Agon and Agon
Last month I visited the RMC Cave where we got a sneak peek at the Agon Console8 from Heber. The Agon Console8 is a consolised version of the more general-purpose Agon8 Computer. They come in a natty retro case, and features twin 9-pin joystick ports.
I’d not heard about the Agon line of Open Source devices before, but they tickled something in me. I’m somewhat fascinated by computers that boot directly into BASIC.
Pi time
I wrote about this back in 2021 in Raspberry Pi: Boot to BASIC where I configured a Raspberry Pi to boot directly into BBC BASIC, by R.T. Russell.
Last week Noel, from Noel’s Retro Lab was sent an Agon computer to noodle around with. Noel made a detailed video all about it, worth a watch - as are all of Noel’s videos. He’s good people, and is an Amstrad CPC fanboy like myself.
I’m interested in these devices, but I’m currently trying my best to get rid of clutter, not buy more! However, in the video, Noel mentioned there was an emulator for the Agon line of machines. My interest was piqued even further.
Interest²
In an idle moment over the weekend, I stumbled on Agon Light Emulator, then quickly discovered it’s deprecated. There is another though, Fab Agon Emulator which appears to have gone from zero to functional in just a couple of weeks!
So I had a play with it, and it’s rather neat! Imagine booting up a modern real hardware computer and being greeted with this! Wonderful 🥰
LOAD"
You can type code in, save it out, and load it in from SD cards - on the real hardware - or in the emulator, to a “Virtual SD card” on your filesystem.
Common BBC basic IO commands like *CAT, LOAD and SAVE work with these real or virtual SD cards. It’s all very clever. and familiar.
RUN
Yeee-haw!
Download
There’s currently no binary build of Fab Agon Emulator available, so I made a snap, because of course I did.
Quite looking forward to getting back into BBC BASIC with this. Maybe I’ll write another virus for it. 😅