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







WIP Missile Command by Cyril GOURET and TITAN

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Missile Command is an Atari arcade game released in 1980, and in 1981 for the Atari VCS 2600, ported by Rob Fulop, which sold over 2.5 million copies.

Cyril GOURET (music, code and sprites) et TITAN (loading screen) are working on a WIP remake of this classic for Amstrad CPC. A working demo was available at the RGC 2022 meeting, the final version isn't available for the moment.



Amspirit v0.704b, an Amstrad CPC emulator by Dmanu78

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A new version of Amspirit, an Amstrad CPC emulator by Dmanu78 is available on the System.CFG forum for windows. There is a 32 and 64bit version. Reading all the thread is a good idea if you didnt read it already as it's a complete genesis of this emulator.

The thread on CPCWiki is here.



Fractoid, an Amstrad CPC demo by the Osmium Path group (Optimus and Ham)

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Fractoid by the Osmium Path group is an Amstrad CPC demo about Julia fractals. It's written by Optimus (code) and Ham (graphics and music). This little intro was written for the Decrunch demoparty.


Youtube video



ZCN 1.4, CP/M for the Amstrad Notepad NC100, NC150 and NC200 by Russell Marks

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After having released a new version of his Amstrad Notepad NC100, NC150 and NC200 emulator, Russell Marks has just released a new version of his version of CP/M for these same machines : ZCN 1.4, the new features are :

  • NC150 support, with a custom zcn150.bin kernel. As with the NC200, this is not as complete as the NC100 support. Also, it has only been tested under emulation
  • Internal ramdisk support on NC200 and NC150, so you can use ZCN on them without a memory card (to some limited degree). This is really only intended to be used if you lack a memory card - you switch between memory card mode and ramdisk mode using the "ramd" command
  • Improved keyboard layout support via keyb, supporting Danish, French, German, Italian, Swedish, and US keyboard layouts, in addition to the old UK and Dvorak. All supported keyboard layouts can be used on any NC model
  • Preinstalled memory card images for NC100/NC150/NC200. These are intended for use with emulators like nc100em/MAME/RC2014, but they should also work on the real thing if you have the means to write them correctly. (Serial link installs are still supported, of course.)
  • Support for booting from floppy disk on the NC200 - this uses David Given's floppy-boot code from FUZIX, almost unchanged. ZCN itself does not support the floppy disk, so this just loads ZCN and a small ramdisk image then boots it
  • Support for displaying some non-ASCII characters, specifically some from the old DOS code pages 437 and 850 like in the ROM software, as well as the euro sign character from 858. Only a few dozen characters are supported (!) and you need to run keyb beforehand (i.e. since boot) for this to work
  • NC200 time-reading and time-setting support, meaning that e.g. time and timeset work
  • The man command now uses ZX0 compression - the data file is smaller, man.com is smaller, and man pages load faster
  • Certain .com files in the support directory, like QTERM, are now also provided in versions using ZX0 compression. So for example, the ZX0-using version of QTERM is 5k smaller. ZCN comes with a "zx0com.bin" file you can prepend to a .zx0 file to run it in this way (limited to .zx0 files of 16k or less)



New batch of Albireo cards made by Zik (originally by PulkoMandy)

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PulkoMandy is the author of the Albireo expansion card for Amstrad CPC which lets you use mass storage (USB and/or SD card) and a serial port.

With the agreement of PulkoMandy, Zik is going to make a new batch of cards (beware without the serial port). It's even possible to use two cards (but needds a cutter and some soldering).

You will need a ROM board and one of the ROM which can manage an Albireo, Unidos for example. The estimated price for the card, shipping cost and maybe a SD card is 30 euros.

If you are interested, go write on the CPCWiki's thread.



CPCRetroDev 2022 : 14th October to 2th November 2022

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CPCRetroDev 2022 competition has been announced. You can check the details on CPCRetroDev.

You can submit your game between the 14th october and the 2th November 2022.

As last year, the game will be submitted on Itch.io.



Amstrad Eterno 2022, the 8th October 2022 in Barcelone

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Amstrad Eterno 2022 es un evento de Amstrad CPC en Barcelona (España), el 8 de octubre de 2022.

Amstrad Eterno 2022 is an Amstrad CPC event in Barcelone (Spain) on the 8th October 2022 (10am to 8pm).

Francisco Gallego of the studio Byterealms, creator of the CPCRetroDev contest and of the framework CPCTelera will launch Amstrad Eterno 2022 as usual with his conference programming rasters effects in C with CPCtelera.

See also the Amstrad Eterno Facebook page.



UniDOS v1.40 by Offset, the lord of the DOS to rule them all

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These last years several expansions allows you to use mass storage (USB or sd...) on Amstrad CPC, each needing a ROM to use it correctly.

And if you use two of these expansions, you will need to load two ROMs, so less RAM for your Amstrad CPC.

So Offset did write UniDOS and drivers to be able to use another expansion, needing only one ROM with features being the same whatever the expansion. Unidos can manage actually :

Offset also wrote UniDOS Cartridge Creator (v1.4) which is an utility to create Amstrad Plus cartridges equipped with a patched firmware which allows to add UniDOS and its DOS nodes. You can furthermore configure up to 30 additional tool ROMs (such as Utopia, Maxam, Protext..) in the cartridges (compatible with ParaDOS and Burnin' Rubber) without requiring a real ROM board. The tool also let you automatically download the latest UniDOS ROMs from the official web site.

Unidos v1.40 brings the following modifications :

  • new |CAT RSX which is sorting directories with color
  • new generic driver UniTools with : allowing automatic boot on whatever drive (check the driver documentation for more details), upgraded ZERO drive (now supports hexadecimal values)
  • upgraded DOS Albireo driver to use two at the same time
  • upgraded M4 and FatFs DOS drivers (minor modifications)
  • small uupgrade of the DOSNode_Init API
  • minor modifications