The Disappointing Amstrad Saga

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Socoder -> Retro Coding -> The Disappointing Amstrad Saga
Fri, 10 Jan 2014, 13:56
Jayenkai	My Amstrad CPC is somewhat abandoned, and has been for the better half of a decade. The monitor does a weird "glitch" thing.. Every ten seconds or so, it'll go "flicker", at which point all power is lost to the keyboard, which resets the system. It's been like that for a good number of years, and I always figured that, one day, I'll bother to get it repaired. This week, I opted against that, and decided instead to grab a cheap set of cables off of eBay. Two power plugs (one for keyboard, one for disk drive) and a wire to hook it up to Scart, instead of the standard monitor. It arrived today, and I spent a good five minutes reorganising the desk to fit it on there, then plugged it all in. Issue 1. The Hauppage USB dongle doesn't like the video signal that the Amstrad's sending to it. It gives me one single frame, in black and white, then freezes up. Bugger.... Issue 2. ...But I can hold down the delete key, and get the familiar "Beep...... Bididididididididididididididididiididid" sound, so I know it's at least working.. I typed in CAT, and got a horrible nasty grinding noise from the disk drive. ...without a disk in.. Then I tried putting a useless disk in, to see if it was just an odd dirt issue.. ..nope.. Seems a decade of inactivity has finally killed off part of the CPCs disk drive. I'm hoping it's just the drive belt, and that it'll be easy enough to fix. sigh No closer, today. What a waste of a day!!! -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Fri, 10 Jan 2014, 14:30
rockford	Sounds like your tv doesn't particularly like a 50Hz signal. You may need a new drive belt, but you may also need just a tiny drop of oil on the drive motor.
Fri, 10 Jan 2014, 15:08
Jayenkai	Yeah, previous experiements with the Hauppage-stick have shown it to dislike anything beyond basic Pal signals. If you boot up Lemmings 2 on Amiga, you can hit Tab in game to flick between NTSC and PAL. It freezes immediately upon flipping to NTSC, and then resumes once back to PAL. Kinda frustrating that I might very well need to get an actual TV up and running.. I was hoping the Hauppage would do everything. Grrr.. -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Sat, 11 Jan 2014, 03:57
spinal	I used to have a Hauppage tv card in my old pentium 2 many years ago. bloody useless it was. -=-=- Check out my excellent homepage!
Sat, 18 Jan 2014, 10:56
Jayenkai	Works well enough if your resolution's standard! It just freaks out at the CPCs quirky res! Amiga capture.. View on YouTube (And, for those who like the look of that, here's CaffeineKid's Windows remake of Super Obliteration) Also plays nice with Wii and XBox/360, and am awaiting a new Dreamcast scart cable for that, too.. Just... Not sure what to do about the Amstrad.. Hmmmm... -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''