… or how my Amstrad loads youtube

.

Photo of the week

This time I present you a photo titled “The great chase of a 1337 h4x0r !”







Obviously, this had to be a 1337 hacker inside purple Lanos since her/his car was speeding 14Tb/s through a snow-covered road and I couldn’t catch up with him (most probably because of my dog sledding team was hungry, lol).

Amstrad no.1 – My Amy 464

Finally, I’ve got my Amstrad CPC464 from < INSERT OBVIOUS BIDDING PORTAL NAME >

I had all necessary cabling already done during Schneider project so I’ve quickly hooked it up to PSU and a monitor aaaaaand…..

….it worked !!111!one!eleven1.

Moreover, to my surprise, it was in very good shape.

It just needed a couple of small fixes and a bit of cleaning here and there. Pure pleasure to fix.







The keyboard was bent a bit.







I’ve disassembled the unit and started with removing old dust and other crap that piled inside of it.







The bent backside of a keyboard.













a bit dusty membrane 🙂













I did mandatory keycaps cleaning and after a while, I had nice, clean and most importantly, straight keyboard for my Amy464 😉







PCB also required minor cleaning.







… but it was back to mint condition after a short while

While cleaning the cassette recorder, I’ve found that the counter reset button is broken.







I’ve tried to glue it together with cyanoacrylate but bond failed miserably on a first try.







So I did a small hack 🙂



















After cleaning and final assembly unit looks like this:















Now, it would be great to actually load something up.

But how? I didn’t have any cassettes from retro-times.

Internetz to the rescue !!!







A few minutes later I’ve got my answer!







I’ve hooked it all up to an MP3 player and started tests.

Above wouldn’t be possible without some amazing software projects that are very helpful with converting CDT files to WAV/MP3. CDT2WAV authored by Markus Hofmann was extremely useful. Markus, thanks for this project 🙂

Anyway, while I was looking for various info on the Internetz, I’ve found a video of someone loading a game through an MP3 player – Bruce Lee.

A cunning plan was born :>

Black aaaaaader !! black aaaaader !!

…. naaah, not that cunning ;>

I was curious if it will work with real hardware and I gave it a go.

Here is a video of this test.

PS. these videos feat. special pissing effects in the background ;P … and no it wasn’t me ;P

aaaaaaaaaaannd BOOOM !!! It loaded just fine!







HA! Can your Amstrad load a youtube video ?! Can it ?! … evil laughter follows …

PART TWO with two other 464 repairs is still loading (no, not from youtube ;P) so stay tuned 🙂

OUTRO

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