Transfering from the PC World to the Acorn

I have Archived these programs using SPARK by David Pilling - it's like WINZIP. A free program called SPARKPLUG can be used to unzip them.

Get the latest version from David Pilling’s website.

At the time these programs were large compared to the 100K floppy disc used to store them on, or even the 20MB hard drive that came later!

For convenience in 2014 the archive file was then placed inside a ZIP file.

Click on the link to begin the download procedure. Once downloaded you will need to extract the original application using !Sparkplug, a self-extracting program written in BASIC. It will open both zip files from the PC and arc files from RiscOS.

Unfortunately the filetype is not preserved when downloaded and appears initially as a data file.

To set the filetype put the mouse pointer over the Sparkplug file icon. Click the MIDDLE button. A filer menu appears. Go down to File 'SPARK~1'   then sideways and down to 'Set Type'. Go sideways again, type in BASIC and press return.

The icon should change to a blue script thing. Double-click on the file icon and the Sparkplug Application will be created in your root directory.

Now find !Sparkplug (Application names always begin with !)

Double-click on it. An icon will appear on the right hand side of the task-bar. It then acts automatically to open an archive file when you double-click it.

Set the file types of all of the .arc files to ARCHIVE.

Alternatively, you can simply drag and drop the downloaded data file on to the Sparkplug icon.

Double-click on the archive file and it will open to show the contents. Drag and drop the contents where you would like to store them. Double-click to run the application.

To transfer from a PC:

Format a disk to PC DOS 720K (older acorns cannot read 1.4MB PC discs, but can read 720K)

It may be easiest to do this on the Acorn.

Put the mouse pointer over the floppy disc icon on the icon bar (or Task Bar as it is on a PC, but Acorn had it ages ago!)

Click the MIDDLE button. The middle button always opens up a context sensitive menu.

Go sideways from 'Format' and find DOS 720K.  

Once you've copied the files onto disc and put the PC disc into the Arc, click the LEFT button over the floppy disc icon to open the directory viewer. You can then drag and drop between directory views to copy. If you only have one floppy drive you can put in a different disc, open it up and drag & drop between them. Use ADFS 800K (E) format normally - its faster.

The problem with the transfer from PC to Acorn is that the file type information is lost. So you have to change the filetypes - more on this above.

Free Software for Acorn Computers