Amstrad CPC 6128 Repair & Upgrade Part 2 

Part 1 - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-yEtkGc1gia4.html BTW - Nothing wrong with fitting a Gotek to an Amiga ;) It's just easier running things from WHDLOAD imo! Those 2 screws that go in the side, I forgot to show that after cleaning them they were silver looking instead of black - I repainted the tops of them with black paint and they look like new now!

RU-vid has made everyone a collector.

I love the color palette on these Schneider/Amstrad CPCs. It's one of the best. Pixel art really looked lovely on these machine!

These disks were widely used in UK fishing industry with the decca light pen driven plotter - Racal-Decca CVP 3500 videoplotter.... had carrier bags of em back in the day.

Love watching you clean up an old computer... makes me want to do more hardware work myself.

Awesome as always bud

I'm working on the exact same machine now. My keyboard membrane was full of dirt. Incredible amounts. But the keyboard still worked. Now everything is shiny :)

Impressive work. Greetings from Karachi, Pakistan.

I find the rotary encoder on the front a bit intrusive for a CPC. I drill a small hole above the existing left button button (right button has LED above it) and mount a 90 deg angled push button on top to give the 3rd button. I mount the button upside down and solder the body of the switch to the body of the switch below to hold it in place. Then just run wires to the header you talked about. So with HxC and having an OLED screen (and 3rd button) it is easier to run HxC in mode like FlashFloppy and just use buttons to scroll/select files rather than mounting to specific slots. Cheers

Great stuff as usual. Thanks. That R Type games looks good on the CPC.

I was (and still am) a huge fan of the Amiga Action Replay III Cartridge. I used it for a lot more than just cheating in games back then and would therefore prefer to retain having that option. But the AR3 doesn't work with any hard drives or accelerators... or at least you'll have to turn them off... So, if you want the Action Replay III experience on your Amiga 500 without the DJ experience, then a Gotek is the only way to go. - Having said that, I am also a huge fan of keeping the internal floppy drive a real drive. So, the Goteks on both my A500 and my PowerPuff CPC6128 are both external. For that reason, I have installed a DF0/DF1 boot selector mod in my A500, which can "trick" it into seeing the external Gotek as DF0... And in the Amstrad I have made an "ABBA Switch" mod (in a more elegant and less intrusive way, than the original butcher-mod from the '80s). So that by flipping a switch, A: is swapped to B: and B: to A: (ABBA), very similar to the Amiga boot selector mod. - If you are wondering why I call it my "PowerPuff CPC"... it is simply because it was made by Sir Alan Sugar, with spice and everything nice 😆❤

The reason the 3D print is smooth on the bottom is because that is the part that was on the print bed. It would be easier to print it that way because less supports are needed. It looks like there were supports needed for the LCD screen hole which would be the source of those white spots you pointed out. If the mount was printed with the face down on the print bed then the screw blocks that are sticking up along the sides and the back bar of the mount would need support along the whole length of the mount using more filament that costs money.

Agreed: I have a floppy emulator in my 6128 for the same reason. I'd be even happier if there was some kind of 'DivMMC' or even a 'HDD' solution for the system but to my knowledge there isn't anything reasonably available. To be fair most CPC software (games) is hard-coded to run from drive A so even with an ABBA switch that 'only' gets you a useful external floppy... ...my "favorite" mod is a gutted slimline 3.5" FDD to fit the case along with a Gotek-like solution along with an ABBA switch - kludgey but useful. Hardware I can do, and design, but I'm not a software guy - one of the old Speccy Z80 socket to CF boards would work fine if there was an AMSDOS for it. The CPC is such a good 8bit system and for me carries a fair bit of nostalgia as I had a 464 back in the day, sadly mine doesn't get a lot of use.

A lot of software will only run from Drive A (nominally the internal drive), so if you want to place the internal drive into an external case, you might want to look into adding an 'ABBA' switch which would allow you to swap around whether the internal drive is configured as A and the external as B, or vice versa. These tended to be fitted "back in the day" to allow booting of software from external 3.5" drives, but should also work for swapping between a 3" and a gotek.

Both my 6128 and +3 have internal Gotek. Amiga 4000 has it too but it has external Gotek while keeping original Chinons inside. There are external 3.5" PC drives with A/B switch on the cable, they're compatible with both 6128 and +3. I bought it a while ago from a Greek retro guy on eBay, forgot his name. That would be a cheaper alternative to 3" disks.

For the storage upgrade i installed the M4Board. Adds wifi, makes the CPC a server for your home network so that you can drag and drop your disks from the Web Browser of your PC directly to the SD card which is connected to the CPC. You do not have to remove SD and put it in the PC inorder to add new files. Also you can use additional file manager features, and control from your PC through Wifi from the Web Browser. You can also add ROMs. You cannot go wrong with this solution.

CPC6128 (looking back) was probably my favourite machine until Amiga came along... If I could get one at a sensible price I would.....

Oh boy that keyboard was manky underneath. I will have to try the conductive paint method on the membrane in my Samcoupe. least new membranes are sometimes available for it, at a price tho so if i can fix the old one all the better.

Great job! Where exactly did you put the cap to get a sharper image? On the CRTC? I've never tried that but I'd love to get the slightly sharper image, especially for Mode 2!

For problems with FlashFloppy read the FlashFloppy wiki on github. More help is available in the FlashFloppy facebook group.

Just for the purpose of testing gotek and starting HCX, without reparing the keyboard, you could use arrow keys (with Shift) and COPY key to copy H letter from the file list you got with CAT command. :-)

Another great video. :) I love that new conversion of Scramble by PuzCPC - and it even has two fire button capability! Can you tell me what were those two games that you showed from 55:36 to 55:56 please? I'd like to check them out.

Great videos, thanks for making them :) Have you ever tried denatured alcohol for cleaning pcb's? Some people swear by it but I am not sold yet on using it.

exactly the same problems with the one i got...bloody keyboard i had lots of keys not working.... and it looked imaculate after i stripped it down..... currently just changed the 74ls chip... not tested it yet...mare of a job... maybe should have gone with the blobby stufff sound chip Ay on the way too.... :) yep and the disc games.......... sooooo pricey... just had to buy steve davis snooker though... :) even though i cant try it...... :) and yes you need to buy another 6128 for parts to test the one you have and another one to test that.... lol all good fun edit... im ringing Alan Sugar on monday...... N x

I had a similar issue with the membrane of a TRS-80 and I found the conductive paint (same one you used) to have too much resistance when used in a thin line. I ended up using copper tape and scotch tape. I wonder what the difference was? It worked well for yourself :-)

WD40 is just Naphtha. It dissolves grease but not most plastics

I didn't know that later CPC6128 did not have the Centronics style connectors anymore. A bit of cost saving there. Yours seem to be a very late model from 1988. Mine was from 1985 or 1986. Edit: I also have never seen that soundchip branded "Microchip". Only "GI". So definetly a very late model

44:30 I would just toss it into ultrasonic cleaner, 60°C, 2 minutes each side. It would come out looking brand new like it just came from the factory.

Where did you find an external enclosure for your 3 inch drive? I can’t find any anywhere!

My keyboard types weird symbols not letters Any clue how to fix

Screen capture at the end? 🙂🤷‍♂️

Why add caps when they are not required, there were maybe a million 6128 sold without adding extra caps.