28 May
2009
28 May
'09
6:24 p.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
You're lucky. Charity shops round here never sell mains-powered stuff,
and often don't even sell battery-powered calculators, etc.
Related to that (in that it's in the same
service manual) is the GX4000
which seems to be a cartridge-based games console.
I saw one of those last week in a charity shop. It's a beige plasitc box with two game controllers attached.
Presumably
electronically similar to the CPC464 and CPC664.
It's closer (as in almost indentical) to the CPC464 Plus. It has the
later ULA chip (with the 4096 hardware colours), and from what I can see no
internal ROM. The CPC464 Pluse (and CPC6128 Plus) don't appear to have
internal ROM eiother (unless there's a small bootstrap in the ULA chip,
as in the PCW series).
According to the service manual. the CPC464 Plus came with a 128K ROM
cartridge containing BASIC and a 'Burning Rubber Game'. The GX4000 came
with a 128K ROM cartridge contianing the 'Burning Rubber Game'. My guess
is that it's the same cartridge, but the keyboard lines on the ULA are
hard-wired to sleect the game at power-on (there is some evidence of this
on the schematic). I wonder if you could hack the machine a bit, add a
matrix of switches as a keyboard and run it as a CPC464 Plus?
One featuer it has that the CPCs don't is a PAL video encoder and a SCART
socket.
-tony