Amstrad CPC 464

My first computer was an Amstrad CPC 464.

I got it for Christmas when I was a child in the early 90s, by which time it was already an old computer.

The first game I had for it was Treasure Island Dizzy.

Treasure Island Dizzy

It got a lot of use as a games machine, and I remember typing in BASIC code from books, which would more often than not fail to run because I made a typo.

I remember thinking it was slow to load games compared to my cousin's Amiga 500 and Sega Mega Drive, which used 3.5" floppies and cartridges respectively, compared to the CPC's tape drive. Also I only ever had the monochrome monitor, so all my games were in shades of green.

It spent many years languishing in the loft, exposed to the heat of the Summer and cold of the Winter.

A few years ago I made an RGB to SCART cable for it, and bought a suitable power supply to use the computer without the monitor. It was the first time I had ever seen the Amstrad display in colour!

I recently carried out some repairs/maintenance:

Resoldered the joints on the flyback transformer to minimise high-pitched CRT noise.

Resoldered a loose connection on the tape drive circuit board.

Changed the belts in the tape drive.

Cleaned the contacts for power, display, and expansion connectors.

I bought a DDI-4 from Zaxon. It has a floppy drive interface, Parados 1.2 ROM, 512kB RAM expansion, and edge-connector pass-through.

DDI-4

Using the DDI-4 with a Gotek floppy drive emulator, I was able to load a game from a .dsk file on a USB stick!

I had to make a power cable for the Gotek to supply it with 5V - an old USB type A cable on one end and a couple of female dupont connectors on the other end.

It was strange to load up a game in seconds, rather than minutes. A game made this century too!

Baba's Palace

Amstrad CPC 464 with DDI-4 and Gotek

I also bought a USIfAC II from Ikonsrg. It provides a serial interface, which allows access to USB, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc.

USIfAC II

More to come...