In the house computer grow of 1980s Britain, you might explain Amstrad as the third-placed home-grown player after Sinclair as well as Acorn. If you were a computer enthusiast youngster rather than a gamer kid, you desired Acorn’s BBC Micro, your parents purchased you Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum since it was cheaper, as well as you believed the Amstrads were great since they came with a much better screen than your family’s cast-off 1970s TV.
Amstrad were not a computer business headed by a technical wizard, instead they were a consumer electronics business whose creator [Alan Sugar] had a keen nose for the preferences of the consumer. therefore the Amstrad machines were different from a few of their competitors: they were much more polished, much more appliances than experimental tools. Mass storage gadgets such as tape decks as well as floppy drives were built-in, every Amstrad came with its own devoted monitor, as well as keyboards were good high quality as you’d see on a “proper” computer.
The high-end Amstrad design was the CPC6128. It came with a 3″ floppy drive, as well as of many interest, it might run the CP/M operating system. If your parents purchased you an Amstrad CPC as a 1980s teen, it wouldn’t have been this one, so they are significantly less typical than their 64k brethren with the cassette deck. One has discovered its method into [Drygol]’s hands though, as well as since the vintage 3″ floppies are unobtainable nowadays he’s fitted a floppy emulator board that stores data on an SD card.
In a sense, in that this is just the fitting of an off-the-shelf board to a computer, it’s Not A Hack. however misses the point. This is an unusual house computer from the 8-bit age as well as his review is as much a teardown as it is a howto. We don’t commonly get to see inside a 6128.
Fitting the board needed the fabrication of a cable, with some extremely neat soldering work. The board has an LCD display, which is mounted in the floppy opening with a 3D printed bezel. The result is a extremely usable vintage computer, without as well much in the method of wanton remodeling.
This is most likely the very first genuine Amstrad 6128 we’ve shown you, however that hasn’t stopped lovers making a clone with original chips, as well as one more on an FPGA.