General / Off-Topic Thirty three years, one rubber band: My Amstrad CPC lives again!

AJW

AJW
(Spoiler Warning! This thread contains nostalgia: persons under the age of forty-five should probably give it a miss. ;) )

Back in the mid '80s, late 1984 I think, I bought myself a state-of-the art home computer: An Amstrad CPC 464. I got a fair bit of use out of it, before replacing it with an Acorn Archimedes, and it has since lurked in a cupboard, only coming out a few times to confirm it still works. When I tried it a few years back, I found that the external floppy disk drive (a weird Hitachi 3" thing) wasn't working. Not good, so back in the cupboard it went, as I didn't have the time then to investigate further. Yesterday though, I did a bit of Googling and found that the commonest cause of failure was the drive belt. And sure enough, when I finally dismantled the drive enough to look at it, the belt was a sticky tangled mess, evidently reverting to the dinosaur-squeezings it was originally made of. It seems that replacement drive belts are available on e-bay (what isn't?), but for now I cleaned up the belt-gunk, and replaced it with a rubber band of about the right size. It works!

An Amstrad CPC 464. This isn't mine, which is a bit grubbier.
Zilog Z80 processor running at 4 MHz, 64k of RAM. Pure luxury...
800px-CPC464.jpg



So far I've not found any other obvious faults with the 464, other than a slightly iffy monitor lead connector which sometimes needs a bit of a wiggle to work properly. The cassette drive seems ok, or at least no worse than the damn things always were, and I seem to have a large collection of game tapes, most of which I have no memory of at all. And a copy of the original Elite (on 3" floppy), which I certainly do remember. I've not tried the disk (safer to wait for a proper drive belt), but if it works, I have a floppy with game saves on it, potentially enabling me to revive my Commander from suspended animation!

As for what else I might do with it, I have a sudden urge to dig out my dog-eared copy of Programming the Z80 and do some assembly-language metal bashing. And it would be nice to figure out how to at least transfer files to and from a modern PC. Apparently there are replacement 'floppy drives' available which use SD cards, but they are rather expensive. Needs some thought...
 

MottiKhan

MottiKhan
Nice! I learned Assembly on the Z80, way back when. It was a decent processor for its day and lived on in robotics for decades after it was no longer a viable PC processor.
 

AJW

AJW
I've been searching through my tapes and disks, looking for my own programming stuff. Lots of experiments with graphics, and a few assembly-language 'RSX' files: Resident System Extensions, which functioned rather like a .dll on a PC. I'd done a fair bit of experimenting regarding pushing the graphics further than BASIC would allow (e.g. changing screen mode halfway through screen update, which isn't quite as daft as it sounds), and the RSX system allowed simple integration of my own code with BASIC applications. Quite an advanced idea for its time. I've also found what I think was the first computer game I wrote that was fully functional: a Space Invaders clone, written entirely in BASIC. The graphics are inevitably rather flickery - maybe 3 frames a second - but it is playable enough. And all in a 4k file, which should be a lesson to modern games developers. ;)

I should probably try a few of the commercial games tapes I've found. They mostly seem to be 2D platform games (most were at the time), but there are a couple of 'flight simulators': a Tomahawk helicopter game, and a Fighter Pilot one which I think features an F-15 of sorts. I've also got a couple of Chess games, which I'm sure will still beat me. :( And of course, there is Elite...

@Patrick: I had to Google the Laser 500. Seems to have been a bit of an oddball, and if it was sold here in the UK, I don't think I ever came across it. Was it any good?
 

ebbrell

ebbrell
Omg.. I had one of those. I wired the house up to it. Created maps of up and downstairs, and tracked the opening of door and pressure pads in the floor.

I was only 13 years old I think
 

AJW

AJW
ebbrell said:
Omg.. I had one of those. I wired the house up to it. Created maps of up and downstairs, and tracked the opening of door and pressure pads in the floor.

I was only 13 years old I think
Click to expand...

I don't think I want to know why a 13-year-old would do that. ;)

An update on games: Codename MAT (space shooter) loads and runs from tape. I've just tried to load The Rocky Horror Show (platform game, rather good from what I remember), but with no success. Possibly I need to disconnect the disk drive, as I seem to remember having troubles before with tape games conflicting with it. I suspect that some of these games may be available online, though I'd then have to figure out how to get them onto media the 464 can read...

Update: got The Rocky Horror Show to load once I disconnected the floppy drive: It's just a jump to the left, and a step to the right...
 
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Patrick_68000

Patrick_68000
AJW said:
@Patrick: I had to Google the Laser 500. Seems to have been a bit of an oddball, and if it was sold here in the UK, I don't think I ever came across it. Was it any good?
Click to expand...

It was a computer made in Asia, I think,

I had paid for a computer training by correspondence and I had received it in the package

An entry-level computer to learn the basics of computer science and simple programming in Basic

But I was amazed, by this universe

Without a doubt the minimum in this computer, but so magical for a novice like most people of the time

:)
 
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Dad Rock

Dad Rock
wow, the memories. I had an Amstrad CPC 6128, but I can't imagine it was too different. Well done on getting it working again :)
 

PiggyPiggyPig

PiggyPiggyPig
I remember seeing these machines in Dixons. I had a c64 at the time. I treated my commodore PET to a PETmicro SD. http://blog.tynemouthsoftware.co.uk/2015/10/which-pets-support-which-pet-microsd.html
I downloaded from the internet, most of the software ever written for it. Handy for writing your own programs in a modern assembler or emulator too and then transferring it over later to see if it actually works on original equipment.

Didn't Alan Sugar once have a meeting with Bill Gates, who tried to convince Sugar to use his Microsoft BASIC in his machines but Sugar stubbornly refused to see any value in it because he didn't want to pay for something that wasn't tangible, so he finally got the rights to use his BASIC for next to nothing.
Gates at that time just wanted to get his BASIC out there, so begrudgingly agreed. I think if Sugar dropped a penny to the floor, it would hit him on top of his head on the way down.
 

AJW

AJW
PiggyPiggyPig said:
I remember seeing these machines in Dixons. I had a c64 at the time. I treated my commodore PET to a PETmicro SD. http://blog.tynemouthsoftware.co.uk/2015/10/which-pets-support-which-pet-microsd.html
I downloaded from the internet, most of the software ever written for it. Handy for writing your own programs in a modern assembler or emulator too and then transferring it over later to see if it actually works on original equipment.

Didn't Alan Sugar once have a meeting with Bill Gates, who tried to convince Sugar to use his Microsoft BASIC in his machines but Sugar stubbornly refused to see any value in it because he didn't want to pay for something that wasn't tangible, so he finally got the rights to use his BASIC for next to nothing.
Gates at that time just wanted to get his BASIC out there, so begrudgingly agreed. I think if Sugar dropped a penny to the floor, it would hit him on top of his head on the way down.
Click to expand...

A bit more Googling, and I've discovered that someone sells an 'floppy emulator' expansion card for the CPC series which combines a SD card with WiFi access. The SD is necessary since it has to emulate a ROM, but it provides some local storage too, while WiFi allows for file storage on a PC without the need for physical connections. Clever stuff. http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/amstrad-cpc-hardware/amstrad-cpc-wifi/

And yes, using an emulator for writing software makes a lot of sense. There seem to be several available.

As for the BASIC on the CPC series, it has nothing to do with Microsoft. It was developed specifically for the machine, along with the rest of the operating system. It was influenced more by the BBC Micro than anything else - the original design concept was for a 6502 rather than a Z80.
 

Patrick_68000

Patrick_68000
PiggyPiggyPig said:
I remember seeing these machines in Dixons. I had a c64 at the time. I treated my commodore PET to a PETmicro SD. http://blog.tynemouthsoftware.co.uk/2015/10/which-pets-support-which-pet-microsd.html
I downloaded from the internet, most of the software ever written for it. Handy for writing your own programs in a modern assembler or emulator too and then transferring it over later to see if it actually works on original equipment.

Didn't Alan Sugar once have a meeting with Bill Gates, who tried to convince Sugar to use his Microsoft BASIC in his machines but Sugar stubbornly refused to see any value in it because he didn't want to pay for something that wasn't tangible, so he finally got the rights to use his BASIC for next to nothing.
Gates at that time just wanted to get his BASIC out there, so begrudgingly agreed. I think if Sugar dropped a penny to the floor, it would hit him on top of his head on the way down.
Click to expand...

With his MS-DOS, Gates played well with IBM

:)
 

PiggyPiggyPig

PiggyPiggyPig
Komemiute said:
Interesting way of saying...
What does it mean? (Obviously not a native English speaker)
Click to expand...

I was implying, in a humorous way that Alan Sugar is very shrewd with his money, to the point of meanness ( at least with regards to Bill Gates ). The guy was tighter than a camels a***hole in a sandstorm. :D
I like him though. He's a hard working self made man.
 

PiggyPiggyPig

PiggyPiggyPig
AJW said:
A bit more Googling, and I've discovered that someone sells an 'floppy emulator' expansion card for the CPC series which combines a SD card with WiFi access. The SD is necessary since it has to emulate a ROM, but it provides some local storage too, while WiFi allows for file storage on a PC without the need for physical connections. Clever stuff. http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/amstrad-cpc-hardware/amstrad-cpc-wifi/

And yes, using an emulator for writing software makes a lot of sense. There seem to be several available.

As for the BASIC on the CPC series, it has nothing to do with Microsoft. It was developed specifically for the machine, along with the rest of the operating system. It was influenced more by the BBC Micro than anything else - the original design concept was for a 6502 rather than a Z80.
Click to expand...


Yeah I think that story with Bill Gates relates to Sugar's first Amstrad. Thanks for the link, very interesting. I watched the video and was well impressed with his ability to download software from the internet on the CPC. There are some very clever people out there.
On the PET, I have to swap my SD card back and forth.
 
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