Category: Computer System

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 🙂

I have wanted one of these in my collection for ages but at around £200-250 for an unboxed one, I had decided to wait to see if a better offer came along. Typically two then came at once so I had to buy both of them!

The first of which arrived today. This one was the first purchase and I took a bit of a chance on this one. It was from an online shop that deals with retro computers/consoles. They advertised it as not working and said it may require a new ULA. I actually have a poor condition grey +2 sat in a cupboard somewhere so a new ULA wasn’t going to be an issue. So for £120 including next day delivery, I went for it as I thought it would be fun troubleshooting the issue and hopefully bringing it back to life.

Not only is it in great condition. But I plugged it in and it works perfectly! No issues that I can see whatsoever. I have no idea how they came to the conclusion that it was broken. The only thing I can think of is that maybe the RF output doesn’t work? I will have to test this as I am currently (and always will) using an RGB Cable.

So I think I ended up with a pretty good deal on this one. Hopefully, the second unit should be here in a couple of days and that one was fully working but needed a new keyboard membrane.

I have replaced the membrane in this one also as it is almost certainly going to die in the near future, they all do!

I have recently taken delivery of two more Atari machines. The first was a Facebook marketplace sale where the guy only had the computer itself with no accessories and therefore priced it accordingly at £65. The machine in question is an Atari 1040STe. These normally sell on eBay for 100+ and it saves me having to worry about upgrading my 520STFM to get some of the more resource-hungry applications to run.

I gave it a good clean when it turned up and have replaced the floppy drive with a Gotek to make loading of software easier.

The second computer is something I hadn’t even come across before. It was launched around the same time as the ST and continued Atari’s 8 bit line of computers. This is the Atari 65XE and as you can see from the photo below it got it’s styling from it’s bigger brother. I have purchased an “S-Drive” for this computer which is a really smart looking SD Card solution for the XE. Will be interesting to check out this machines software library to see ow it compares to other 8 bit machines of the era.

I have been looking at these for a while now and this one came up for a decent price on one of the various Facebook groups I follow so I couldn’t resist. It’s all in perfect working order but the case is a bit yellowed. So this gives me an excuse to have another Retrobrighting session and this time I’m going to fully document it and make a guide for the website for anyone wishing to do the same.

Stuck out the back you can just about see the Elk128SD interface which gives the Electron 128k of RAM, a joystick port and an SD card slot for loading all the games from.

So another new computer added to the collection. This one is a bit weird! After the Commodore 64, Commodore decided their next computer would be worse in pretty much every way. Although it was cheaper and more focused as a business computer with a built-in word processor, spreadsheet, database and graphing functionality. Not surprising that it was a bit of a failure.

Still, it has a bunch of games available as it is essentially a C16. And I do actually like the overall design. Kind of reminds me of an MSX.

As you can see in the photo I’ve connected up an SD2IEC to load the software from SD-Card.

I actually have two of these currently as one was bought for cheap as untested which didn’t work. The second was from eBay and was advertised as fully working. The fully working one didn’t however display the built-in applications so I suspected a faulty ROM. I managed to get a discount on the price I paid and swapped the “3 plus 1” ROM chips over from the other unit which sorted that issue.

Whilst I had it apart I also swapped the CPU over and found that both CPUs are working fine which is a relief as they are pretty rare. So on the faulty unit, I’m going to swap out the TED chip next as I expect that is the reason why it’s not working. Hopefully, I can get it back to full working order in the near future.

I’ve actually had this for a couple of weeks now but hadn’t got around to adding it to the site. I’ve still not got around to connecting it up yet either due to being busy with other projects. I don’t see me spending a huge amount of time actually using this one as the Spectrum was a far better computer, but it will certainly be interesting to see what limitations people had to deal with on the first home micros!

I was always fascinated with the keyboard on these when I was younger, it always looked kind of futuristic like some sort of touch screen device. I expect the reality of actually typing on it will be a very different experience from what I imagined.

The interface stuck out of the back of the is the 16K memory expansion. This was pretty much an essential addon due to the ZX81 only having 1KB on board. The sticky residue on the interface was from a previous owners attempt to tape the interface to their ZX81 due to it being extremely common that if you gave it the slightest nudge when powered on, the computer would crash and you would lose your work 🙂

So I have actually had a 48k speccy sat in a box for quite some time but it is in pretty bad shape so didn’t consider it as part of my collection. Recently I was given a bundle of retro bits and included were another two 48ks. One was a board only and one was cased. Again the case wasn’t in great condition but it was a fully working Issue 2 board inside. So I decided to rehome this one in a brand new reproduction case with a new keyboard membrane too.

In the bundle I recieved there was also an brand new in box VTX5000 modem for the speccy (unfortunately the ribbon cable was missing from the box though so I will be making my own adapter to plug it in). This gives the 48k a nice stand to sit on and I will be looking to see if I can use this to connect to something in the future.

I’ve not got this one wired up permanently yet as I need to do the composite video mod on it then I will probably actually move it next to the CRT screen.

I’m currently running low on places to put new systems until I build my new display unit (hopefully next week). So until then any system I bought needed to be small and easy to store. What better system than the Cambridge Z88 from Clive Sinclair. This system couldn’t be branded as a Sinclair system because Clive had already sold the Sinclair brand name to Amstrad at the time this was released (1987).

Managed to grab this one of eBay as untested so was expecting it to be broke and was going to try and revive it. But surprisingly it is in fully working order.

I look forward to seeing what I can get this thing do do with its built in serial port and BBC Basic.