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






NQ!-Music disc for Amstrad CPC by Shining and HAL6128 (musics by n1k-o)

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After releasing Pentomino last year, Shining got many feedback of people who liked the music. And as a big ay-chiptune fan and also a big fan of n1k-o, who is the composer of the Pentomino-music, he decided to do a music-disc, featuring only songs from him : : NQ!-Music disc

After getting the permission from n1k-o, the music-disc finally plays 26 songs, choosen by him. Because of the very crooked different frequency of the ay in the sinclair (where all the tunes come from), they sound not always the same on our Amstrad and many of them, he had to fine-tune. Some, which he wanted to use, were nearly impossible to convert, so the choosen-ones are not the 26 best, in his opinion, but the 26 best he could get up and running on CPC.

Since he joined forces with HAL6128 again, the great gfx was completely made by him. As only playing the songs is a little bit boring, and he wanted to play around a little bit with the crtc and the plus, he implemented the CRTC-register 3 equalizer (he thinks this will not work on TFT but on original monitors. Also the picture in Winape shakes a little bit, in JavaCPC it's ok.).

The pictures use 32k-Overscan and because he wanted to be compatible with 64kB, he had to reload some stuff, to arrange everything in the memory. But when you use the cartridge version or something like the M4, this doesn't matter at all.

As mentioned above, he wanted to play around with plus-sprites, so the demo detects if it is running on a plus and then enables (randomised) one of 4 different note-movements. 3 of them use 14 multiplexed plus sprites at the same time, so that you can see 28 notes on screen.




Rampage the video game, its history and ... a film in 2018 with Dwayne Johnson

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Rampage is an arcade game by Activision, adapted on Amstrad CPC by Marcus RAINBOW, Mak and Nick JONES. You can see all the ported platforms including the Amstrad CPC in this video of the history of Rampage by Novabug. And well, there will be a Rampage film in 2018 (2nd May in France) with Dwayne Johnson, no joke !







Kilobyte Magazine issue 2 of 2017 to read online

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The second issue of 2017 of the Kilobyte Magazine is available online. It's about 8bit computers, with some part about the Amstrad CPC.

The issue 3 of Kilobyte Magazine is also available, but without Amstrad CPC content except an article about the Logo programmation language which was present on the CP/M disks.



New version v0.29 of the Amstrad CPC emulator Sugarbox

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Sugarbox v0.29, the Amstrad CPC(+) emulator is available. It features :

  • Complete PLUS family support : 464+, 6128+, GX4000. All ASIC functions are supported (making modern demo like « CRTC3″ or « Eerie forest » functionnal)
  • SNA v3 is supported, with BRKS chunks (breakpoints generated by RASM or Winape)
  • Various fix on full screen management (should not crash anymore)
  • Various fix on DSK management. More dumps should be analyzed correctly
  • IPF support : Generated IPF file should be more reliable (no more crash with Samdisk or DTC from kryoflux)
  • Joystick support is better
  • Sound have been reworked


FPGAmstrad on MiST-board revision r005.8.15.1 by Renaud Helias (hardware Amstrad CPC emulation)

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A new version r005.8.15.1 of the Amstrad CPC core for MiST by Renaud Helias is available.

VGA counters fix... How can't I see that before ? (found while merging ZX-Uno version...).
Taken into account also in experimental r005.8.16c30 (experimental != validated)



RASM v067 by Roudoudou, a multi platform assembler for Amstrad CPC

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Not very new (February 2017), Roudoudou has written a multi platform Z80 assembler for Amstrad CPC. It was originally designed for the release of his CRTC³ Amstrad CPC+ demo (cartridge mode, banking, ...).

The last version of RASM is v0.67 (21th December 2017) : bugfix buffer overflow with long filenames for export, export breakpoint in snapshot (unofficial Winape chunk), new directive BREAKPOINT, labels begining with BRK or @BRK for local labels will be exported as breakpoints in the snapshots.