This one's in fine working order with 2 working microdrives and the excellent hi-res Microvitec purpose built colour screen. Pity the National Bingo phone line's gone now eh :) Can't use that Bingo V3.1 cart any more.

Here's a mail from Mervyn Cooper, who has just retired from his own Bingo Hall:

"From conception of the game that it was developed for - the National Game.
It has a feature on it that allows small progs to run including a very early
membership register - those are the tapes I have.
Only one phone line needed to be used the other line was for the handset.
The unit was purchased from the National Bingo Association Ltd and a running
charge was made to play the game which is still on the go !
I was at the inaugural meeting of the company NBGA and as each bingo owner
became a share holder in the company 100 guarantee from each of us it cost.
Each club dialled into a 'local node' to connect to the main frame at
Feltenham where equipment designed by ELM of Burstwick was held and that
sorted out the prize money and then printed out the call numbers for all the
clubs , winners were entered and then overall winners were transmitted to
all clubs."

A recent visit from Swindon correspondent Richard Harding has left me with a BT Merlin M1800, aka the OPD with a different sticker pack on. Aside from the different stickers the only other thing that's different is the small mono monitor and a non-motorola CPU. Oh, and instead of the National Bingo ROMpack it has a M1821 Messaging ROM that I haven't delved into yet. Cheers Rich!

A full technical breakdown of the OPD by Murray McCabe
A conversation with Chris Solley, Technical director of Satellite Computing - an OPD software developer
The Tony Cheal Computer One
The OPD Basic Compiler