During a recent refurb of Bristol Hackspace, we found that an Amstrad CPC that had been in a pile of computers assumed broken was, in fact, fully functional. Well, we think it’s fully functional, but we don’t have any software for it, or any way to load software at the moment.
It does, however, boot to BASIC. As there’s nowhere to save data, there’s not much point in creating complex programs because they’ll be gone when you power off the computer. There are still a few sources of 3-inch (no, not 3.5-inch) floppy disks around…
The expansion header has a whole bunch of exposed pins on, only some of which we understand – we’re still digging through the documentation. The pins were pulled up to about 3 V – we could pull them low to change them. This meant we
could hook them up to a Raspberry Pi Pico without worrying about level shifters.
They have written some CircuitPython for the Pico to read & write from the Amstrad.
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