Upgrading a CPC 464 in 2022

[Gryzor]

Great passive aggressive reply man, really great. 

[GUNHED]

Thanks for being so fair and balanced all the time. 

[Gryzor]

Oh the apologies keep piling on. 

[Uityyy]

Ok. So now that we've covered RAM expansions in pretty good depth, let's talk about mass storage expansions.

Amstrad's original solution for the 464 was two separate pieces of kit: an edge-connecting Disk Drive Interface and then an actual drive connected to that by a ribbon cable. These days there are a number of one-stop-shop solid-state solutions. These obviously need to include their own disk controller ROMs to work on the 464 and also coexist with the built-in ROMs on the 664. But the capability lists on a number of them make me uncertain whether their ROMs override the original DDI in a way that would make it impossible to copy files from SD to physical disk or whether they play together nicely.

Does anyone know which modern mass storage options play nicely with physical 3" drives?

[GUNHED]

The M4 does. And the Symbiface 3 does too (with CubeDOS installed).
In addition there are the Albireo (with own DOS) and the X-MASS, which is compatible to the Symbiface 2 mass storage (also own DOS).

There is UniDOS which has the aim to support all mass media.
(You can find threads about that topics here, best is to use Google to search this forum).

[SerErris]

And there are the various versions of DDI-X(1-5) from where DDI3 is the best combination. It gives you a DDI interface + a HxC driver (USB drive to mount disk images). So you have both things accessible.

DDI-5 is also providing 512kb memory but in DKtronics compatible version (not like Revaldihos) ... 

I think the DKtronics is actually good enough for most things .. you can even patch CPM to utilize it (dktronics patch).

[Uityyy]

I emailed TMTLOGIC about whether the SYMBiFACE's "CPC 464, Extern memory hack" was the same as revaldinho's shadowing trick and whether the boards are currently available. Hans replied that the boards are not currently available and that, while there are plans to make more, the chip shortage will prevent this from happening for the better part of a year. He described the memory hack as one by Tot0 but made it sound like it was the same.

I already knew I didn't have a hobby budget large enough to buy everything I wanted for my CPC in one month and plenty of non-CPC retro projects to occupy my time, so I think I'll take an unhurried approach to upgrading my CPC and maybe accumulate some original tapes, disks, etc. before moving on to SymbOS and/or FutureOS compatibility.