New Old 464 arrived Today

[dcdrac]

Good to see an old friend and fully working

[Gryzor]

Like a trusty old dog, only lives longer

[dcdrac]

They do seem remarkably resilient for mass produced computers from nearly 30 years ago.

[phaerun]

I had not used my 464 for 22 years, took it from the storage, plugged it in and it worked like a charm. The tapes were working fine. Even the hard drive only needed the belt changed and all my 3 inch disks were working fine too...
And that amstrad spent quite some time in my backpack when I was biking to friends to play coops.

I am on my 2nd xbox 360 and I am actually extremely careful handling my new consoles to the point of being called a freak :p

As much as it hurts me ... they do not build them like they used to. Now things are more complex and more error prone. Look how simple yet elegant is the FD-1. A pin for the write protection detection, a simple rubber band for the rotor.

Those CPCs were built to last.

[Bryce]

Electronics these days is running at it's absolute maximum. Which means lots of cooling is required and the lifetime of the ICs is about 1% of what it actually should be. Electronics back then was ticking over at a leasurely pace, nothing was being strained. On top of that, things got a lot smaller. The area of silicon in the CPC+ ASIC is about the same size as they fit an entire modern CPU on to. Also the outer IC package, with SMD instead of thru-pin, means that everything is smaller, but much more prone to breaking, heat damage and dry joints.
Overclock your Z80 to 50MHz and even with cooling it won't last very long.

Bryce.

[00WReX]

They do seem remarkably resilient for mass produced computers from nearly 30 years ago.

I have to agree. From my experience the CPC is very robust.
I have a lot of CPC's in my collection and as well as the locally sourced ones I have had them shipped to Australia from Holland, Germany, Spain, France, England, & Greece. All arrived without an issue.
Out of my whole collection, I have only one that has an issue with cyclic rebooting until it warms up and the then it is fine and another where the sounds goes "off" after it has warmed up. No total failures and all the rest work perfectly.
The last 464 I picked up about 3 weeks ago was really dirty. I got it for next to nothing.
A guy had moved into a house and found it in his shed...not covered up or anything.
The 1st thing I did was plug the CPC into a monitor I already had, and it fired straight up...all keys working.
[attachimg=1]
[attachimg=2]
[attachimg=3]
I then cleaned up the green screen that came with it and pulled the back off to clean inside...wow it was a fire hazard, that's why I did not trust plugging in to start with.
After the clean up it too was fine.
[attachimg=4]
I cleaned both up and it looks OK now.
[attachimg=5]
Even the cassette deck works fine.

Cheers,
Shane

[ralferoo]

What a clean L key...

[steve]

What a clean L key...

It's new

[arnoldemu]

What a clean L key...

and left arrow?

@Shane: The computer is dirty, but good to see you cleaned it up well and it's going strong.

So.. after the wash what game are you planning to treat it to? 

[00WReX]

What a clean L key...

Yeh, it looked clean...but it was actually dirty, just that it had a very oily residue over it like something had dripped onto it.
Would have looked really shiny if the whole thing had been sprayed with it 

and left arrow?

@Shane: The computer is dirty, but good to see you cleaned it up well and it's going strong.

So.. after the wash what game are you planning to treat it to? 

The 1st game it was treated to was Boulder Dash. I have a sacrificial copy of that game that I use to test cassette decks for the 1st time just incase it gets chewed up and spat out 


Speaking of going strong. Funny part was when I picked this CPC up the guy I got it off had it sitting out the front on the doorstep ready for me to grab it. As I grabbed the CPC & monitor the guy said "don't forget the power supply". I looked at him holding this black brick power supply and said "but these things get the power from the monitor". He looked at me confused and said that he found the power supply in the shed with the computer and thought it was for that. He said he tried to plug it in but the connector was a bit wobbly so he thought it may have been broken. It was in the evening when I picked it up so it was dark, I just put it all in the car a when I got home I had a closer look at the power supply...
Hewlett Packard 30VDC...
So I immediately thought if this thing has been plugged into the CPC, the CPC would be well and truly buggered.
Luckily the connector did not really fit so it appears he did not get it in properly. Phew.

Cheers,
Shane

[Bryce]

30VDC? You would have been collecting the CPC as a bag of parts!
Only one IC (in the cassette deck) would have survived.

Bryce.