Every year at Fujiama , Prodatron , the author of SYMBOS is present with his Amstrad CPC.
When I visited GEMTOS this year, I saw Gryzor running on an Amstrad CPC and was immediately impressed by the colours.
I was a huge arcade Contra addict in my younger years so I had to checkout the Amstrad CPC.
And so it began , I acquired a “broken” 464 end of May.
It was actually working except for the typical replacing of belts on the tape drive.
Since the Amstrad CPC shares almost the same soundchip as the Atari ST , I was sold.
And so it began.
I changed the Idler tyre , installed an audio-in mod to use a TZXduino which I still had for my ZX81
and started loading tapes either real tapes or via the TZXdUINO.
I needed a way to connect the CPC to my little screen and so I stumbled upon RGB4ALL which you can read about in
a previous blog post here RGB4ALL .
Looking for an insight into the demoscene unknown to me I stumbled upon MEMORYFULL.
Hicks/Vanity send me the book and also the 64NOPS magazine and already invited me to the Benediction Coding Party.
More on that later.
I made a previous blog entry on the book and the magazines here NEWBOOKS
So on my way to France, Shadow Party, I started reading the book as a way to pass time on all the trains I had to take.
YES I travel by train since I do not own a car.
At Shadow Party I met Candy from the CPC OVL demogroup who showcased me a lot of Demos , shared some interesting stories/insights
about the scene and usefull hints on magazines like the brilliant CPC-FANZ-BZH .
This sparked my interest even more in the Amstrad CPC scene.
The pride, humbleness, welcoming vibes of the Amstrad CPC owners is astonishing, it reminds me a lot when I stumbled upon the Atari scene 5 years ago.
And further I went into the rabbit hole looking for a way to load DSK images and ROMs.
Also being able to load games/demos that require more than 64Kb RAM.
A DKTronics replica memory expansion MEMOTRON
The ULIfAC and USIfAC interfaces by John aka ikonsgr IKONSGR
The Dandanator Elite + by Rancanuo RANCANUO
At Fujiama , Prodatron was present and I showed him the MemoryFull book which he had heard about
since he knows Hicks but hadn’t seen it in real life, also the book being in French and him being German my multi-lingual skills became usefull.
As usual when I swear it will be the last retro machine I will buy, yup bought another one, an Amstrad CPC 6128.
And wow, it really is a nice keyboard, and a all-in-one machine.
To be continued in the next blog entry