Tony is a Geek

Following on from the previous article post , as Bob would say, "you wouldn't let it lie" I ordered some cables, actually for the printer conversion project , but as it had 2 x connectors on it, I hijacked it and used it for this first. There was a LOT of trial and error & learning mistakes 'earnt' during this exercise and I would probably have been quicker and more efficient if I wasn't doing this late at night after long work/work days, but y'know someone has to do the day job as the EPs I work with all seem to be very work shy... So, armed with screw-drivers, hacksaws and cups of tea... a hacking I went. I thought I would just cut & splice the existing internal 4 wires that provide the internal 3" disc drive with power, I mean, it'll only be using the power one at a time, wouldn't it?  I had a niggling feeling that this would not work - mainly due to the fact the proper "external 3" disc drives" come with a massive PS...

What's all this about then? Well, I was very late to the game with this one - but the very nice man who made this board (about 6years ago), made a small batch of them again and sent one to me ( I had to pay for it of course and it was about 6 months wait - but it was way worth it! )  Basically, it's a single board that you plug into the back of the Amstrad CPC computers. Either the 464 or the 6128.  Now, I am initially plugging this into the CPC6128, however, I am going to move it over to the CPC464 as that is where I think it deserves to be.  The CPC464 does not have a disc drive, but this loveely board will allow me to load and access .DSK files, I can also upgrade the BASIC to v3 and add a bunch of ROMs too. Yes, you did indeed read that right, a 1984/5 Amstrad now has access to an Arduino wifi board and a 32GB sd-card ( that we prob. won't ever use more than 100MB of! ) I shan't repeat all the other things off the internet that explain all the other gubbings, I'...

A match made in heaven? If you rewind back to one of my first posts on this blog (although I had been "doing" stuff way before then, I just didn't record it), I was setting up a Raspberry Pi 1 to run nodeJS - basically "server-side JavaScript", it was more than capable and was very useful and handy thing to do. Well, the Raspberry Pi 5 has just been announced to be available from 23rd October - yes, I've got an order in for a 4GB and 8GB version - well, the specs for the RPi5 are just mindblowing.  It is like having a full blown desktop replacement machine in a small form factor, you don't need to "buy a PC" anymore, a £50 RPi v5 will do all you need it to do... if indeed you want to use it as a "PC replacement". Personally, I'm more of the, it should be an IoT hardware integration device and not something you use for playing the latest triple-A games on or complaining about "dropped frames" from streaming YouTube videos...

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 an...