Econet

In a very rare occurrence I have parted with some cash monies and shelled out on a Mini Econet Module by Ken Lowe (Stardot Forum) which is a rpi hat with 2 econet 5-pin DIN sockets, coupled with software by Chris Royale this will allow your rpi to act as a Level 3/4 econet file server. It also supports Acorn's later implementation of AUN (Acorn Universal Network) allowing Econet to work over Ethernet.

My current setup has my two Beebs connected via cable to the rpi econet hat, as well as my pi running RISC OS connected wirelessly to the Econet server via AUN. The server software also allows the mapping of CUPs printers, allowing my Beebs to print to either a HP laserjet, Canon Colour Inkjet or 9pin Oki Dot Matrix printer. The fileserver drives (which are standard directories) can be shared via SFTP, SAMBA or any other modern file sharing protocol.



For BeeBS this has meant that I can upload menu screens, files for downloads and create backups incredibly easily saving hours of faffing with disc images and disc image manipulation software. It also means that menus can be updated whilst BeeBS is live, reducing down time. A few weeks ago I have updated BeeBS to work with ADFS (the Beebs Advanced Disc Filing System) meaning that I could use an emulated SCSI Harddrive using a Pi 1MHz Bus. This process was incredibly tedious so I did not create a post about it. However updating this to work with ANFS (Advanced Network File System) was a doddle as the majority of the leg work had already been done.



Having a Pi running Risc OS makes updating tokenized BBC Basic files in !Zap incredibly simple, rather than using Acornsoft's Basic Editor in ROM on the Beeb (which is up to know what I have used for all of the reprogramming of OBBS). Backups are also now just a case of clicking and dragging the files to a backup folder.