Year: 2022

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Amstrad PPC512 External ISA Expansion

With HUGE thanks to Joao (Website: http://www.enide.net/webcms/index.php?page=ppc512-640-isa-expansion) I recently received a PCB to build up an ISA Card expansion board for the Amstrad PPC512.

This allows you to plug up to three 8bit ISA cards into the PPC512. I built up the board with just one ISA slot to start with (There was only one available on eBay and I can’t find them for sale in the UK anywhere at the moment so have to wait for some to come from China).

My first experiment was to connect a Soundblaster sound card. This is possible thanks to the Unisound DOS driver which is a driver and config utility for Plug and Play sound card under DOS.

As you can hear in the video above, this worked perfectly. A much better gaming experience than the internal beeper 🙂

The next test was to plug in an external EGA Graphics card. Luckily the wiring for CGA is the same as EGA, so I didn’t have to change any cables. Also, the RGBtoHDMI board in my monitor already supports EGA. So all I had to do was flip a couple of DIP switches on the PPC512 to tell it to use an external video card and voila!

I now have 16 glorious colours on screen at the same time and my Lemmings are the right colour as opposed to their weird pink and cyan CGA versions.

I am really impressed with what I’m being able to get out of this 086 8Mhz PC with 512k of memory.

I now need to wait for the other ISA connectors to arrive so I can get both cards connected at once. In the meantime, I think I’m going to design a 3D printed case to hold the expansion board and the ISA cards securely in place.

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Build guide for the mini CGA Monitor

I’ve had quite a lot of people interested in my mini CGA monitor build so have put together a build guide to show what components I used. I have also uploaded the 3D printable files so anyone with access to a 3D printer can build their own.

I do still need to complete the wiring diagram for one of the cables which I will do shortly, I just forgot to take a photo of it before I put everything back together!

Click the link below to find out more, or head over to the “Projects” section of my website.

http://localhost/wordpress/mini-crt-cga-monitor/
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Amstrad PPC gets a DIY CGA colour monitor

I was originally going to replace the green screen LCD on my PPC512 with a modern LCD colour screen. But there was nothing physically wrong with the built in monitor apart from the horrible motion blur. It seemed a shame to butcher a fully working device. So instead I opened up my CAD program and designed and built a mini “CRT” monitor for it. It holds an 8inch LCD panel and a RGBtoHDMI board for doing the CGA conversion. I will do a write up soon with instructions on how to build your own, including the 3D stl files to print your own.

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Casio TV-980 Portable LCD TV

Along with my collection of computers and consoles, I also collect various other bits of old technology. I recently picked up this “new” portable LCD TV for a bargain price. Obviously, these devices only pick up analogue signals which are no longer transmitted in the UK. But with the help of my HackRF (Software Defined Radio) and a brilliant little program called HackTV, I am able to broadcast analogue TV along with Teletext signals within the walls of my own home.

I know it’s kind of pointless, but I’ve enjoyed playing around with it. And what better show to be broadcasting than the entire series on Games Master 🙂

I can now turn on any of the old CRTs and tune them into GamesMaster whenever I want!

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RIP Psion Series 3. Hello 3A and Series 5

So whilst decorating, the Psion Series 3 decided it wasn’t getting enough attention and jumped off a shelf onto the new laminate flooring. Sad to say, resusitation was not succesfull after breaking several body parts.

So I decided to take a look around for a replacement and came up with two options. Either a Series 3a which was the same computer but with a larger screen or a series 5 which was bigger in size, had a better keyboard and was more powerful.

I chose both of them 🙂 So say hello the Series 3a and Series 5!

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Amstrad CPC464 Plus

This is another computer I’ve actually had for a little while now, but when I purchased it, it had a missing key. I was planning on 3D printing a replacement, which I got as far as designing the model and printing the prototype using my resin printer. But then I came across a unit being sold as spares or repairs so decided to grab that and fit the original key to this machine. So now it’s fully functional and looks in great condition. I’ve added the spares or repairs machine to my repair pile to fix up one day in the future 🙂

The plus series of the 464 had the advantage of having a cartridge slot on the side for loading the cartridge-based games including the games that play on the GX4000 console. I actually prefer the styling on the plus machines too.

I’ve moved the M4 board over to this machine now so I can load games from SD card or over WiFi, which is a lot more convenient than waiting for the tapes to load 🙂

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Amstrad PPC512

I’ve had this machine for about a week now and am still enjoying tinkering with it. This luggable computer was the first IBM compatible portable PC made by Amstrad. It comes with it’s own backpack to carry it in, and if you want to use it on the go it will quite happily eat 10x C cell batteries in about an hour!

It has it’s own built-in green screen LCD but also has an external CGA monitor output on the back for that high-end gaming experience 🙂

The computer doesn’t have a hard drive but does have two Double Density floppy drives on the side. This is pretty useful since most of the time you will want the DOS boot disk in the primary drive. I have already swapped out drive A: with a Gotek drive to make booting the machine and loading old software a bit easier than constantly transferring stuff onto floppy disks.

I was actually planning on replacing the green screen LCD with a 9inch colour panel, but after using it for a bit I really feel it would spoil the charm of this machine, and the screen is in perfect working order. So instead, as a side project, I am currently building a mini 8 inch CGA External monitor to sit alongside it (Keep an eye on my blog for updates).

I will do a full write up of my experience using this machine once I’ve had a bit more chance to play around with it. I’ve already connected a WiFi modem up to it and trawled around some BBSs 🙂

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Sony Trinitron 14inch TV

So after a few attempts on eBay to pick one of these up (When will people learn that you can’t just wrap a CRT in a single layer of bubble wrap and ship it in a single cardboard box 🙁 ), I finally have a working Sony Trinitron 14″ Flatscreen TV to replace my old “no-name” brand. The picture quality on this one is absolutely gorgeous, so it will now be the main display for a bunch of my consoles/computers such as the Spectrum, CPC464, CD-i, Master System, Mega Drive, Saturn and XBOX.

Shown above: Rayman running on the Sega Saturn 🙂

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XBOX Series S

I am fully aware that this is in no way a retro console! But it is a part of my collection and saves me having to update my website again in 20-30 years’ time 🙂

This was actually a win in a raffle, so only cost me £12 which I’m fairly sure is a good price. It’s also my first digital-only console, which I have very mixed feelings about. Since it’s not my main console, the XBOX game pass thing just isn’t a good deal for me, and looking through the games available there is only a couple I would enjoy playing anyway so it’s best just to buy them.

I already owned Flight Simulator on the PC, so it’s nice that it transferred over to the console. I have also purchased Forza Horizon 5 for it as I quite enjoyed the last one. I expect those will be the only games that ever go on this console unless some other amazing XBOX exclusive comes out. Maybe I’ll take a look at the developer mode on these at some point in the future and have a mess around with the emulators and homebrew just for something to do.

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Wonderswan Color gets a new screen

After trying to use the Wonderswan with its new flash cartridge (Flashmasta) I purchased. I decided that I wasn’t going to spend much time with it using its original display screen. It’s one of those annoying ones where you need to get the light hitting it in exactly the right direction to stand any chance of it being visible.

I try to keep as many devices I own as original as possible, but in this case, I decided it was desperately in need of a little modernisation. So I opted for a nice backlit LCD display. It was actually a really simple installation procedure on this one with just two wires for power that needed soldering.

The end result is simply amazing and I will now be checking out some of the great titles available for the device thanks to a few language translation patches available on the net.