The M4 Board which let you add wifi on your Amstrad CPC just got another firmware v2.0.5 beta 7 : monitor and snapshots !

RetroVirtualMachine v2.0 beta 1 by jcgamestoy was released the 22th December 2018. It's an Amstrad CPC WIP emulator for MacOS, Windows and Linux.

The precedent version did add the support of the Dandanator expansion card..

The M4 Board which let you add wifi on your Amstrad CPC just got another firmware v2.0.5 beta 6 :

• Fix do not erase ESP flash, if CRC error in ESPFIRM.BIN
• Added RSX command |ROMSOFF
• Added upgrade report, that is generated in root of microSD, called report.txt

Abalore is the author of M4FE, a frontend for the wifi M4 board created by Duke.

It is written in assembler, it lets you move through the directories and launch programs. It supports 64k files for each directory, joystick (2 buttons), snapshots, reading text files, search for a file or directory, it remembers the last directory used..

Comments and suggetions to the author are welcome.

The Odroid GO supports now a QWERTY keyboard with is used by a C64 emulator (the second C64 emulator in fact).

Sadly, still no Amstrad CPC emulator in sight, but we can still pray for one, especially with this keyboard which would really help such emulator.

Seen on BYTECellar, the WIFI232 created by Paul Rickards (see his page on the WIFI232) is an electronic card (with an ESP8266 micro-controller) which you connect on any computer with RS232 (DB9 or DB25 with an adaptator) so you can get like a good old modem used with AT Hayes commands to connect to an internet BBS, for an Amstrad Notepad NC100 for example. See this video for using TCP/IP encapsulated with pppd.

You can buy a WIFI232 at Simulant (U.K.), this address was in a comment at BYTECellar.

From time to time, an article not about Amstrad computers, well till 1986 when Amstrad bought the computer part of Sinclair Research.

OSNews mentions an interesting article about the making of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, its colour clash and graphics engines like Nirvana+ which allow nice games without this colour clash like Gandalf released in 2018 (see the video below).

There are a lot of ergonomic keyboards, one of them is the ErgoDox (see also there).

This ErgoDox Amstrad CPC 464 keyboard is certainly interesting.

The Odroid GO is a portable video game console with a LCD screen (320 x 240), battery, direction pad and 6 buttons (easy to build). It uses the ESP32 SOC microcontroller. The builtin firmware emulates old consoles (GB, GBC, NES, SNES, SMS, GameGear and Colecovision). More interesting, it can emulate a ZX Spectrum, MSX both using a Z80. So of course, it could lead to a possible Amstrad CPC firmware.

Reading the last page of the September Odroid magazine, Andrew ARMSTRONG intends to use an Odroid Go to transfer to and from an Amstrad CPC 464.

Emotional stories about processors for first computers: part 4 (Zilog Z80) is an interesting article about the Z80.

A new version r005.8.16.4 of the Amstrad CPC core for MiST by Renaud Helias is available.

RetroVirtualMachine by jcgamestoy is a new Amstrad CPC WIP emulator for MacOS, Windows and Linux.

The v2.0 WIP does support the Dandanator expansion card..

TMTLOGIC gave informations in April 2018 about the developpement of the Symbiface III card (see CPCWiki source too) :

• USB mass storage device FAT32, tested with an speed of 700Kb/sec, seen as drive D
• USB wireless mouse
• 512 KB RAM
• RTC (not compatible with the SF2 RTC) and a battery
• OLED display

The final choice of the features isnt frozen, you can propose other features on CPCWiki.

Everybody know the M4 wifi board by Duke for our Amstrad CPC. The M7-Galaxy board is an extended version of the M4 but intented for the Amstrad GX4000 as the board will interface inside the Z80 socket and the processor will be on the board. It features :

• WiFi
• disk drive emulation, it emulates the DFC765 chip so all read/write accesses are redirected to a .DSK image like a Gotek or HxC without the need of a FDC chip
• Rom board
• cartridge emulation
• RAM expansion, probably 320 Kb + the original 64 Kb
• using a wireless keyboard and mouse

So you can upgrade an Amstrad GX4000 in an Amstrad CPC+ without any soldering. For more informations, see Duke's page.

The Zen80 board is similar to the galaxy board, but is used as the M4 board : externally and not internally. It will feature 8MB SDRAM (and MCU with more GPIO's), which would be hard to fit in the internal version without going BGA.

The boards will have an approximative price of 60 euros, there is no preorder at the moment.

• first video
• second video

To load an Amstrad CPC tape (or a ZX Spectrum one), you can use :

• a tape drive
• an Android phone with the tapDancer Virtual Datasette application
• the TZX Duino

In november 2017, a new version of the TZX duino was released with a percentage counter and a timer counter have been added to all screens, and in March 2018 the possiblity to do some firmare editing (type of screen, logo...).

You can buy the TZXduino in the author's shop.