Sideway RAM for BBC and Electron Plus One

104 184 As already reported on numerous oc- casions in this magazine, the BBC micro ranges among the most widely used types of personal computer currently available. To newcomers in the computer field, the amount of commercially available ROM-sup- plied software is truly staggering, and there seem to be programs to suit almost any requirement and budget. However, the number of ROMs that may be located in the BBC computer is limited to four in the basic version and sixteen when it is equipped with a sideway ROM expansion card. Users in posession of a good many ROMs and EPROMs are, therefore, often forced to exchange these before a program can be run; a method that is both cumbersome and possibly bad for the ICs and their sockets. A way of getting round this problem is to install RAM rather than ROM or EPROM chips on the sideway board, so that software may be readily moved about between ROMs, direct access memory, disk and RAM, since many of the originally ROM-based programs may als...