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28-644: Bug-Byte Software Ltd. was a video game company founded in 1980 in Liverpool, initially producing software for the Acorn Atom and ZX80 . Bug-Byte's first hit was Don Priestley's Mazogs which was one of the most successful titles for the ZX81 . In 1983, it published Manic Miner , considered to be one of the most influential platform games of all time. The company went into liquidation in 1985 but their name and logo were purchased by Argus Press PLC for use as

56-470: A TV or modified to output to a video monitor. Basic video memory was 1 KB but could be expanded to 6 KB. Since the MC6847 could only output at 60 Hz, meaning that the video could not be resolved on a large proportion of European TV sets, a 50 Hz PAL colour card was later made available. Six video modes were available, with resolutions from 64×64 in 4 colours, up to 256×192 in monochrome. At

84-519: A budget software label. Bug-Byte was founded by Tony Baden and Tony Milner, two Oxford chemistry graduates. In 1981 they paid £75 for The Damsel and the Beast for the ZX81, the first game produced by Don Priestley , a former teacher who had learned programming from a night school course. Priestley produced two further games considered to be classic ZX81 titles, Dictator and Mazogs , before becoming

112-532: A director of rival publisher DK'Tronics . In 1982, Bug-Byte published the first commercially produced games for the BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum , Spacewarp and Spectral Invaders , both developed by David Lawson. Lawson used the profits from his next game, Spectres , to set up Imagine Software with Mark Butler, another Bug-Byte employee. Spectral Invaders was the number one game for the ZX Spectrum in

140-592: A dispute over royalties led to Smith creating his own publishing company Software Projects , and taking Manic Miner , and Maton, with him. The company had several lesser hits over the next year including The Birds and the Bees (written by Matthew Smith's school friend Adrian Sherwin), the sequel Antics and the text adventure Twin Kingdom Valley which reached number one in the BBC micro charts. In early 1985 it

168-580: A fully populated Atom. There has never been a de facto standard for external 5V connections, but using the same 7-pin DIN connectors as the Atari 800XL allowed an Atari 5V linear power supply to drive an Atom, so long as the current was less than the Atari PSU rating (1 or 1.5 amps, depending on the model). These are now uncommon, but 5V wall-wart switch-mode power supplies capable of supplying several amps are

196-474: A readily and cheaply available alternative. The Atom was incorporated into a "complete dedicated spreadsheet system" known as the Prophet by a company called Busicomputers, with the second edition of this product, the Prophet 2, consisting of a modified Atom, Ferguson 12-inch black-and-white television, and a Pearlcorder microcassette recorder, all housed in a "robust metal case". Powered by a single mains plug,

224-455: A transfer rate of 1200 baud and the Atom's cassette interface only supported 300 baud. The following is the memory map for the Atom. Shaded areas indicate those present on the minimal system. The manual for the Atom was called Atomic Theory and Practice and was written by David Johnson-Davies , subsequently Managing Director of Acornsoft . The Acorn LAN , Econet , was first configured on

252-499: Is approximately 1000. The binary interpretation of metric prefixes is still prominently used by the Microsoft Windows operating system. Binary interpretation is also used for random-access memory capacity, such as main memory and CPU cache size, due to the prevalent binary addressing of memory. The binary meaning of the kilobyte for 1024 bytes typically uses the symbol KB, with an uppercase letter K . The B

280-518: Is sometimes omitted in informal use. For example, a processor with 65,536 bytes of cache memory might be said to have "64 K" of cache. In this convention, one thousand and twenty-four kilobytes (1024 KB) is equal to one megabyte (1 MB), where 1 MB is 1024  bytes. In December 1998, the IEC addressed such multiple usages and definitions by creating prefixes such as kibi, mebi, gibi, etc., to unambiguously denote powers of 1024. Thus

308-462: The Atom. The Acorn 8V power supply was only rated to 1.5 amps, which was not enough for an Atom with fully populated RAM sockets. The Atom's two internal LM7805 regulators (each regulating the +5V for a section of the digital logic independently) also got uncomfortably hot. Therefore, some Atom enthusiasts removed and bypassed the internal regulators and powered their Atoms from an external 5V regulated power supply. Three amps were typically needed for

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336-531: The BBC charts and their re-releases of American Football and Alien both reached the all-formats top 10 budget chart. In 1987, Argus Press Software was purchased by its managing director, Stephen Hall, renamed Grandslam Entertainment and the Bug-Byte range was given a rebranding. The rights to Domark's games were also obtained resulting in re-releases of games including A View to a Kill and Split Personalities . The final few games were published under

364-558: The Prophet 3, featured a built-in floppy disk drive. Kilobyte The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information . The International System of Units (SI) defines the prefix kilo as a multiplication factor of 1000 (10 ); therefore, one kilobyte is 1000 bytes. The internationally recommended unit symbol for the kilobyte is kB . In some areas of information technology , particularly in reference to random-access memory capacity, kilobyte instead typically refers to 1024 (2 ) bytes. This arises from

392-557: The effective storage capacity of the microcassettes, whereas more expensive disk-based systems would be able to transfer similar volumes of data in a matter of seconds and store tens of spreadsheets on each disk. Regarded as "low-tech" later in 1983, the Prophet II was apparently being given away to participants of one- or two-day business-related training courses, these costing £600 and £700 respectively, with this initiative considered "a nice way of moving old stock". A subsequent model,

420-478: The first UK video game charts published by Popular Computing Weekly in December 1982. In 1983, Bug-Byte published Styx , the first game from a three-game contract with Matthew Smith . His second, Manic Miner , originated in a request from Bug-Byte's Despatch Manager Alan Maton for a Donkey Kong style-game. Manic Miner became the best selling video game in the country within weeks of its release, but

448-409: The fully expanded version with 12  KB of RAM and the floating-point extension ROM. The minimum Atom had 2 KB of RAM and 8 KB of ROM , with the maximum specification machine having 12 KB of each. An additional floating-point ROM was also available. The 2 KB of RAM was divided between 1 KB of Block Zero RAM (including the 256 bytes of " zero page ") and 512 bytes for

476-569: The high-resolution graphics were not required then up to 5½ KB of the upper memory could additionally be used for program storage. The first 1 KB, i.e. Block Zero, was used by the CPU for stack storage, by the OS, and by the Atom BASIC for storage of the 27 variables. It had an MC6847 Video Display Generator (VDG) video chip , allowing for both text and graphics modes. It could be connected to

504-566: The more advanced "BBC BASIC" used by the BBC Micro . The upgrade was purely to the programming language; the Atom's hardware capabilities remained unchanged, and hence, contrary to some pre-release beliefs, the BBC BASIC ROM did not allow Atom users to run commercial BBC Micro software, since nearly all of it took advantage of the BBC machine's much more advanced graphics and sound hardware and greater RAM capacity. Commercial BBC Micro cassettes could not have been loaded anyway, as they ran at

532-573: The name "Bug-Byte Premier" at a slightly higher price. on the "Bug-Byte Premier" label: Acorn Atom The Atom was a progression of the MOS Technology 6502 -based machines that the company had been making from 1979. The Atom was a cut-down Acorn System 3 without a disk drive but with an integral keyboard and cassette tape interface, sold in either kit or complete form. In 1980 it was priced between £ 120 in kit form, £170 (equivalent to £921 in 2023) ready assembled, to over £200 for

560-643: The prevalence of sizes that are powers of two in modern digital memory architectures, coupled with the coincidence that 2 differs from 10 by less than 2.5%. A kibibyte is 1024 bytes. In the International System of Units (SI) the metric prefix kilo means 1,000 (10 ); therefore, one kilobyte is 1000 bytes. The unit symbol is kB. This is the definition recommended by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). This definition, and

588-527: The related definitions of the prefixes mega ( 1,000,000 ), giga ( 1,000,000,000 ), etc., are most commonly used for data transfer rates in computer networks , internal bus, hard drive and flash media transfer speeds, and for the capacities of most storage media , particularly hard disk drives , flash -based storage, and DVDs . It is also consistent with the other uses of the metric prefixes in computing, such as CPU clock speeds or measures of performance . The international standard IEC 80000-13 uses

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616-454: The screen (text mode) and only 512 bytes for programs (presumably in text mode, mode 0, and graphics not available), i.e. written in the BASIC language. When expanded up to a total of 12 KB RAM, the split is 1 KB, 5 KB for programs, and up to 6 KB for the high-resolution graphics (the screen memory could be expanded independently from the lower part of the address space ). If

644-479: The system was effectively a "turnkey" solution, emphasising the built-in spreadsheet as its primary function. Although regarded as worth considering as an "inexpensive way of obtaining a sound and reasonably well-presented spreadsheet system", being priced at £795 plus VAT, the use of cassette storage to reduce the system's cost was regarded as impacting its usability, with the slow data transfer rate causing waits of 30 minutes or more to save spreadsheet data and limiting

672-405: The term "byte" to mean eight bits (1 B = 8 bit). Therefore, 1 kB = 8000 bit. One thousand kilobytes (1000 kB) is equal to one megabyte (1 MB), where 1 MB is one million bytes. The term 'kilobyte' has traditionally been used to refer to 1024 bytes (2  B). The usage of the metric prefix kilo for binary multiples arose as a convenience, because 1024

700-418: The time, 256×192 was considered to be high resolution. The case was designed by industrial designer Allen Boothroyd of Cambridge Product Design Ltd. It had a built-in minor variation of Acorn System BASIC , a fast but idiosyncratic version of the BASIC programming language developed by Sophie Wilson , which included indirection operators (similar to PEEK and POKE ) for bytes and words (of 4 bytes each);

728-457: The use of a semi-colon to separate statements on the same line of code (instead of the colon used by most if not all other versions of BASIC); and the option of labels rather than line numbers for GOTO and GOSUB commands. Assembly code could be included within a BASIC program, because the BASIC interpreter also contained an assembler for the 6502 assembly language which assembled the inline code during program execution and then executed it. This

756-511: Was being reported that the company was having cash flow problems which soon led to liquidation. Later in 1985 the rights to their name and logo were purchased by Argus Press PLC for use as a budget software label. Along with original releases, they re-issued titles from the Argus Press Software back-catalogue and games previously published by Quicksilva and Starcade, which it had also recently acquired. In 1986, Tennis topped

784-429: Was unusual. String handling was based on arrays of characters. A byte vector A() to Z() could be DIM ensioned and then referred to with the string operator $ A to be treated as a string. This sample program, adapted from Atomic Theory and Practice , demonstrates some of Atom BASIC's peculiarities: In late 1982, Acorn released an upgrade board for the Atom which allowed users to switch between Atom BASIC and

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