BBC hardware.
And the second section's gonna be all about the emulation.
Now, if you're gonna build an Econet network,
one of the things you're gonna need is a BBC.
One of the other things you're gonna need is another BBC.
Yes, if you're gonna network BBCs
you're gonna need a minimum of at least, well, two BBCs.
I mean, three would be great.
But you're looking at a bare minimum of two.
Now, luckily, you've got quite a variety
of BBCs to choose from.
You can have a BBCB or A.
You can have a BBC Master,
or a BBC Master Compact.
If you already own an Acorn Atom or have the kind of money
that allows you to own an Acorn Atom,
you could even have an Acorn Atom on your Econet.
Even Acorn Electron users aren't left out in the cold,
as Barton Computers even developed an Econet interface
for the Acorn Electron.
Now once you've got your BBCs,
you're gonna need some Econet interfaces for those BBCs.
However, given that many BBCs did in fact
have an Econet interface fitted,
there's a not tiny chance that your BBC may actually
already have an Econet interface.
So it's definitely worth opening up that case
and having a look.
Now here's a BBCB with its lid off, oh, saucy.
And here you can see the section of the PCB
where an Econet interface would be
if you had an Econet interface.
Yes, this is a BBC that's missing one
and this is what one that's missing one looks like.
So if you're PCB looks like this,
you're gonna need yourself an Econet interface
and luckily there's a chap called BeebMaster
that occasionally makes kits available on eBay.
So you can get yourself one of those,
pop all of the components in
and have all a jolly-good time soldering them all.
Now if soldering things does not seem your bag,
do not worry, there are places you can go
to soldering these things together for you,
but I would say
this is really not as hard a job as it looks.
It's all through hole,
I mean I'm not a great solderer,
but even I managed it on a machine or two.
I'd give it a whirl.
I mean after all, what's the worst that could happen,
you could merely just destroy your precious PCB,
burn your house down and get disowned by your family.
Things for the BBC Master and BBC Master compact
are somewhat easier, however.
You get these little Econet interface boards
that you can just pop inside your machine,
they're pretty easy to fit,
you'll find them on eBay.
Clunkier ones going secondhand,
and again that BeedMaster chap
who I mentioned earlier,
yeah he even makes up new boards,
look I got one here.
That you can just, again,
pop into your Master or your Master Compact.
Life's pretty simple.
They also go inside a few
of the Archimedes machines as well.
Shh, don't tell anyone.
So we've got some BBCs, we've got some Econet interfaces,
now we're gonna need some cabling and a clock box.
So in terms of clock box,
you're either gonna try and get yourself
one of the original ones from SJ research by Acorn
when they do come up on eBay every now and again.
Or you're gonna get one of the new ones
that people are making.
The new ones are way easier to get 'hold of
than the old ones.
As you can just, you know, go to a shop and buy one,
which is pretty darn convenient.
CJE Micros sells them.
So you can just go onto their website
and, you know, buy yourself one.
You'll also find designs on GitHub
if you fancy making one yourself.
You'll find PCB layouts and bombs and everything,
you can just get a board made up,
purchase yourself some bits and get soldering.
You'll find in the description below
that I've popped some links to not only stuff on GitHub,
but also CJE's Micro socket box as well.
So, we've got clock boxes,
we've got interfaces,
we're gonna need some cabling.
Now again, you can go the route
of trying to find old socket boxes on eBay,
they still come up every now and again,
again they go for a fair old price,
but they are definitely there.
You can even still buy some of them from CJE Micro.
The other option is the Y splitter cables or T pieces,
they're quite good for linking machines together.
Again, CJE Micros carries those.
And the alternative,
some people have actually been designing
their own Econet socket boxes
with RJ45 to link them together.
It's worth having a bit of a nose 'round
see if you can find some.
And although I've seen them,
I couldn't find a particular example
to link in the comment section below,
so if any of you know where you can find someone,
do feel free to pop them in the comment section
and enlighten us all.
The final alternative is you can have a go
at making your own socket boxes.
I've linked an article down below on Retro Kit
where it'll show you how to put them together.
So if you fancy giving it a whirl,
that's the place to look.
Okay now we get to the really exciting bit, file servers.
Yes, if you're gonna wanna do the whole Econet work thing
you're gonna wanna file serve.
Now if you're thinking that MDFS of the Acorn file server
from the previous video looked pretty good,
you're right, they do.
They are very good.
They're also basically unobtainium.
I've not seen one on eBay for over a decade now,
so I wouldn't hold out your hopes of getting one of those
unless you know someone who's willing to sell you one
or, actually there is no or,
I mean you're probably just not gonna get one
any other way.
So realistically you've only got about two options.
You're gonna have to build yourself
either a level three file server
or a level four file server.
Now a level four file server's not particularly difficult.
It's take pretty much any old Archimedes box,
stick the level four file software on it,
give it a hard drive and an Econet interface
and you're good.
I'm gonna guess that's not gonna be the most popular option.
'Cause it doesn't involve using the BBC
and you know, you wanna build a BBC Econet,
so we're gonna want the level three most probably.
So that's what we're gonna spend
all the detail time on here.
So if you remember from the previous video,
which is linked in the description below,
don't run off just yet, you can watch it later.
If you remember from the previous video,
the level three is basically one BBC Micro,
a second 6502 processor and a hard drive.
Now, getting a hold of a BBC Micro
with an Econet interface, not too difficult.
They're readily obtainable
and you may in fact already have one.
Original second process however,
yeah no that's getting harder.
There are less and less of those available
on eBay these days.
I mean they do still come up,
there's a great option if you can get hold of one,
it's nice to use the original kit,
but yeah they're not gonna be the easiest thing
to get 'hold of.
Luckily we don't need an original one.
A while ago, some clever person thought,
you know if we just stick a voltage level shift on this,
we can hook a pie up and get it to pretend to be
all the co-processes the BBC had.
Hence the raspberry pie co-processor tube adapter.
Oh and we have one here.
This particular one was made for us by Mark Haysman
over at Retro Clinic.
I mean other people do make these things
but this is the one I happened to buy
and this one allows you essentially
just to plug into the tub socket under the BBC
with a little bit of a ribbon cable.
And you take a raspberry pie zero,
you plug it in, write the right image to the SD card,
slap that in the pie,
and there you go, you've got yourself all the co-processes
the BBC Micro ever had.
And of course if you don't want it external
and you've got yourself a BBC Master,
well, there's an internal version of the tube adapter
that you can pop inside your BBC Master,
stick your raspberry pie in there
and there you go,
it's all neatly inside your BBC Master case, neat.
If you don't mind paying a bit more
for your raspberry pie zero,
you can get one with the header pins
already pre-soldered in,
or you can even buy yourself a complete kit
of the tub adapter and the pie and the SD card.
Or alternatively you can buy all the bits separate
and solder on the header pins yourself,
like I'm doing here in this little bit of footage.
There we go.
Turns out a lot harder at the solder,
not getting your head in the way of the camera.
I am better at soldering
when I don't have to worry where my head is.
Yeah, this is not great soldering.
Yeah. (laughing)
Anyway, moving swiftly on from the terrible soldering job.
We've now got ourselves a second processor.
Be it either one of the original ones
or a raspberry pie based one.
But we've got one.
So time to look at the storage.
Now you can buy yourself an original hard drive
like this giant lump of tin
you can see in this bit of video footage here.
I mean you can, you shouldn't.
I mean you can, but you just, just don't.
Look, I mean this is a 40-year-old hard drive.
If you can find one that's working you can afford,
it's gonna break down pretty darn quickly.
And lose all your data,
so you know, no.
Yeah we need to look at some modern storage based
on an SD card or a compact flash
or something like that
for this to not blow up in our face.
So our basic options here is we have
the wonderful data center, again,
created by Mark Haysman
who seems to be coming up quite a lot lately.
I promise he's not sponsoring this video,
that's just a coincidence.
Now that's what I use personally.
I have a little compact flash card in there.
And that acts as the hard drive to my level three.
The other option is something based around Beeb SCSI.
Now you can either get one of the Beeb SCSI cards
that Simonin's put together himself,
or again, there is one of those little voltage shifter
kind of dealies for the 1 MHz bus
and then you can stick a raspberry pie on there
that can pretend to be a Beeb SCSI
which is pretty handy.
And you can see one of them here.
Again, you just take this thing,
pop the header pins on a raspberry pie zero,
pop the pie zero into this thing,
put the right software on the SD card
and away you go.
And again I'll link to that in the description,
but that then gives you a functioning Beed SCSI hard drive.
And also a music 500 and a RAM expansion as well.
Which we're gonna make no use of
on one of these machines, but nevermind.
So we've got all the bits we need
to build a level three file server,
let's get building a level three file server.
First thing we're gonna have to do
is format our hard drive.
And we have a handy little utility for that.
Now I'm gonna show you this being run through an emulator
'cause I'm not gonna format my compact flash card
'cause it's already got stuff on it, so,
sorry you'll just have to see this in emulation.
Once formatted, it's given us two partitions.
One ADFS one where all our file server software can go,
and one especially formatted
as the level three file storage volume
where all our users and network files are gonna go
once the file store's up and running.
So, with our disc formatted
and all the file server utilities
copied across to the ADFS partition,
we basically have a file server ready to go.
So, let's boot this bad boy up.
Once the level three software is loaded,
we've got a few details we need to give it,
like for example, the date.
Now I'm running this here on BBC Master
that has a real time clock.
The original BBC didn't,
so when you turned it off,
it forgot whatever the date and time was.
So, you had to enter it manually
whenever you started to level three.
Now, obviously that could be a bit of a pain in the butt,
I mean you don't have to do this
every single time you restarted,
so Acorn made a real time clock you could plug in
to the user port.
Now, we've not got one of those
because one they're expensive
and two they had an in-built backup battery
so they could keep the time when the BBC was off.
And they're all dead now.
That and they were surrounded by potting compounds,
you know good luck getting that thing out.
Our final task is to tell the file server
about all its discs and then tell it to start
and tell it the number of work stations
we'd like it to be able to deal with.
And after quick a while of checking its discs,
I mean I sped this footage up.
It really does take quite a while.
It eventually has started
and is now a fully functional level three file server,
ready to serve files to all our BBC and Risk machines
or you know write files as well.
When we were formatting the disc
we were asked to supply a username or two.
Well, that's the default account now for this thing
so we can log in using that username
and no password, by default.
So we've built ourselves a hardware Econet network.
We built the actual network itself,
got ourselves a clock box, a work station,
level three file server,
we are all good.
But what if you want a little play with Econet
and you don't wanna do the whole hardware route?
Well, I said we'd have a look at doing this in emulation,
so here comes the emulation section.
So, this is BeebEm.
It emulates pretty much every single BBC there was
and pretty much all the hardware add-ons for the BBC,
including Econet.
Now the handy thing about how BeebEm
does Econet emulation is that it uses AUN:
Acorn Universal Networking
to encapsulate all the Econet traffic for us,
which is exactly the same system that Risk OS used.
Which means we can actually get BeebEm
talking to real Risk OS machines.
Now this of course means that an emulated Beeb
set up as a level three
can actually act as a file store to Risk OS machines,
which is pretty cool.
Or alternatively you can use BeebEm
as a client to a level four file server
running on a Risk OS machine.
There are some alternatives
to the level four file server software
you can run on Risk OS,
the likes of awServer and softMDFS.
AUN relies on something called the AUNMap,
which is a simple text file that tells you how
your Econet addresses map to IP and UDP ports
on different machines.
You can in fact have more than one Econet station number
on a single machine,
you just have to use a different port number
for each Econet station number.
Now, if you wanna get a level three file server
up and running in BeedEm,
well, all you have to do is click the tick boxes
that turn on the extra bits of hardware that we need.
So we need a second 6502 processor,
we need a hard drive,
we can even turn on the real time clock
to make life a little easier.
And then we just mount the disc image
with the file server software on
and then we follow through the exact same
hard disc formatting thing
we went through on the real hardware.
Everything else is basically the same.
After all, this is an emulator.
Now the final file server option I'm gonna cover for this
is the one I wrote myself.
Yes, I wrote an Econet file server emulator.
Don't worry I didn't just write it
just for this video,
I mean I go to a lot of effort on these things,
but writing a whole file server
would perhaps be, would just be one step too far,
even for me.
Now I'm particular to the ones written in PhP
because why not?
And to be honest, PhP's a lot more accessible language
so I wanted people to see how it works,
take it apart, add their own features into it,
do stuff with it.
And more people know PhP than a lot of other languages
I could have written this thing in.
And PhP's pretty easy to modify,
you don't have to worry about pointers
and other scary things that may just make it implode.
I also figured while we're being all modern about this,
we could turn it into a Docker image
and then you can launch it on Docker
onto Windows, Linux, Mac, or even if you got one
of those fancy little Synology NAS boxes,
you can launch it on there.
Now for those of you who are not familiar with Docker,
it's a containerization system
originally written to run under Linux.
But it can run on pretty much every OS these days
that's in major commercial use.
And you just tell the thing
to pull the image for Docker
and there we go just like that.
You then tell it to run
and you give it a port number you want it to listen on,
and you give it some directions
you want it to map into your filing system,
which is where all our files are gonna be served from
and then you go, the thing's up and running,
and then you can connect BeebEm to it, log in.
And there's even a little web interface you can use
to see who's logged in and have a look
at user's and whatnot.
Oh, how exciting.
Well that just about wraps everything up for this video.
If you've managed to build yourself an Econet network
or done something with emulation,
why not tell us about it in the comment section below?
So, it just remains for me
to say thank you all very much for watching
and especially those of you who subscribed.
Do feel free to click the like button
or share this video with friends and family
or people you think might actually be interested in this.
And of course as ever,
if you're feeling in the mood to subscribe,
I would of course appreciate it
because it actually means quite a big deal to me
when people subscribe and stuff.
Really makes me wanna make more of these things.
Okay well, thank you very much and good bye.