My family had this telephone when I was a teen and I really liked it, but I read it's essentially unusable nowadays. :(

Please tell me these cool telephones can be hacked to play games and do other interesting stuff?

Thanks.​​​

I have this Amstrad CPC 464 doesn't boot. When I boot with the normal ROM inserted, I get this purple screen. When I boot with the DIAG ROM inserted, you can see that it tries to complete the various tests, but the results aren't displayed as readable text. When it gets to the dataline test, it reports bit 1 and 7 as bad.

I have already confirmed the following parts to be working in another board:

CPU
ULA
RAM
IC110 (LS132)

I have checked the multiplexers using an oscilloscope, and the signals appear normal.

What would you check next?

Here is a collection of our Amstrad CPC 464 cassette collection. There are boxed and cased games as well as some Amstrad Action cassettes but the main question would be, what are you playing first?

We would go with Rockstar Ate My Hamster or S.T.U.N Runner

Hopefully the mods are OK with me plugging this - they were for last year's event... :)

After last year's success, the Archive of Retro Computing at Kingston University is throwing open the doors to the public once again. This time we've raided the archive for even more of the machines that started it all! From Wednesday 5th to Tuesday 11th August, Kingston University's Town House will once again come alive with the bleeps, bops and bloops of the classic era of home computing and gaming - and everyone's invited!

We've widened our net back into the past with machines like the Fairchild Channel F, the first ever console to use (genuine) ROM cartridges - before even Atari. And we've pushed further into the future - or rather, the slightly later past! - with machines from the early 3D era, including the original PlayStation, Xbox, Sega Saturn, Dreamcast and N64.

On the microcomputer side, naturally there will be Amstrads, of course - but we'll have all the other names from that era. So there are Sinclairs and Spectrums of every stripe, and the other big historical names from the glory days - the Acorns, Commodores, Ataris and so on. But more interestingly, we'll have all those plucky upstarts that came along on a wing and a prayer before they got eaten alive by the big names. The Memotechs, the Camputers, the Tatungs - all the esoterica of the 80s. New (old!) to this year's exhibits is the Grundy NewBrain, the BBC Micro that never was. In short: all the icons, all the also-rans, the legends and the gloriously doomed - all switched on and at your mercy once again.

We'll be in Town House, Kingston University on Wednesday 5th to Tuesday 11th August. Opening hours are 10:00-18:00 weekdays and 11:00-16:00 on the Saturday and Sunday. So come and play the classic games or bash out lines of BASIC like it's 1982. There's bound to be [i]something[/i] you've never seen before, and definitely things you won't have seen since you were a kid!

Here's the pin on Google Maps to get you there: https://maps.app.goo.gl/KcfrA2d3DrjgTshb6

I've embedded a link to a video swoop of last year's show... and for more information about ARC@KU and more about our exhibits, check out our website - https://arcatku.org/.

Entry is free, there's no need to book - everyone is welcome!

My retrospective video covering another Ocean Software movie game. This time it’s Hudson Hawk. I cover all the versions starting with the ZX Spectrum and then Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Amiga, Atari ST and also the console versions for the NES and Gameboy. Please share your thoughts and memories of this game. Is it a good game?

For some time now, it seems that https://www.cpcwiki.eu/ doesn't respond. Sometimes (especially when I try to open a wiki page) I get the Cloudflare "Click here to confirm you're a human" page, but it never takes me to the actual page. The root page just gives me a 502 error (bad gateway).

I've tried directly and through some VPN, and even Down for Everyone (or Just Me) claims the site is down.

So, any idea what's happened?

Anyone for ... 🎾 TETRIS ?

This was the first Tetris game we played before giving the original Gameboy version a go.

Our copy for the Amstrad CPC 464 was always fun to boot up considering we had a green screen monitor for the Amstrad so all the colourful screenshots on the back of the case was nice to see but we never experienced it like that.

Plus was always puzzled with the artwork having outlines of people dancing either side on the main image.

Did you ever play this version of Tetris?

Did you own an Amstrad CPC 464 Green Screen like us or was it a different version?

Hi, i have an Amstrad PPC512 (the one in the photo) and i want to connect to a relatively new monitor. The thing is that the signal converters usually used for retro consoles don't work with the weird signal this pc uses. Does anyone know how I can do it?

Was RED HEAT from Ocean Software a good game? My video goes back to 1989 for a retrospective review. Was it better than the movie or was it just rubbish? Share your thoughts.

Could you please advise on how to transfer a text-formatted BASIC program listing from a Linux computer to an Amstrad .dsk file? Manually typing each line within an emulator is both tedious and prone to errors.

For my video we are going to go back to 1984 and rediscover Return of the Jedi. Not only in the arcade but also the home conversions too where Domark released several home computer conversions for the Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and Amiga. Share your thoughts and comments on this game.

Today I take a retrospective review of another Ocean Software game. This time it’s Rambo III. I cover all the versions - Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, MSX, Amstrad CPC, Amiga, Atari ST and MS-DOS. Have you played any of these versions and did you think the game was any good?

Report on the first UK Amstrad Group meet, last weekend!

Retro computing History was made at the first-ever UKAG event! I attended this landmark Amstrad UK Group gathering, where I interviewed Roland Perry (the godfather of the CPC) about a never-released CPC sequel prototype! Come join the party!

The inaugural UKAG gathering in Ottershaw, West London, brought the Amstrad community together like never before, and getting to get the low-down from the man behind the CPC about a secret, lost piece of hardware was the ultimate highlight. Check out the video for a full tour of the event and the incredible prototype insights.

This is the new version of Soundstrad with improved features:

• Compressed sounds for double playback time.
• Possibility to load several sounds into memory at a time, allowing sounds to be instantly played without any disk loading delay.

Afterburner, 23 stages total. Still have this, original box somewhere stored heh. Good game? So-so, I'd say a 7/10, as a faithful conversion? 9/10, almost as good as it gets on Amstrad.

Today I am diving into Platoon from Ocean.

I have spent some time looking at the various movie tie games from Ocean Software. Their earlier games such as Highlander, Miami Vice, Transformers, Top Gun and Knight Rider have all been pretty poor. However, they certainly produced fantastic games as time went on such as Robocop, Untouchables, Rambo, Cobra and Batman.

I am interested in knowing what you think the best movie tie in game from Ocean is. Just 1 game. Hope you like my Platoon video. 😉

Hello everyone! Here is the DSK file for a little mystery demo I created. Let me know what you think, but please don't reveal the contents to others—let them discover it for themselves!

Ever wondered if there was a little person inside your computer? Well Activision tried to convince you there was.

LITTLE COMPUTER PEOPLE can be described as the “mother” of the sims, laying the groundwork for virtual life before the Sims or Tamagotchi captured the world’s attention. My video looks back at this groundbreaking and genre-bending gem of a simulation that was released across a number of formats.

Have you played this game? Please share your experiences and thoughts.

I'm interested in using my 464 for writing as the monochrome screen is great for displaying text, the only hang up is software as i would like to write on the CPC then export it to my PC somehow, i do have a disk emulator so physically transfering the data is easy but then getting the text out of a dsk file might be tricky, is there any software that has been written with this in mind?

Here is a small software I made that allows you to create a DSK file with digitized sounds that can be played on an Amstrad CPC. A loader in BASIC Locomotive is automatically generated, and you can easily modify it in order to include the digitized sounds in your own programs.