Polishing off the second revision of the #Amstrad #CPC464 #MechanicalKeyboard

* Key bed repositioned by a few fractions of a millimetre.
* Diode footprint tweaked for easier hand soldering.
* Moved a couple of diodes which were uncomfortably close the connectors.
* Patched up all the traces affected by the above.

I still have a couple of minor items on the todo list but this is very close to being ready for the fab.

"Wie alt bist du?" "Das ist mein erster Computer." "Ach du Shicé!" #meinerstercomputer #schneider #cpc464 #alteleute #vintage #computer

My #Amstrad #CPC464 just died on me. It was working fine and then it froze up. Now this is what I get when I power it on. Anybody have any suggestions?

Il y a 40 ans, #Amstrad dévoilait une machine qui allait révolutionner l'informatique : le #CPC464.

Pour l'occasion, @pixelsfr publie un format exceptionnel dans lequel Alan Sugar (Amstrad), Marion Vannier (Amstrad France), Yannick Cadin (dev de Zombi, le premier jeu Ubisoft), des membres toujours actifs de la demoscene ou encore notre journaliste Damien Leloup racontent leur histoire - format sublimé par la mise scène ultra rétro de nos collègues de la DA

https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/visuel/2024/09/28/il-y-a-quarante-ans-la-revolution-amstrad-cpc_6337400_4408996.html

Welcome to #Lave station
Article in German, promo video in English:

https://heise.de/-9949690

The Amstrad CPC464 is over 40 years old and one of the components that breaks easily is the tape counter reset button.

However, thanks to the world of 3D printing (and a willing volunteer who was kind enough to print it!), my problem is solved.

The original button was black, and yet this blue gives me the CPC464 feels regardless. Very happy.

Can you remember the old German warehouse 'Quelle'? A donation originally packed. Additional the #CPC464 and the #CTM640 too.
#RetroComputing #Schneider #Museum

Good ol' boring stuff today.
But hey, joystick!

Mastodon, we have a keyboard!

But how, might I hear you ask, since there's no sound chip yet?

Well, who needs that pesky sound chip. The only thing we read from it is the keyboard data. So just skip the chip for now and always return keyboard data when port A is read. Ta-da!

(oh and that Amstrad BASIC looks pretty neat. Like... much better than the Commodore one)

Well, that pesky "job" thing got in the way today so I was just able to squeeze in a bit of time.

I reworked the memory class to allow different blocks on read/write, and added calls to restore and allocate only read|write blocks as needed.

After that, all you need is to swap L and H ROMs in and out on demand (that's done by poking some bits in the gate array).

What this means is that we now have the BASIC ROM loading properly!

Peeps, we have CRT Controller Initialization

The CPC does incomplete io decoding. A lot of computers do, but this is the annoying kind.

To save on decoding when you have few io devices, you hook their select chip pin directly to an address line:

/A14 -> CRTC
/A12 -> Parallel port
/A11 -> PIO

Simple, but if code uses "illegal" port addresses, multiples devices could be enabled at the same time. You don't want that usually.

But a proper emulation should replicate this behaviour as best it can. That sucks mildly.

Me looking at the Amstrad CPC 464 architecture: oh fun, my emulator doesn't do stacked memory mapping*. Back to the drawing board.

*Don't know if there's a better term, basically you have a block of ROM mapped "over" a block of RAM.
The reads are from the ROM, and the writes goes to the RAM "under".

Right now in my model only one block of memory can occupy an address range.

Yay!

managed to get some #retrogamedev done on the amstrad last night and got my timers working properly.

its on my itch page (https://terlan.itch.io/easy-as-123) as a CDT if anyone wants a shot.

its easy all you need to do is answer 1 2 or 3 to simple sum of the numbers 1, 2 & 3 before the timer runs out and get the highest score you can. the timer gets progressively shorter the more you score.
there are other versions too.
#retrogaming #retroprogramming #basic #amstrad #retrocomputing #cpc464 #amstradcpc