Some days ago I was roaming in an antique's shop full of random stuff, mostly old toys and various kinds of old fornitures, when I reached the first floor I noticed something hidden in a mess of wires...
It was an Amstrad CPC 464! Yeah!!
While leaving I noticed that there were lots of CRT and lucky me I saw it's screen!!
An Amstrad GT65!!
The original green phosphors screen!
Luckily the screen itself comes with the power output for the computer and the screen's connector built-in!
As soon as I got home I rushed to connect everything and try using this machine!
This pictures comed after a lot of troubleshooting tbh... here what I did...
It were not powering on... :(
I proceeded on removing the screws and that was strange, there were some kind of mod to the video ouput port, I had to remove a couple of resistors and restore 2 tracks that were cutted. Maybe that was why when I were connecting the screen even with the computer not powered on it were losing the "still black" image. You can see the two restored tracks that are joined with a blob of solder.
But no luck yet, that just worked on mantaining the screen alive when connected, but the 464 were still not powering on...
So I kept on looking around, but everything seemed ok!
I just connected the two wires going to the power button and boom!
The computer boots!
I then had a lot of issues with the cassette deck, had to replace some bad rubbers to see it start spinning the cassette tape, but the definitive fix was putting a spacer in the pause button mechanism, cause without it the deck had a hard time pushing the tape.
It was time for some Lotus Turbo Challenge gameplay,
But sadly without any music... that would need a more powerful 128k CPC464+
That was fun!
But why not add a simple mod to the CPC to make it more modern friendly?
I connected a mini jack connector to load games with a smartphone, pc or any kind of player!
The mod was really simple, just connect the wires to the tape's head points on the cassette's deck board!
Here the result:
I really enjoyed fixing this Amstrad CPC 464 !
OLD STUFF RULES!
Thanks for reading!
And don't forget to keep your retro passions rolling!
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