Archives of Genesis8 Amstrad Page from 1999 to 2024 about hardware





New firmware v1.20 for the Picogus by Ian Scott for your ISA PC XT/AT

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Ian Scott has released a new firmware v1.20 for his ISA card PicoGUS which supports the sound card Gravis Ultra Sound (and much more). This firmware replaces the Adlib mode with a SoundBlaster 2.0 mode where Adlib support is better, and also a fix for the MPU-401 emulation mode. The new firmware can be downloaded on Ian Scott's Github.



Présentation by Retro Erik of the PicoMEM ISA card created by FreddyV

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Retro Erick is presenting in video the PicoMEM ISA card made by FreddyV (FreddyV on Twitter).

This card is a must for all PC XT, even for 286, 386 and 486+, its features are (and more are on the way, see the github) :

  • integrated BIOS
  • less than 640 Kb ? You can fill up to 640 Kb (16 Kb granularity), it's possible to have up to 736 Kb of conventional memory
  • EMS memory (2 Mb)
  • up to 2 virtual disks drives and 4 virtual hard disks (up to 4 Gb). The images are on a SD card and can be created directly from the BIOS (recent feature)
  • USB mouse but you must use a USB OTG hub with its own power !
  • NE2000 network card support using wifi (it's better to be near your wifi router)
  • POST code for PicoMEM cards rev 1.1 and 1.11 with this Sparkfun screen




Abalore in three words : OS, wifi and Amsteam

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Abalore in three words it's :

  • the past in one word to start AbalaoreOS about which I didnt write in time (it started in February 2023). And yes, it's a WIP operating system for Amstrad. You can see video about it on CPCWiki and his Youtube channel.
  • the present in two words first a wifi card which leads to its use Amsteam which is the streaming of Amstrad CPC games.

What will he bring us for the future ?




New CGA card, MCE2HDMI, RGBtoHDMI and Amstrad CPC(+), video by Retro Erik

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Retro Erick is presenting in video the a new CGA card wi tested with the MCE2HDMI. This card is able to do CGA composite and can be bought on Aliexpress. The MCE2HDMI can be bought on Serdashop (where I bought several things, including a few weeks ago two waveblasters card to get MIDI on my PPC 640 without connecting my Roland expander). You can see another Retro Erik video presenting the test of the MCE2HDMI.

You must know that the MCE2HDMI is none other than the RGBtoHDMI by Hoglet67 which exists for many others computers (8 and 16bit), not only for PC with Hercules/MDA/CGA/EGA, but also the Amstrad CPC and CPC+. A list of vendors of the many RGBtoHDMI is available.





Mod Master XT v1.01 for your PC XT (player of musical modules files) on Github

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The version 1.01 of Mod Master XT by FreddyV is available as source code on github.

This msdos utility lets you hear a lot of music modules formats on any PC even a PC XT (CGA), for example an Amstrad PC 1512/1640 or a PPC 512/640...



Exernal Gotek for Amstrad CPC 664 and 6128 by Amstrad Retro Geek

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Amstrad Retro Geek is presenting an Exernal Gotek for Amstrad CPC 664 and 6128 with personalize USB key, 2 colors LCD screen, activity LED, rottary button to choose an image, buzzer for the drive sound, choice of drive A or B in a 3D printed box by Benemerit (Madrid, Espagne). The video is well done with integrated subtitles in french and english.





Would you want an Apple 2 or 286 in your ISA Card PC (and still more)

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Tube Time has done many things, you can follow him on Twitter or Mastodon, and his github is a gold mine, notably :





HxC Floppy Drive Emulator v2.15.1.2 available on Sourceforge

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HxC Floppy Drive Emulator v2.15.1.2 is available on Github.

It's an utility to manage .HFE disk images to be used by the SDCard HxC Floppy Emulator, a replacement for the 3 inch disks drives of the Amstrad CPC.

There is a support forum for HxC products and also a facebook group.



Mariage in heaven : the PicoMem card and TCP NetDrive by Michael B. Brutman

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mTCP NetDrive is a new utility by Michael B. Brutman which lets you connect under ms-dos a network drive which is in fact an image disk hosted on a windows or linux server (disk drive or hard disk image) for only 6 Kb of RAM (adds the RAM for the packet driver though). A mariage in heaven with the PicoMem card by FreddyV.




From 64 Kb to 1 Mb of RAM on an Amstrad CPC 464 by Noël Llopis

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Noel Llopis presents in his new video how he goes from 64 Kb to 1 Mb of RAM on an Amstrad CPC 464.

The expansion card to be used should have been by Revaldino but some components being hard to get, it's finally the card by Rebobinando which has been used.




Video by Retro Erik showing an ISA bus extension for the Schneider EuroPC (8088)

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Schneider made the Amstrad CPC under licence in Germany. They also did create PC XT like the EuroPC (several models). Retro Erik is presenting an ISA bus extension which he saw in another Youtube video. At the end of the video he is announcing that he is working on an universal ISA bus extension with a friend of the Norway retro community.




mTCP v20230331 by Michael B. Brutman, TCP/IP for Ms-Dos

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mTCP v2023-03-31 by Michael B. Brutman is a set of TCP/IP applications for personal computers running PC-DOS, MS-DOS, FreeDOS, and other flavors of DOS. mTCP needs a 8088 processor (or +), 96 to 256 Kb of system memory depending on the application, ms-dos v2.1 (or +) and a network card (Ethernet adapter, or a device emulating Ethernet) that has a packet driver.

If you go on the mTCP web page, you must know that it's a 39 years old PC Jr which is running mTCP own http server.



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