Home - Hardware - GoMMC - What is it
GoMMC is the ultimate storage system for the Acorn BBC and Electron.
It allows a single MMC (MultiMedia Card) to replace all your floppy drives, floppy discs and hard discs. GoMMC acts like a huge jukebox, containing hundreds or even thousands of individual (floppy- or hard-) discs, which can be selected by name with one simple *-command, and then used just like before (through slightly changed versions of standard filing systems).
Total storage. Everything you ever had, right there at your fingertips. No more searching. Switch discs in seconds.
Giga huge. Stores anything up to 4 GB worth of floppies and harddiscs (depending on the capacity of the MMC).
Very fast. Over 100 KB per second typical transfer speed, i.e. games and the like load in a jiffy (half a jiffy, really).
Totally compatible. Works as a transparent 'backend' of a variety of standard filing systems, using no extra RAM.
Solid state. No moving parts ! Very quiet. And no more worries about age related failure of your drives and media.
Easy backup. On a PC with a flash card reader, using a powerful utility program, (batches of) disc images can be put on or taken off the MMC quickly and easily (and, e.g., backed up on CD- or DVD-recordable).
GoMMC simply plugs into a free ROM socket in the machine. See 'Snapshots' below !
GoMMC accesses your 'relocated' floppies and harddiscs via slightly changed versions of standard DFS and/or ADFS filing systems (patches for eleven well known ones are provided, among which many Acorn DFSses and ADFSses, and a few 'foreign' ones like Watford DFS). These can be introduced to the system in a variety of ways (e.g. in a ROM, or automatically loaded from the MMC into sideways RAM), and, if need be, can run alongside the original versions.
GoMMC is compatible with
Running GoMMC on an Electron requires a special 'GoMMC for Electron' interface, available at extra cost. Running GoMMC on a BBC B+ or 'USA'/'German' model B requires a special version of GoMMC.
Standard GoMMCs are 'portable' between BBC model B, BBC Master and Electron, should you have more than one of them. Special versions of GoMMC are not 'portable'.
More details, and more technical information, can be found in the actual GoMMC documentation. It may be quite helpful to read.
To do so, you're kindly invited to go to the Software updates section, download the latest GoMMC software archive there, and extract and read the 'Guide' text file.
GoMMC costs 75 Euro. Availability is limited. Get yours while you still can.
An MMC is not included. I can supply a sure-to-work MMC at cost. Or you can purchase one yourself, at your own risk. Practice has shown that almost any MMC will work fine. Brands Apacer, Traxdata, Kingston and Transcend are recommended in this respect (since I supply these myself, and never had any problems). A 1GB Adata 'MyFlash' card is the only problem case I know of (it is likely to have a firmware flaw).
GoMMC is a hobby project, and is not supported 'professionally', but I will do my best to provide the usual care, and for some considerable time, I don't doubt. There is a GoMMC mailing list as well.
You can pay by PayPal, direct bank transfer, or cash. Always contact me first, to discuss details.
Email me here.
