Making the Most of the Micro (4): Introducing Graphics

Episode 4 (Of 10). Broadcasted in BBC-2, 31 January 1983
Making the Most of the Micro was a TV series broadcast in 1983 as part of the BBC's Computer Literacy Project. It followed the earlier series The Computer Programme. Unlike its predecessor, Making the Most of the Micro delved somewhat deeper into the technicalities and uses that microcomputers could be put to, once again mainly using the BBC Micro in the studio for demonstration purposes. The series was followed by Micro Live.
List of Episodes:
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1. The Versatile Machine (10 January 1983)
2. Getting Down to BASIC (17 January 1983)
3. Strings and Things (24 January 1983)
4. Introducing Graphics (31 January 1983)
5. Keeping a Record (7 February 1983)
6. Getting Down to Business (14 February 1983)
7. Sounds Interesting (21 February 1983)
8. Everything Under Control (28 February 1983)
9. Moving Pictures (7 March 1983)
10. At the End of the Line (14 March 1983)

[@metropod]

Here I am… sitting in a Chinese food restaurant on my lunch break… watching this on a device these guys could have hardly imagined…

[@johneygd]

Awesome to see space invaders & space panic in action, but man,making charactors or triangles takes forever. That farari studio with it's advanced drawing computersystem and foto digitizer is mind blowing to see in action.

[@amigachris]

RIP Ian Mcnaught-Davis

[@frederickbowdler8169]

Great advocate for computing.😊!!!

[@por1821]

I got the ZX81 for Christmas which was pre'built and also had 1k memory & nearly exactly the same(the Zx Spectrum was too expensive)😀...I think it was 55 Irish pounds. I was amazed at the ability to be able to type my name on the TV Screen! I too got saved up my pocket money for the 16k ram pack (30 pounds sterling). Some genius figured out how to make Hi-Res games on this Low-Res machine (only blocky Character graphics no pixel ability). I was over the moon when I manged to buy 2 of these games in the post😊

[@sologals361]

In 1983 i was more into collecting star wars figures and playing my astro wars than computers. Now computers are my life,my income.

[@bobomb1986]

I played that game Monsters at the 22-or-so minute mark so many times without realizing before that he's modelled on Rupert Bear!

[@seprishere]

Interestingly the discussion of how colour was stored was much less true then than it is now, certainly a lot of home micros (particularly the Spectrum and C64) stored colour information at a much lower resolution than the basic image. This caused the infamous "attribute clash", especially on the Spectrum. (The C64 did have sprites and certain other modes that mitigated that a bit, though absolutely no support in BASIC for any of this other than PEEK and POKE.)

[@annother3350]

when i was little my cousin had the sinclair ZX 80 with 1k ram -- but thank god he got the 16k RAM pack to play the advanced games...

[@ms-ex8em]

in this video at around 21:09 is Mac refering to the commodore Amiga??? 16 million colours? thanks....

[@rooneye]

Anyone know what that program is to draw sprites/characters at 9:18 ?

[@yousorooo]

Did you just make a complete game directly in machine code....

[@AllGamingStarred]

do you need an outside assembler to run machine code on this computer?

[@Inaflap]

BASIC on the Acorn BBC Model B included an in-line assembler. You could mix 6502 assembly language routines in with your BASIC code. 5 CLS 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!" 20 P%=&3500 30 [ 40 LDA #10 50 RTS 60 ] 70 PRINT "NOW CALL MACHINE LANGUAGE" 80 CALL &3500 90 PRINT "BACK IN BASIC" 100 END The opening and closing square brackets delimit the assembly language. P% was set to the desired memory origin for the assembled machine code. The CALL command would execute the machine code. Your assembly language code could reference BASIC variables, making it easier to mix BASIC with machine code routines, when speed was important.

[@ms-ex8em]

does any1 know of Grand prix basic listing for the Dragon 32? it was in a book from 1983 (i cant find it) please let me know if some1 comes across it thanks....

[@AllGamingStarred]

I keep getting this error message:no such variable at line 10

[@johnknight9150]

The custom character "graphics" - is this how things were done most of the time on the Speccy?

[@andysimpson8974]

I take it as read that 'that guy' was a sinclair guy. Imagine inviting on a bloke who freely admits that he hates programming on the very machine chosen for the BBC computer literacy program, the only reason any of them are there at all...

[@seprishere]

He could have been Commodore? But that really WAS a pain to do graphics or sound on?

[@andysimpson8974]

@@seprishere Could be. Could be. I imagine he's less of a BASIC guy and more of a PASCAL guy. Maybe...