Well, sort of – through emulation, not temporal manipulation!
Realising that people can’t time travel – not even within their own lifetime – members of the RISC OS User Group of London will step into the Quantum Leap Accelerator Blue Eyed Maid and, rather than vanish, will find themselves enjoying a presentation about a BBC Micro emulator for Android devices.
The meeting will take place on Monday, 15th August, starting from around 7:45pm, at the group’s customary venue:
173 Borough High Street,
London,
SE1 1HR.
The guest speakers, responsible for taking the group back in time metaphorically, rather than physically, will be Kenton Price and Reuben Scratton of Little Fluffy Toys1. The pair, who first met at school, will be discussing their programming history, and how and why the emulator, BeebDroid2, came to be developed.
As well as BeebDroid – along with demos and code examples – visitors to the meeting will hear the story behind iBeeb, an iOS version of the emulator that was rejected by Apple for inclusion in their App Store, and which in turn led to the development of an emulator that runs in JavaScript.
Admittance to ROUGOL’s meetings is free, and the group has a video projector available for use by guest speakers so, provided nobody in front wears a stupidly big hat, everyone should have a good view of the screen. The venue serves a range of hot and cold food, as well as alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, and also offers free Wi-Fi connectivity.
Next month’s meeting, which takes place on Monday, 19th September, will feature Ident Computer‘s Tom Williamson as the guest speaker, talking about the Micro One computer – and having experienced his presentation at the Midlands User Group’s May meeting, I can recommend attending this if you are in the vicinity – but if not, Tom will also be at this year’s London Show.
!ReadMe
- Little Fluffy Toys Ltd’s web address is www.littlefluffytoys.mobi, but there isn’t currently a website there. However, the pair does appear to have a YouTube channel with the Little Fluffy Toys name – not to be confused with an older and very similarly named channel that is very definitely not safe for either work or family viewing. Meanwhile, their Android apps can be found easily enough on Google Play.
- Visitors on Monday may like to argue the point that the emulator should really have been called Beeboid, rather than BeebDroid due to the etymology of the word ‘android’.