The Microbee Emulation / Software Archive page

The Microbee Emulation / Software Archive page

This is a placeholder page to provide information for those interested in Applied Technologies' Microbee line of computers.
Once I get things up and running, I am planning to try to document what Microbee software has been archived or "preserved".

Latest update: 23/7 2005.

About the Microbee

Others have covered this very nicely:

Mike Leys' Microbee Archive
Systems and peripherals from the PC museum
Microbee Technical References by Alistair, author of Picomozzy (see below). Mirror here.
The MicroBee Story
The Flying Computer

Interact:

The Bee Board, a public message board about the Microbee line of computers.

Emulators

Three Microbee emulators exist:

NanoWasp by David G Sinclair.
Pretty far along, has basic disk support, but development seems stalled since 2002.
Cross-platform, based on SDL. The source is available.

NanoWasp home page. (Alternate link)
NanoWasp SourceForge project page

MESS driver by Jürgen Buchmüller. MESS is a multi-system emulator.

PicoMozzy by Alistair Shilton.
Currently under development (March 2005). Coming along very nicely, the latest version adds a GUI and has good compatibility. Based on the Allegro library. The source is available.

Alistair's Microbee Technical References (same link as above)

Software

The MBUG software archive has 184 disks of Microbee software freely available for download. This includes a ton of games.

MBUG Software Archive (from the Walnut Creek CP/M CD-ROM). Many thanks to retroarchive.org for making this available!

Transferring your own Microbee software

Reading Microbee disks on a PC

Several options exist:

PC-Alien
A program which lets you read a variety of cp/m disk formats on your PC, including Microbee formats. Regrettably, I don't know if this is available anywhere. A review here.

22disk
Similar program to PC-alien. Apparently has Microbee disk definitions. Software here, authors (Sydex) here, who also offer a mail-us-your-disks conversion service.
Fdtools for linux
Software for accessing alien disk formats under linux. Use this together with the dd program to make disk images.

File transfer via serial cable

You should be able to transfer files via a null modem using terminal software on the Microbee (telcom, kermit) and on your PC (The HyperTerminal under Windows, for example).

From Alistair:

Serial transfer should also work afaik - just use hyperterminal or
whatever on the pc.  http://www2.ee.mu.oz.au/pgrad/apsh/microbee/beemac.pdf
might help with the settings.  On the bee side of things, I seem to recall
seeing a copy of kermit for the microbee floating around the internet
relatively recently.

Software on tape

I do not have a good solution for this right now. In 2001 I sent some WAV file recordings of tapes to Jürgen Buchmüller, who managed to extract the software and get it running under MESS.

Back when I had a working Microbee, i used a program called TDCOPY to copy tape software to disk, this was not always successful though.
More information on this later.