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BBC Computer Literacy Project - all shows online now

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Vimster

Vimster

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It's great to see all episodes of Micro Live in there too. All this stuff has been about in some form, mostly virtually unwatchable VHS rips of partial shows, so this is a really fantastic effort. Very much my era of computing, growing up in the 80s with the BBC Micro at school, lapping up anything to do with "micros", and looking forward to Micro Live on Friday nights, although I tended to drift off when the American guy came on.

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merman

merman

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I have vivid memories of them demonstrating the Robtek Sprite Killer, a C64 cartridge that switched off the built-in collision detection. They played Who Dares Wins II and walked through the gunfire.

 

Of course it didn't take long for programmers to work out how to do collisions without using the built-in detection, rendering the Game Killer impotent.

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Vimster

Vimster

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13 hours ago, merman said:

I have vivid memories of them demonstrating the Robtek Sprite Killer, a C64 cartridge that switched off the built-in collision detection. They played Who Dares Wins II and walked through the gunfire.

 

Of course it didn't take long for programmers to work out how to do collisions without using the built-in detection, rendering the Game Killer impotent.

I'll bet it was Fred Harris demoing that. Old Mac had a big downer on games, as I remember, he thought computers were better than that. Even then it felt a bit quaint, an old-fashioned view going against the tide. In fact looking back it was incredibly dry in places.

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Vimster

Vimster

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Watched the first couple of Micro Live's, so much gold in those, from Brian Jacks buying an Atari 800XL and moaning because he forgot to buy any software, to Lesley Judd trying to wipe floppies on the underground. A viewer moaning that they don't show computers other than the BBC micro, Mac poo-pooing any talk of games, the idea of buying a printer for £400 in 1984. The only bits that drag it down are the Freth (or however you spell his name) bits that tend to drag out. I do know there's a great section later in the series where they go to Infocom though. And this is only two episodes in!

 

 

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Vimster

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1 hour ago, elyuw said:

Did he say what he used to download them at all?

I asked him, he basically downloaded the TS files and combined them with ffmpeg - ie beyond me, frankly.

 

Quote

 

The episode is divided into lots of TS files (basically MPEG video)

You have to download all the files then use ffmpeg to combine them into one big file.

Using Firefox, open the console with F12 then select the Network tab

Start the video and look for any files that end with .TS.

Click on it and you'll see a URL in the panel to the right.

Copy that and paste it into a text editor.

Now go too the end of the video and see what the filename of the final piece is, this should be something like 0213.ts

Now you can create a script that downloads all the pieces.

Each line should be:

invoke-WebRequest (paste the URL here)001.ts  -OutFile File001.ts

Save as a .ps1 file (powershell script)

Open up Powershell as an administrator.

Navigate to a folder

Copy your. Ps1 file to that folder

Type ./(name of script).ps1 to run it.

You'll have to let it run, might take some time.

Once you've got all your bits, time to combine them.

Download ffmpeg (https://ffmpeg.org/)

It's one of those that comes in a .tar.bz2 file.

Unpack it and copy to a folder in your Program Files (x86) folder

You need to set the path variable so that you can invoke ffmpeg from your video filder.

$env:path = "C:/Program Files (x86)/ffmpeg/.../bin/"

You need to create a file list of all your ts files.

In powershell type dir > files.txt

Then in your text editor make each line:

 

file '0001.ts'

file '0002.ts'

etc.

 

Save it as files.txt

Now to combine the files.

Enter this command:

 

ffmpeg -f concat -i files.txt -c copy output.ts

 

This will simply concatenate all the files, won't re-encode, so will take n time.

And there you go!

 

 

 

 

er.... I'll just stick to a browser.

 

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Vimster

Vimster

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Watching more Micro Live, it's interesting to see them talking about things we take for granted now but back then were really cutting-edge, for instance in episode 4 there's a piece about cellular radio telephones. It's pretty much invisible technology now, it's so much part of our daily lives we barely notice it, but seeing Lesley Judd with her "rather portable" phone - a bit like a small car battery with a handset on it - making a transatlantic call that probably cost about £10 you can only imagine how huge it was in 1985.

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44 minutes ago, Vimster said:

Watching more Micro Live, it's interesting to see them talking about things we take for granted now but back then were really cutting-edge, for instance in episode 4 there's a piece about cellular radio telephones. It's pretty much invisible technology now, it's so much part of our daily lives we barely notice it, but seeing Lesley Judd with her "rather portable" phone - a bit like a small car battery with a handset on it - making a transatlantic call that probably cost about £10 you can only imagine how huge it was in 1985.

 

Just like the "bag phone" guy in Yakuza 0 :)

 

 

 

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elyuw

elyuw

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If anyone is interested, I've created 18 DOS Batch scripts to allow you to download these programmes. You'll need to have FFmepg installed (which you can get from here https://www.ffmpeg.org/download.html).

 

Each script has two lines at the top so you can configure them for your own needs;

 

SET FFMPEG="C:\Program Files\FFmpeg\bin\ffmpeg.exe"
SET DOWNLOADFOLDER=E:\

 

You can get the zip file of all the scripts from here https://www.dropbox.com/s/1g5vtx2djttbqir/BBC CLP Download Scripts config versions.zip?dl=0

 

Cheers,

Ely

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