bbc_domesday_emulator

The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between Acorn Computers Ltd, Philips, Logica and the BBC. It marked the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book, an 11th century census of England. It was compiled between 1984 and 1986 and published in 1986.

In addition to offering access to a number of working BBC Domesday systems here at the museum, we wanted to share a virtual method of exploring the system through an emulator that works in your browser.

You can explore the following discs of the BBC Domesday system in a fully emulated BBC Master with an LVROM player:

The Community North disc
The Community South disc
The National A disc

A full guide to the BBC Domesday System is availabel as a PDF, and you can also read a then-contemporary review of the system in an article by A & B Computing, with other BBC Domesday materials available when you visit the museum. Work on recreating the experience of the original BBC Domesday project using modern hardware and software, rather than emulation, can be found at the Domesday86.com website.

The emulator is a modified version of BeebEm with the addition of an emulated LVROM deivce. The C++ source code was compiled into WebAssembly using Emscripten by Rhys Jones so that it can run without any additional requirements within a standard web browser. Many thanks to the Domesday86 group for all their help with the LVROM work and their assistance with the project.