It's been a little busy with the Amstrad updates.
First of all, the UsifacII device has been great - it dawned on me that I could convert .DSK images into real 3" disc images and vice-versa. This was a minor break through for me. why?
well, it allowed me to write out to real 3" discs software apps like CP/M, Arnor-C and Hisoft-C, you may notice a theme there! It also allowed me to convert an entire 3" disc to a .DSK image and save it onto the USB drive for later retrieval. again, why? well, the 3" discs themselves are getting rare and the non-Amsoft banded ones do tend to fail - easy test is to do a format and if all sectors are okay, all will be good, else mark the side of the disc as BAD and if both sides are bad, you have a new coffee cup coaster.
I visited archive.org and got hold of a nice .pdf version of the Hisoft-C manual
I did the obligatory "hello world" following the instructions:
and there we have it. it worked.
The manual has CP/M and AMSDOS specific walkthroughs, which is rather good.
I then had a thought. At some point in the past I acquired a Spectrum +3, that has a 3" disc drive... just like the Amstrad. It got me thinking. If the Amstrad CPC 6128 3" drive failed, I would have no backup... The Spectrum +3 motherboard had failed and the 3" disc drive did power on, but it was making some awful noises. So I stripped it out. There it is:
and after taking it apart (and NOT losing the read/write pin!) I extracted this lovely bunch of sqwish that once was a drive belt.
Everything actually looked in good condition.
Even upside down, it looks good.
Just be careful about that little r/w pin, if you lose it, you will not be able to write to a disc ever again.
I ordered a new belt, well, I ordered a 5-pack! Whilst I wait a few days, I pondered a few things.
I was wondering if I could attach the drive as a "B: drive" connecting it as an external drive and hooking in the power from the existing cabling... hmmmm....
Well, whilst I wait for the belts to arrive. I wrote a C app on Hisoft-C, it is a simple app, basically, it is annoying seeing files on a 3" inch disc but not being able to "see the content", so I thought I would write a little app that can print to the screen the contents of the file.
Here's a little video of using Hisoft-C, loading the file, editing it, compiling it, executing it and using it.
Kind of works well for small files, a little larger and well, it crashes at the end. I need to come back to that!
This got me thinking. Rather than having the file content zooming up the screen, I wonder if I could print it out. Hang on! I "think" I have an Amstrad printer buried somewhere in the far corner of a loft somewhere... so up I went. And, true enough, there it was, in the original box - looks like I purchased it back in June 2005! Still sealed up, I'd never opened it up. Time to do so:
It's in great condition, it has both a PC cable and a CPC cable.
I noticed it actually had a printer ribbon inside the casing. I assumed that it had dried up after all these years, but I thought I'd give it a try anyway. Quick & Dirty way to test the printer is to do:
Print #8,"here is some text for the printer"
I attempted this on the CPC 6128 and it just made some noises. So I plugged in the CPC 464 and it printed... and it actually printed some text, so the printer ribbon has some ink still!
I then repeated the same thing with the CPC 6128 & it worked. Why, it helps if you plug the cable the right way around!
I did spend some time trying to find a DMP 3160 printer ribbon online, looks very difficult, if not impossible to get a new one. I did read that you "can" use Indian ink or even Sharpies (and some random usage of a fine mist of WD-40) to extend the life of the existing ribbon - this might be an option if I actually choose to print out some C code via the printer. Seeing as I didn't even think I had a printer a week ago, this is novel and interesting progress.
...So, back to the 3" disc drive. I had the carcass of a CPC 6128 motherboard hanging on my wall for about a decade, I cannot really remember why I had just the motherboard on it's own. I didn't do a good job, I literally just ripped parts off the motherboard. I was skeptical whether it would even work.
I took the Spectrum +3 3" disc drive, the internal cable and mated it together with the CPC 6128....
and it only bl00dy well worked! Not only did the CPC 6128 boot up okay, access to the 3" disc drive was fine, the drive was very quiet - that new belt makes a lot of difference. I just ran whatever was on a disc - it was the Demomaker app, as shown here:
I'm well chuffed with that.
As you can see, I have the bare board and I have a keyboard casing that it plugs into.
For reference, I thought I would take photo's of the "working" CPC 6128, just to see what is missing and for reference.
Hmmmm.... I see that I am missing an on/off switch, a volume dial and a speaker, apart from that it all looks the same.
I decided to make a "cardboard" bottom for the "spare" CPC 6128, I glue-gunned the motherboard with some balsa wood to raise it slightly, glued the cable into place so it didn't move around and glued the 3" disc drive into place. It actually doesn't look to bad:
A quick :CPM boot later and yep, it works great:
You can see the "lift" from this angle.
Well, that was a job well done. Well, it was done.... I'll keep an eye out for a proper case bottom on eBay, but y'know these machines go for £100-£250 nowdays so getting a "spares" one will be unlikely and probably be expensive. I'm pretty chuffed that I took two devices that were gathering dust and made a working machine - well, a nice "backup" machine.
So, I can now write C code natively on the CPC machines (in both CP/M & AMSDOS), I'm getting more CP/M Z80 experience ( a nice PROPER OS ), I now have the ability to PRINT and now I have a backup machine. That means I now have 2 x 464, 2 x 6128 working machines letting me continue my retro goodness!
Time to blow off more C coding dust and potentially see what I can do interacting with external devices to the CPC machines....
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