Fantam 39 Amstrad Action Revised What's Going On Inside....? By Fantam 39

                                 Whats Going On Inside....?


  Your probably after all this time was wondering what made your CPC tick well internally the CPC's technical side had these components media wise it could load off tapes and 3 inch floppy disks and its operating system was AMDOS and Locomotive BASIC 1.0 or 1.1: CP/M 2.2 or 3.0 Zilog Z80A @ 4 Mhz 64 or 128 KB expandable to 576 KB input was used with a keyboard so there you have it that's what tech was keeping everything running on the inside while you were using your CPC one more fact the Amstrad sold 3 million units worldwide, which in my books isn't a bad figure, France been the biggest user base for the system with a huge following over seas I don't think it was that popular in the states where most Americans used the Commodore 64. England had a firm user base as well for the CPC, I've just discovered that the Amstrad was released in 1984 and was discontinued in the early nineties 32 years a go. Has it really been that long, well anyone with a PC can easily download a emulator to play all there favorite CPC games one of the best emulators that I use myself is Winape it's a Amstrad CPC plus emulator so you could play the entire library of games from the CPC's library including the GX4000 games, give it a try you can get all the CPC games from different sites like Free Roms and Emuparadise, you'll get the full spectrum of systems in Winape i.e 464/464 Plus/6128/6128 Plus there all there including ParaDos unless you've managed to keep and maintain your original system from over the years with your games still running then you won't have to worry about emulators. One more fact before this section's finished is you could also buy a TV converter to watch TV on your monitor I think it was for the color monitors only but stories leaked that using the converter would drain the color from your monitor which wasn't the cleverest piece of tech Amstrad thought of if you wanted a healthy monitor to continue playing your CPC library. Also on the audio side of things the Amstrad used a General Instrument AY-3-8912 sound chip output was used by a small built in speaker driven by a internal amplifier it was possible to hear digitized sound by a resolution of approximately 5 bit by sending values to the sound chip games like Robocop and Chase H.Q used this effect on non playable scenes to a grainy but audible quality. Who made the disk drive on your 644/6128 it was produced by Hitachi's floppy disk drive. The interface used was a NEC 765 FDC used also by IBM.