7 ms·
The Amstrad CPC 472, an unusual case
- song 6y agoIf you speak Spanish and are bothered by the not so great translation, here's the original article https://auamstrad.es/hardware/mundo-cpc/amstrad-cpc-472/ https://auamstrad.es/hardware/mundo-cpc/amstrad-cpc-472/ Quite interesting
- lordelph 6y agoI rather enjoyed the somewhat flowery translation!
- jacquesm 6y agoAh, the Dragon 32 rates a mention. Great little machine, my first 'real' computer. That was a TRS-80 Color Computer clone with a 6809 in it, which has what I still think was one of the most elegant 8 bit instruction sets.
- amiga-workbench 6y agoI've had a Dragon 32 sitting on my shelf for years now, I've never actually gotten around to building a power supply to test it. If memory serves it needs multiple voltages feeding to it over a DIN connector.
- jacquesm 6y agoThe power supply board outputs 12V, 5V and -5V. The 5V is about 1.5 amps, the 12 250 mA and -5 50 mA. If you've lost the supply brick; that's strictly the AC side of things, it is just a transformer in a plastic wrapper. The outputs of the transformer are connected to a DB-9, the pinout is: 1,6----8.5V----2,7 3--14V--CT--14V--5 Pins 8 and 9 are NC. Keep an eye on the large capacitor on the powersupply board, they tend to go bad, look for white stuff near the caps, if you find any replace them before trying to power it all up. You can pull fairly decent composite video off the input to the modulator (on the PSU board). Good luck!
- tangent-man 6y agoFor some strange reason I've had 2 Dragon 32 PSU's in my cupboard for years -alas no Dragon32 - if you cover the postage you can have one if you want? (Sorry I know that seems tight but I'm out of work right now). p.s. They are D plugs.. look like female joystick ports..
- amiga-workbench 6y agoThanks for the offer, I'll be in touch via email.
- appleflaxen 6y agoThe photo of keyboard "with ene" does not show the letter, which is actually on the right half of the keyboard (the left half is chosen by the author for some reason).
- anthk 6y agoYou can use "enye" as a placeholder for "eñe". On the location, currently is right to "l", in the US layout it prints ";".
- achairapart 6y agoSo basically Spain taxed computer machines with less than 64kb memory, so Amstrad introduced a computer with 72kb, with an additional 8kb that was soldered but not even connected. Clever! I'll look for the Alan Sugar' autobiography as well.
- Zardoz84 6y agoOther side effect was the Inves ZX Spectrum+ and the ZX Spectrum 128K . On this case, the computer had really 128KiB, a Spanish keyboard and translated ROM. From : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum#spectrum128 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum#spectrum128 "In 1985, Sinclair developed the ZX Spectrum 128 (code-named Derby) in conjunction with their Spanish distributor Investrónica (a subsidiary of El Corte Inglés department store group).[28] Investrónica had helped adapt the ZX Spectrum+ to the Spanish market after the Spanish government introduced a special tax on all computers with 64 KB RAM or less,[29] and a law which obliged all computers sold in Spain to support the Spanish alphabet and show messages in Spanish."
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- twic 6y agoAfter Dragon got wound up, the little guys who worked inside had to get jobs advertising dehydrated mashed potato: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKt-KR1TsRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKt-KR1TsRg
- rapnie 6y agoAfter owning a Texas Instruments TI99-4A my 1st pc was an Amstrad Schneider PC 1512 with one floppy and one 20 Mb hdd. It ran, I believe GEM window system on top of MS-DOS.
- achairapart 6y agoAmstrad PC1512 and PC1640 were great machines. They had some weirdness like the proprietary PU mounted in the monitor but were solid, well built and well priced, even more they looked kinda futuristic when compared to the boring 8086 clone boxes of that era. And yes, they even came with a mouse and a GUI (GEM by Digital Research).
- Lio 6y agoSharing PSUs between components was an Amstrad staple. Sugar used the technique in products from hifi's to computers as an innovation to save money and keep costs down. That's not necessarily meant in a bad way. Amastrad often used the savings to to bump up the spec somewhere consumers cared more e.g. memory or a bundled monitor or printer. I think when commodity PCs became wide spread Amstrad ran out of corners to cut to get an edge and became uncompetitive.
- Stierlitz 6y ago> I think when commodity PCs became wide spread Amstrad ran out of corners to cut to get an edge and became uncompetitive. It was when Amstrad dropped their own OS in favour of DOS that they became just another commodity PC maker. Actually first Amstrad moved to DR-DOS then MS-DOS to avoid potential compatability issues. Which I'm sure Microsoft would have eventually discovered. http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011207/PX_9923.pdf http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011207/PX_9...
- rapnie 6y agoAh yes. DR-DOS it was. So long ago, completely forgot about it.
- heyflyguy 6y agoIn the summer of 1987 I mowed yards 7 days a week, 4-6 hours per day to earn enough money to buy an Amstrad PC 1512. I was 10 years old and when I finally got to unbox it and power it up, it was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me.
- flavor8 6y agoGEM desktop, digger, ribbit, and all the rest? Did you have dual floppy drives or one?
- heyflyguy 6y agoDual floppies and let me tell you that 6 months down the road I was upset with that decision. Loading any games took 4 floppies and 20 minutes.
- petercooper 6y agoI almost think there's some sort of article/podcast/something in this as I've heard so many similar stories from that era. For me it was sweeping yards and doing chores to save up to buy Visual Basic for DOS. Not the best use of my money it turned out.. :-D
- jacquesm 6y agoFor me endless (and I really mean endless, especially on days with rain) news paper routes.
- gquiniou 6y agoMy parents bought one to do their accounting but never used it. I was a bit frustrated because all my friends had CPC 6168 and were constantly trading games. At this time the PC games were a lot less common (and more expensive) it pushed me to start programming with GEM Basic.
- tialaramex 6y agoI'm guessing you meant a CPC 6128 ? There are some really fun games for that machine but it's just at the edge of useful for a bunch more things, it has a real disk drive, but the disks are expensive and capacity is low. It's technically just about capable of using a hard disk, but that's crazy expensive. It can run a real operating system (CP/M) but not very well because it needs a hard disk you don't have or constant disk swapping. Or like many 8-bit home computers it boots into a BASIC environment that has a bunch of clever tricks but ultimately dead ends. The 128kbytes of RAM are bank switched, so it's better than a 64kbyte machine but not as much better as you'd hope. On the family VIC-20 I basically reached the limits of what was practical to do with it. I ran out of RAM, my programs became too slow and unwieldy to use. I never got there with the CPC 6128 but I could certainly feel where the limits were, closer than you'd like, and it often caused me not to set off in a particular direction knowing I'd soon run into a wall anyway. I wrote some simple assembly language but never tried to run a real high level language (other than the built-in BASIC). Whereas on my 486sx25 and subsequent machines it was only ever a matter of time and money, so that was always on me.
- seanwilson 6y agoRandom Amstrad memory: When you were coding in BASIC, I don't think there was clipboard but there was a way to get a second cursor to appear that you could position with the (I think) arrow keys somewhere else on the screen. You could then press a "copy" key and it would copy one character at a time from the second cursor to your current editing position. It's weird thinking back to when you didn't have a proper IDE. Has a similar UI been seen on a computer before this? There's a "copy mode" in Screen for Linux that has similarities.
- ggrrhh_ta 6y agoI think tmux's scroll mode (ctrl-b [) is similar. You move the cursor freely and if in vi-mode, you can us vi commands (as if in visual mode) to select and copy (y) contents. Pressing 'enter' goes back to non-scrolling mode, and then you can paste the contents with the configured tmux keys.
- quietbritishjim 6y agoYou missed this bit (emphasis added): > You could then press a "copy" key and it would copy one character at a time from the second cursor to your current editing position Each time you pressed the "copy" key it would literally advance both the main cursor and the copy cursor by one character, with the copied character appearing under where the main cursor just was. To copy multiple characters you would need to press the copy key multiple times or hold it down to trigger autorepeat (even then you would see this process gradually happening until you released).
- goatinaboat 6y agoThe BBC Micro has this and I believe it pre-dated the Amstrad
- blywi 6y agoRISC OS for Archimedes/RISC PC also inherited this feature, although, as far as I can remember, you could only use it in CLI mode (after pressing F12 key) and not in windowed mode. My guess would be that the RISC OS version for the Raspberry Pi still has the copy cursor, in that case you could argue that there are even recent systems available with it.
- fancyfredbot 6y agoIf only US OFAC export restrictions were as easy to bypass!
- Stierlitz 6y ago“At the sight, it is only distinguished by the screen printing of the case, where the «64» is replaced by a «72»” I recall reading somewhere that, to give an artificial boost to the home grown market. The French introduce a law to ban the import of personal computers with less then 72kb of ram. The British got round this law by adding a small pcb to the main board, that did nothing at all. Unless it was the Spanish, funny what you mis-remember.
- jacobush 6y agoMakes me wonder about the Spectravideo (Z80 based) machines. Some had 16 kbyte RAM. All Spectravideo had also 16 video RAM. But the version with 64 kbyte RAM was prominently marketed as having 80 kbyte RAM. (RAM + VRAM = 80 kbyte) I guess that computer model could also have been imported without the high tariff. (The Spectravideo 328, which formed the basis for the almost identical MSX standard.)
- hakfoo 6y agoI think that's sometimes just specs preening. The US answer to the Spectrum was called the Timex/Sinclair 2068 and advertised as a 72k machine (48k RAM/32k ROM)
- JdeBP 6y agoThere's a story, propounded by someone who wrote it into Wikipedia 16 years ago, that the Norsk Data ND-505 was the world's only 28-bit computer, made so in order to avoid CoCom regulations then covering 32-bit minicomputers. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/7310013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/7310013 Unfortunately, the story doesn't agree with the contemporary marketing literature that still exists, that calls it a 29-bit computer; or with the CPU reference manual for the ND-500 CPU that was used in the ND-505, which says that it used 32-bit logical addressing with 5 domain selector bits and 27 address bits, and 41-bit physical addressing with 2KiB pages and a 30-bit page number. * http://sintran.com/norsk-data/library/libpdpi/ND-505CX-A1-EN.pdf http://sintran.com/norsk-data/library/libpdpi/ND-505CX-A1-EN... * https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_norskDataN00ReferenceManualJun87_10475874/page/n42/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_norskDataN00ReferenceM... * https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_norskDataN00ReferenceManualJun87_10475874/page/n55/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_norskDataN00ReferenceM...
- blazor 6y agoLOL I used Norsk ADA on Sintran back in the day