
The Amstrad CPC 472, an unusual case - sohkamyung
https://auamstrad.es/sin-categoria/amstrad-cpc-472-en/
======
heyflyguy
In the summer of 1987 I mowed yards 7 days a week, 4-6 hours per day to earn
enough money to buy an Amstrad PC 1512. I was 10 years old and when I finally
got to unbox it and power it up, it was the most exciting thing that ever
happened to me.

~~~
petercooper
I almost think there's some sort of article/podcast/something in this as I've
heard so many similar stories from that era. For me it was sweeping yards and
doing chores to save up to buy Visual Basic for DOS. Not the best use of my
money it turned out.. :-D

~~~
jacquesm
For me endless (and I really mean endless, especially on days with rain) news
paper routes.

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achairapart
So basically Spain taxed computer machines with less than 64kb memory, so
Amstrad introduced a computer with 72kb, with an additional 8kb that was
soldered but not even connected. Clever!

I'll look for the Alan Sugar' autobiography as well.

~~~
Zardoz84
Other side effect was the Inves ZX Spectrum+ and the ZX Spectrum 128K . On
this case, the computer had really 128KiB, a Spanish keyboard and translated
ROM.

From :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum#spectrum128](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum#spectrum128)

"In 1985, Sinclair developed the ZX Spectrum 128 (code-named Derby) in
conjunction with their Spanish distributor Investrónica (a subsidiary of El
Corte Inglés department store group).[28] Investrónica had helped adapt the ZX
Spectrum+ to the Spanish market after the Spanish government introduced a
special tax on all computers with 64 KB RAM or less,[29] and a law which
obliged all computers sold in Spain to support the Spanish alphabet and show
messages in Spanish."

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seanwilson
Random Amstrad memory:

When you were coding in BASIC, I don't think there was clipboard but there was
a way to get a second cursor to appear that you could position with the (I
think) arrow keys somewhere else on the screen. You could then press a "copy"
key and it would copy one character at a time from the second cursor to your
current editing position. It's weird thinking back to when you didn't have a
proper IDE.

Has a similar UI been seen on a computer before this? There's a "copy mode" in
Screen for Linux that has similarities.

~~~
unnah
The implementation of that copy function was rather unusual, since there was
no text buffer that the system could copy from, all it had was a bitmap in
video RAM. The system would read the 8x8 pixels below the copy cursor, and
compare the pixels with the 256 known character glyphs one by one, to
determine which character it was. One could call this a primitive form of OCR,
although even a single modified pixel would make the copy function fail.

The whole copy-by-character-recognition feature in the Amstrad firmware was
such a weird hack that it seems unlikely anyone else has ever coded a similar
solution for production use, except maybe in some application where the copy
functionality had to be bolted-on later. Amstrad did it that way from the
start.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
You could even use this functionality from your own code - CALL &BB60 would
read a character from the current cursor position and return its ASCII code.

~~~
seanwilson
Any idea how fast it was? If it was doing a linear search it doesn't sound
like it would be fast.

Maybe I couldn't find a better way at the time, but to add a pause/delay to
game code, I remember using "for" loops that just counted to an arbitrarily
high number because the processor was so slow e.g. count from 0 to X to make
it wait a few milliseconds.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
It wasn't fast. But if you were really concerned about performance on the CPC
you wouldn't be using the firmware anyway.

Standard practice to do a delay on the CPC was a loop around CALL &BD19 - that
paused until frame flyback, i.e. 1/50th of a second.

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JdeBP
There's a story, propounded by someone who wrote it into Wikipedia 16 years
ago, that the Norsk Data ND-505 was the world's only 28-bit computer, made so
in order to avoid CoCom regulations then covering 32-bit minicomputers.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/7310013](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/7310013)

Unfortunately, the story doesn't agree with the contemporary marketing
literature that still exists, that calls it a 29-bit computer; or with the CPU
reference manual for the ND-500 CPU that was used in the ND-505, which says
that it used 32-bit logical addressing with 5 domain selector bits and 27
address bits, and 41-bit physical addressing with 2KiB pages and a 30-bit page
number.

* [http://sintran.com/norsk-data/library/libpdpi/ND-505CX-A1-EN...](http://sintran.com/norsk-data/library/libpdpi/ND-505CX-A1-EN.pdf)

* [https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_norskDataN00ReferenceM...](https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_norskDataN00ReferenceManualJun87_10475874/page/n42/mode/1up)

* [https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_norskDataN00ReferenceM...](https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_norskDataN00ReferenceManualJun87_10475874/page/n55/mode/1up)

~~~
blazor
LOL I used Norsk ADA on Sintran back in the day

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jacquesm
Ah, the Dragon 32 rates a mention. Great little machine, my first 'real'
computer. That was a TRS-80 Color Computer clone with a 6809 in it, which has
what I still think was one of the most elegant 8 bit instruction sets.

~~~
amiga-workbench
I've had a Dragon 32 sitting on my shelf for years now, I've never actually
gotten around to building a power supply to test it. If memory serves it needs
multiple voltages feeding to it over a DIN connector.

~~~
tangent-man
For some strange reason I've had 2 Dragon 32 PSU's in my cupboard for years
-alas no Dragon32 - if you cover the postage you can have one if you want?

(Sorry I know that seems tight but I'm out of work right now).

p.s. They are D plugs.. look like female joystick ports..

~~~
amiga-workbench
Thanks for the offer, I'll be in touch via email.

------
twic
After Dragon got wound up, the little guys who worked inside had to get jobs
advertising dehydrated mashed potato:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKt-
KR1TsRg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKt-KR1TsRg)

------
song
If you speak Spanish and are bothered by the not so great translation, here's
the original article [https://auamstrad.es/hardware/mundo-cpc/amstrad-
cpc-472/](https://auamstrad.es/hardware/mundo-cpc/amstrad-cpc-472/)

Quite interesting

~~~
lordelph
I rather enjoyed the somewhat flowery translation!

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appleflaxen
The photo of keyboard "with ene" does not show the letter, which is actually
on the right half of the keyboard (the left half is chosen by the author for
some reason).

~~~
anthk
You can use "enye" as a placeholder for "eñe".

On the location, currently is right to "l", in the US

layout it prints ";".

------
Stierlitz
“At the sight, it is only distinguished by the screen printing of the case,
where the «64» is replaced by a «72»”

I recall reading somewhere that, to give an artificial boost to the home grown
market. The French introduce a law to ban the import of personal computers
with less then 72kb of ram. The British got round this law by adding a small
pcb to the main board, that did nothing at all. Unless it was the Spanish,
funny what you mis-remember.

~~~
jacobush
Makes me wonder about the Spectravideo (Z80 based) machines.

Some had 16 kbyte RAM. All Spectravideo had also 16 video RAM. But the version
with 64 kbyte RAM was prominently marketed as having 80 kbyte RAM. (RAM + VRAM
= 80 kbyte)

I guess that computer model could also have been imported without the high
tariff.

(The Spectravideo 328, which formed the basis for the almost identical MSX
standard.)

~~~
hakfoo
I think that's sometimes just specs preening.

The US answer to the Spectrum was called the Timex/Sinclair 2068 and
advertised as a 72k machine (48k RAM/32k ROM)

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rapnie
After owning a Texas Instruments TI99-4A my 1st pc was an Amstrad Schneider PC
1512 with one floppy and one 20 Mb hdd. It ran, I believe GEM window system on
top of MS-DOS.

~~~
achairapart
Amstrad PC1512 and PC1640 were great machines. They had some weirdness like
the proprietary PU mounted in the monitor but were solid, well built and well
priced, even more they looked kinda futuristic when compared to the boring
8086 clone boxes of that era.

And yes, they even came with a mouse and a GUI (GEM by Digital Research).

~~~
Lio
Sharing PSUs between components was an Amstrad staple.

Sugar used the technique in products from hifi's to computers as an innovation
to save money and keep costs down. That's not necessarily meant in a bad way.
Amastrad often used the savings to to bump up the spec somewhere consumers
cared more e.g. memory or a bundled monitor or printer.

I think when commodity PCs became wide spread Amstrad ran out of corners to
cut to get an edge and became uncompetitive.

~~~
Stierlitz
> I think when commodity PCs became wide spread Amstrad ran out of corners to
> cut to get an edge and became uncompetitive.

It was when Amstrad dropped their own OS in favour of DOS that they became
just another commodity PC maker. Actually first Amstrad moved to DR-DOS then
MS-DOS to avoid potential compatability issues. Which I'm sure Microsoft would
have eventually discovered.

[http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011207/PX_9...](http://edge-
op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011207/PX_9923.pdf)

~~~
Lio
I think that Amstrad's best selling line was actually the WPC range that used
CP/M (8 million vs 3 million for CPC line with their own OS).

So having their own OS wasn't the deciding factor. I think it's the more
commodity nature of PC hardware even compared to CP/M machines that did for
them IMHO.

~~~
mattl
PCW range.

~~~
Lio
Doh! Yes, sorry PCW. Having a dyslexic moment there.

------
fancyfredbot
If only US OFAC export restrictions were as easy to bypass!

