News about Amstrad CPC, PCW, Notepad NC100 NC150 NC200, PDA600 and also Amstrad PC






Test of the Amstrad GX4000 console by Nostalagia Nerd onr Youtube

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Nostalgia Nerd did a video on the Amstrad CPC Story, but as I wanted to listen to Burnin' Rubber music, I found a test of the Amstrad GX4000 console (October 2015) by him.







New release of CHIPNSFX by CNGSoft, a multi-platform tracker and player for Z80 systems

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Second release of CHIPNSFX tracker+player suite by CNGSoft : new command line options -F (48000 Hz) and -L (linear amplitude). A blue bar makes the active items stand out. Minor changes in the documentation file.



Next-Generation Speech Synthesizer for the Amstrad CPC 464 by Michael Wessel

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This Next-Generation Speech Synthesizer for the Amstrad CPC 464 by Michael Wessel started with a breadboard and now a PCB. For the moment, they are 4 videos of the interface card on Youtube :

It uses an Emic 2, the other components in the design are : Atmega 328 for implementing a parallel (CPC) to serial interface, to bride from the CPC to the Emic 2; a 74LS373 flip flop, 2 G16v8 PLD's for address decoding and generation of the chip select signal, and some other gates. The hardware extension is at address &F9E1. The speech synthesizer requires almost no driver, since the microcontroller and the Emic 2 are implementing an intelligent interface. The Basic program shown in the videos is implementing a simple protocol, but basically, to talk to the speech synthesizer, one only needs to write bytes to port address &F9E1 (e.g., using OUT in BASIC). Interestingly, the interface from the CPC's parallel data bus to the Atmel was tricky to implement.

It isnt compatible at the momeent with the other Amstrad CPC synthesizers : Dktronics and SSA-1. Emic 2 requires Start- (S) and End-Token (CR) - whereas Dktronics and SSA-1 simply send the allophones. Emic 2 works buffered, asynchronously, Dk'tronics and SSA-1 work synchronously. To make it compatible with SSA-1 and Dk'tronics, it would a) need to translate between allophone bytes and Emic 2 "equivalents", and b) figure out start- and end-token and shuffle them into the data stream (maybe based on a speech pause timing criterion). Not so obvious. Speech won't be synchronous, but maybe doable.






New version of Arnold, the Amstrad CPC emulator by Kevin Thacker

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Arnold build 20170513 is the new version of the Amstrad CPC emulator by Kevin Thacker.



Amstrad Sang pour Sang by Zisquier, the Amstrad CPC music with some metal added in it

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Thanks to the Facebook Amstrad.eu CPC 464 / 664 / 6128 group, I stumbled on the r Zisquier youtubber who dont hesitate to remix Amstrad CPC music in metal mode. Will you recognize Barbarian, Nebulus and Antiriad ?

Dont hesitate to look for his other gameplay videos of Amstrad CPC games.