Hi from Romania!

[pollito]

Hi I'm originally from the UK, but I've been living in beautiful Transylvania for 8 years now.

On my next trip to the UK at the beginning of June, I'm going to rescue my CPC 464 from my parents' loft and bring it back with me.

This was actually a replacement 464 for the one I damaged irreparably when I was 7 years old by plugging an 11 volt keyboard power supply into it to "see what happened"   Unfortunately the insurance replacement was the "last one in the warehouse" (the plus series had already come out), and it has always had trouble loading games from tape. Anything that doesn't use a fast loader is fine, but anything that does stops loading almost immediately after starting to load. I hope I can finally fix this, and also upgrade the RAM and BASIC version at some point. Oh, and repair the disk drive that needs a new band.

I've recently become interested in electronics, so I am hoping to build some accessories, but I am quite nervous about the possibility of destroying my childhood machine!

Cheers,
Nick

[Richard_Lloyd]

Welcome.

The best self-build projects for beginners (as I was) are those kindly shared by @revaldinho. I suggest you tackle them in the following order.....
1. Expansion backplane
2. 8 ROM expansion card

https://github.com/revaldinho/cpc_ram_expansion

I would suggest the Old School Memory expansions but they don't work on the 464. Either look for a DKTronics one on eBay or buy one of revadinho's Universal Memory Expansions from https://www.cpcstore.co.uk/shop/expansion-cards/6

Good luck.

[Rabs]

Welcome.

I agree with @Richard_Lloyd, @revaldinho's projects are excellent. I started with these. I also found Noel's Retro Lab videos on YouTube really helpful.

Have fun.

[robcfg]

Buna dimineata and welcome to the CPCWiki!

[pollito]

@Richard_Lloyd @Rabs many thanks for the heads up on the projects and videos, I will have a look at both of these sources, and order some parts. 

@Richard_Lloyd unfortunately the Universal 512KB RAM Expansion is out of stock. I checked eBay but the only DK'Tronics products seem to be for the Speccy (I didn't realise they even did a replacement case for it!). Does the CPC Store regularly restock these?

@robcfg Mersi. Îmi pare bine!

[GUNHED]

I would suggest the Old School Memory expansions but they don't work on the 464. Either look for a DKTronics one on eBay or buy one of revadinho's Universal Memory Expansions from https://www.cpcstore.co.uk/shop/expansion-cards/6

Better get the one with &C3 support for the CPC464 - else you won't be able to work with powerful CPC6128 software.

[revaldinho]

unfortunately the Universal 512KB RAM Expansion is out of stock. I checked eBay but the only DK'Tronics products seem to be for the Speccy (I didn't realise they even did a replacement case for it!). Does the CPC Store regularly restock these?

Hi Nick, if you can't get the RAM expansion from anywhere else then you can still get one from me. I just replied in another thread on the same subject, so I'll just cut'n'paste my caveats here - 

I think I have enough PCBs and parts here to make 2 or 3 more of the 512K boards at the moment. I am usually cheap compared with other sellers, because this is not really a business for me, but I do find European postage a bit embarrassing. Given that I have the parts already, you can have a RAM board for £22  - prices may go up next time I need to get more parts in - but tracked postage to Europe works out to be about £10 and then you may have to pay customs charges depending on how enthusiastically your local government applies the rules to items from the UK. So, total shipping fees may well equal the price of the board. Also, my last item posted to Germany sat in customs for about a month. It did get there in the end though.

In your case though, if you'd like blank PCBs for any of the other projects then I probably have them, and you can have them for a £1 each without incurring any extra postage posts. That might make it a bit more worthwhile. You are free to order your own PCBs from any PCB house of course - the files are all free on the GitHub site - and you can also use Seeed directly where they list all the PCBs in my gallery, but you may well need to order a minimum of 5 or 10 boards per project.

So, if you can find these items from a seller in the EU, that's probably best for you. Otherwise PM me for details.

[pollito]

Many thanks, @revaldinho - I have PMed you!