BBC Micro Utilities

Command-line tools for viewing BBC Micro files and disk images

I recently got round to repairing and re-capping the power supply in my BBC Micro Model B, which I bought 40 years ago. Of course I started grabbing various programs and data from it, transferring to my Windows PC as .dsd files, then using those with BeebEm, and I bought a copy of BBC BASIC for Windows so that I could play with that too. I wanted some command-line utilities to display the content of .dsd files, and decode BBC BASIC files along with "PRINT#"-type BBC data files, so I wrote them as console applications using the .NET framework. The utilities are:

• BBCBasicToText — display a tokenized, binary BBC Micro BASIC file as text, HTML, or bbcode.
• BBCDataFileToText — show BBC PRINT# type data files as text, HTML, or bbcode.
• BBCReadDiskImage — display *DIR-style output of .DSD or .SSD disk images, with the ability to export files individually and dump sectors.

All three tools can produce colour output — strings, keywords, and so forth are coloured differently — and can output plain text (in colour when writing to a command prompt window), bbcode, or HTML, optionally launching the browser for the latter. They take wildcards as input and can traverse down through folders.

Example: BBCBasicToText

Here's an example of HTML output using the Sketch program from bbcbasic.co.uk as input, saved on the PC in BBC BASIC tokenized binary as Sketch.bbc:

C:\...\WelcomeDiskFiles> bbcbasictotext Sketch.bbc Sketch.html
BBCBasicToText found 1 file matching Sketch.bbc
Escape non-printable characters: True

BBCBasicToText: processing 1/1, C:\Users\...\BBCMicro\Sketch.bbc

BBCBasicToText Success: 1/1, C:\Users\...\BBCMicro\Sketch.bbc, dialect WindowsOrSDLWithoutLineNumbers

Output: C:\Users\...\BBCMicro\Sketch.html

BBCBasicToText found and processed 1 file, ignored 0, excluded 0, produced results for 1

 X%=10
 Y%=10
 REM Print X in starting place
 PRINT TAB(X%,Y%);"X"
 REPEAT
   Key%=GET
   REM Move cursor in direction after checking
   REM we're still in limits
   CASE Key% OF
     WHEN 139: IF Y% > 0 THEN Y%-=1
     WHEN 137: IF X% < 19 THEN X%+=1
     WHEN 138: IF Y% < 19 THEN Y%+=1
     WHEN 136: IF X% > 0 THEN X%-=1
   ENDCASE
   REM Print X in new position
   PRINT TAB(X%,Y%);"X"
 UNTIL FALSE
 END

It tries to detect the indentation style automatically based on whether the file is an Acorn format BASIC file or BBC BASIC for Windows/SDL, but you can override this with the /w or --windows-style-indent switches. Indentation is applied to FOR, REPEAT, WHILE, and CASE, and it respects EXIT REPEAT etc. You can turn indentation off entirely with --noindent.

I extracted the program from the Welcome disk using:

C:\...\WelcomeDiskFiles> bbcreaddiskimage Welcome.ssd --export=*welcome*

then converted it to bbcode using:

C:\...\WelcomeDiskFiles> bbcbasictotext 0_W.WELCOME *.bbcode /w
BBCBasicToText found 1 file matching 0_W.WELCOME
Escape non-printable characters: True

BBCBasicToText: processing 1/1, C:\...\WelcomeDiskFiles\0_W.WELCOME
BBCBasicToText Success: 1/1, C:\...\WelcomeDiskFiles\0_W.WELCOME
Output: C:\...\WelcomeDiskFiles\0_W.WELCOME.bbcode

Which produced:

  10 REM New version of 'INTRO' from
  20 REM Welcome pack
  30 REM By John Coll & Andrew Gordon
  40 ON ERROR GOTO 630
  50 ENVELOPE 1,1,-RND(50),-RND(50),-RND(45),255,255,255,127,0,0,-127,127,0
  60 SOUND 1,1,255,255
  70 DIM COM%11
  80 M0=650:M1=500:M2=708:M3=104:M4=288:M5=550:M6=720:M7=450:M8=5
  90 MODE5
 100 VDU5
 110 VDU23,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255
 120 GCOL0,135
 130 CLG
 140 VDU18,0,129,24,128;128;1152;896;16,18,0,135,24,256;256;1024;768;16,26
 150 FORI%=M1 TO M2 STEP M3:PROCSWOOSH(M0):PROCLETTER:NEXT
 160 $COM%="DISC SYSTEM"
[Snip rest of "Welcome" BASIC program]

DOSKEY shortcuts

Because typing the full command names is tedious, you can create DOSKEY macros in a command file named cmdsetup.cmd:

To run this automatically in every new command window, add the following to the registry:

Features

Download

As always you should be cautious and do due diligence before downloading and running an installer. Please let me know what you think — you can find my contact details via my PGP key on the KLO Software page.

BBC Micro Utilities is free software.
← Back to KLO Software