The BBC Micro was born out of a public commission: in 1981 the BBC launched its Computer Literacy Project, a televised campaign to teach the nation about computing, and needed a machine to go with it. Acorn Computers, a small Cambridge company, won the tender with a derivative of its Acorn Proton. Sold as the Model A and the better-equipped Model B, the computer became standard equipment in British schools for the rest of the decade.
Its reputation rests first on its sturdiness and on BBC BASIC, widely regarded as one of the best interpreters of its time, with a built-in assembler that let you drop from BASIC into machine code without leaving the editor. A whole generation of British developers learned to program on it, and Acorn's architecture work led directly, a few years later, to the design of the ARM processor.
On the games side, the BBC Micro is remembered above all as the original home of Elite, David Braben and Ian Bell's space trading simulator, whose wireframe graphics and procedurally generated universe made history in 1984. The rest of the library is thoroughly British: Chuckie Egg, Repton, Exile, Revs, Thrust.
| Manufacturer | Acorn |
| Year | 1981 |
| Type | Computer |
| Keyboard | Recommended |
| Controller | Recommended |
| Mouse | Optional |
📷 Screenshot coming soon:
system-bbcmicro.png
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BeebEm | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Libretro B2 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
BeebEm is the default emulator on every board: it is the reference BBC Micro emulator, which the Recalbox team ported to SDL2 and adapted to its needs. It supports four machine models — BBC Micro, B Plus, Integra B and Master 128 — the original joystick and mouse, as well as Tube expansion boards. Libretro B2 is a second core, more limited in the formats it accepts, useful as a fallback. Netplay is not available on this system and RetroAchievements are not supported. CRT output is handled by both cores.
The Acorn BBC Micro guide covers picking the machine model through subfolders, BeebEm's controller shortcuts, the supported floppy controllers and what is not emulated.
No BIOS is required for this system.
Put your games in:
/recalbox/share/roms/bbcmicro/
Accepted extensions per emulator:
| Emulator | Extensions |
|---|---|
| BeebEm | .adf .adl .csw .dsd .m3u .ssd .uef .zip |
| Libretro B2 | .dsd .ssd .zip |
A few pointers on these formats:
.ssd and .dsd are the most common floppy images, single-sided and double-sided respectively;.adf and .adl are floppy images in the ADFS format used by the Master 128;.uef and .csw are tape images.
.zipis only accepted for floppies. The.uefand.cswtape formats are already compressed: zipping them gains nothing.
For a game spread over several floppies or tapes, create an
.m3ufile listing the images in order, one per line, and launch that.m3u: with BeebEm,HOTKEY+L1/R1switches to the next medium. See the Multi-disc management with m3u page.