Thanks to our friends at the Leicester Retro Computer museum, the long lost BBC AIV City Disc set has been found and documented for the Domesday86 project. This disc set (which is without doubt the rarest AIV disc made by the BBC) covers the square mile ‘City of London’ and was produced by the BBC’s Interactive Television Unit in association Continue reading The BBC AIV City Disc set is found!→

In 1989 Apple produced a LaserDisc based multimedia kit for American schools similar to the BBC’s Domesday National disc (although with less focus on data and more on video). As with Domesday, the Apple Visual Almanac is an example of early interactive multimedia applications using LaserDiscs to present video, pictures and sound with unprecedented quality. Information about the kit and Continue reading Details of the Apple Visual Almanac added→

RetroRGB recently did an interview about the Domesday86 project, Domesday Duplicator and ld-decode – with a deep-dive into what’s going on behind the scenes and the current status of both projects.  You can watch the full interview on YouTube: Pit-Perfect Laserdisc Backups with Domesday Duplicator & LD Decode

This V2.1 release of the software signifies the first ‘Production Release’ of the Domesday Duplicator hardware and software (based on the existing rev3 Domesday Duplicator board). The LaserDisc RF duplication system has now been tested successfully on a number of different capture set-ups and high-quality NTSC decodes have been produced by the ld-decode sister-project (proving the end-to-end viability of the Continue reading New release of the Domesday Duplicator software→

The Acorn AIV Master computer used by the Domesday project was fitted with a specific SCSI adapter card in order to connect the Philips VP415 LaserDisc player to the computer. As there were a relatively low number of Domesday systems sold (and very few survive) these cards can be difficult (and expensive) to source. This project provides a drop-in replacement Continue reading Replacement Acorn SCSI AIV Adapter board→

The Front-Loader module (P) in the Philips VP415 Domesday LaserDisc player is a mechanical weak-point and is prone to damage when the player is transported. This project provides a modern replacement for the module made with durable, industrial-grade parts.  The replacement can be simply dropped into the player and requires no alteration.  As well as fixing existing broken players, the Continue reading Philips VP415 Replacement Front-Loader Module→

A number of Domesday related teletext pages from the BBC’s Ceefax pages have been recovered from the teletext archive.  You can view the pages by following this link. If you know of any pages we’re missing, please let us know!

This new release contains a redesigned 3_0 PCB providing three major new features: Elliptic 2nd order filter – greatly reduced aliasing and better overall gain performance across the entire sampling bandwidth Configurable gain – Design now includes a user-configurable gain setting allowing the board to work with the majority of LaserDisc player models (once adapted for direct RF output) 50 Continue reading Domesday Duplicator hardware 3_0 released→

Domesday86 is a project that aims to recreate the experience of the original BBC Domesday project using modern hardware and software. On this site you will find a growing collection of documentation for the original Acorn/BBC Domesday project as well as details of the Domesday86 project itself.  If you would like to read more about the BBC Domesday system or Continue reading BBC Domesday and the Domesday86 Project→

A new version of the Domesday Duplicator hardware (and associated software) has been released.  The new PCB is now smaller and more cost-effective to produce and features a clearer silkscreen layout to make the build process easier. The firmware and GUI have also been improved to support higher sampling as well as an improved GUI application with a clearer layout Continue reading Domesday Duplicator 2_2 hardware released→