The BBC micro was - and is - in many ways my favorite computer, ever. It had a structured basic, half decent sound and video, was expandable and had a fantastic keyboard.
My last one blew up a few years ago when I tried to see if it would still work (capacitors in the supply had gone, took the board with it). So this project is really tempting for me, I'll probably see if I can get this to work.
FPGA's are interesting, a kind of half-way point between software and hardware.
The "tube" was the BBC micro's major expansion bus. Technically, it's a high speed asynchronous, buffered parallel IPC channel with no specific purpose.
Rather neatly, you could chuck a second CPU on the end of the bus and just use the host machine for IO. That made the machines EXTREMELY fast for the time. Many second CPUs were developed with different architectures from 6502, Z80, 32016 and the original ARM CPU (which was developed as a slave of a BBC micro!). I myself have owned a 6502 unit.
If anyone is tempted to try this without purchasing a suitable kit, make sure the parts are suitably rated. The 250V non-polarised C2 may be safety critical if it's a line to line or line to neutral capacitor - look for an "X" or "Y" marking (I can't tell from the damage evident in John's photos). Lots of information on line-rated caps at http://my.execpc.com/~endlr/line-filter.html.
Yup, it's dead as can be :( But no problem, I'll find another one somewhere. This was a 'master 128K' version, my original became an embedded computer in an arts project at some point.
Depends if they blew the traces off the board (that happen to my Master Turbo). Soldered on paperclip fixed it but was probably a small fire waiting to happen.
My last one blew up a few years ago when I tried to see if it would still work (capacitors in the supply had gone, took the board with it). So this project is really tempting for me, I'll probably see if I can get this to work.
FPGA's are interesting, a kind of half-way point between software and hardware.