Debt of gratitude - thanks Arnold!

[laynerd]

I just joined up here and thought I'd share a bit about why I did so!

When I was about 5 years old my father purchased a CPC 464, ostensibly for my use one christmas.  My parents were seperated at this point and the idea was I'd have it to learn on during the week.  However upon enacting the ubiquitous parents' right to have a play a final check to make sure the system worked, he decided it might be too complicated for little me.  So he purchased an Atari 2600 and poor Arnold was kept at my father's place where I'd spend weekends.  As time went by, I'd read the manual directly, learn new commands each week, and not long after had gone from making the border pretty colours to shifting ASCII codes and 'encyphering' text.  I still didn't understand why the game of life demo I had on cassette from a copy of AA wasn't really a game, but I was having fun wadding pieces of paper into the cassette deck's pause button for optimal cassette reading performance by slowing down the playback speed so I could actually finally play M.O.V.I.E. or the tittilatingly loading-screen'd GAME OVER (fond memories of that one!).

I suspect I share with all of you a great fondness for this model and I strongly doubt I'm the only one here to eventually end up in a lucrative AI career because of countless hours of 464 tinkering so I thought I'd do a proper intro rather than just skulk

I'm here with a slight purpose though as I'm on the scrounge for a (really, really) broken Amstrad 464, 664, and 6128 main unit.  I'm naturally keeping an eye on eBay but in case (pun intended) anybody has one here I'd be delighted to hear from you.  Naturally I'm super keen on the 664... 

... why (really, really) broken?  I only want the casing to convert into a 'cyberdeck' and I refuse to gut a model that another user could conceivably bring back to life.  I'm in no rush and if I can't find one by the time I come to start the project I'll likely just try to copy the 664's design in CAD and 3d-print it.

Anyway, glad to be here and looking forward to sharing some nostalgic memories

[Gryzor]

Welcome mate!

Huh, never heard of that pause button hack! Did it really work?

Hope you find something soon

[keith56]

Welcome to the forum... glad your interest in the CPC is renewed... and good luck picking up a CPC!


As you say, a lot of people here ended up in careers in computing thanks to the old CPC.


I have to agree, I'd not heard of the 'PAUSE trick either' - though I guess it would work (?) kind of the reverse of 'speed load'?


Have fun,
Keith