More Sugar for Computers (More about AMSTRADs) Well, last time I told you the basics about AMSTRAD. I showed up the three different kinds of Game-Computers (Colour Personal Computer = CPC), the 464 (Cassette drive integrated), the 664 (3" disk drive integrated) and the 6128 (128K RAM and disk drive integrated, CP/M + too). I want to shine a little more light on the other sides of the business. What kind of software was there in the beginning, where did it come from and what besides games was available (outside of CP/M)? There was a company in England, Eden AMSOFT, that produced quite a palette of games for the AMSTRADs, even if some of them may have been not too inventive. They were still in business with AMSTRAD lately, at the introduction of the AMSTRAD Notepad. A small company in Spain tried to convince Alan Sugar that they would be their ideal central distributor for their country. Although in the beginning AMSTRAD did not believe so, they made business with them, for the company could produce excellent game software: INDESCOMP - a name already known from other shores of the Z80 market then. There were lots of others, there were games, music packages and office bundles - everything. The central distributors in France could only sell what they received from AMSTRAD, but all outside-UK distributors, were they in France, Spain, France or Germany, made incredible sales in short time. AMSTRAD France, for instance, sold about 291 million francs worth of AMSTRAD gear between 1985 and 1986, and the German division, Schneider sold 32,5 million pound sterling of CPC between 1984 and 1985. Only their pricing of the "Personal Computer Wordprocessor", the PCW, was totally disagreeable for AMSTRAD. Where AMSTRAD had expected a price equivalent of 399 pounds, Schneider charged around 700 pounds! Besides, all of AMSTRAD's efforts to sell the machine as a text processing device seemed to be ignored by Schneider, instead, they sold it as a computer, in a market niche, that was already pretty narrow for AT-clones. So many AMSTRADs were sold, that it is no wonder, they form the heart of the European Z80 scene until today. This probably made Commodore pretty sick at that time, especially when a computer magazine's benchmark reveiled the inferior performance of the C64 floppy compared to the CPC tape drive! (The C128 was not much better than that.) There were quite a few magazines for Z80 computers at that time. In England, there were magazines, originally covering the Acorn BBC computer and the Sinclair line, but soon picked up the AMSTRAD, and started their regular series about them. Some had a hard time, since AMSTRAD ran it's own mag and sort of had funny ideas about others publishing infos on "their" computers! You could, for instance, join the AMSTRAD USER GROUP (UK) when buying an AMSTRAD computer and receive the house magazine AMSTRAD 464 USEr as a club news magazine. In Germany, the magazine CHIP was one of the biggies then and always allowed easy comparison of quite unequal machines. Another one, "c't-magazine", described the AMSTRAD machinery on a very sophisticated level. But the most important two for AMSTRADs were "Happy Computer" by Markt&Technik and "CPC-International", where in Germany the word "international" normally is the biggest lie you can read. [ PICTURE AMSMAGS.PCX ] The latter two magazines not only described the functional layout of the CPCs (and the PCWs also), but presented lots of listings, that one could either type in or order by disk from the editors. Even hardware projects were initiated by them. This is were I came in, by the way. I myself never had anything in mind with computers at all. I am a sound engineer and liked to play a little music myself then. My girlfriend, her cousin, her cousins boyfriend and I, we rented a big flat to be able to have nice, voluminous rooms at a moderate price. After some time, as life goes sometimes, the other couple broke up and we had a vacancy for a room. We put an ad, since we couldn't afford the place ourselves, and a guy moved in, who happened to bring along a Sinclair ZX81. On that cutey, I played with the BASIC and fell in love with the super-primitivo flight simulator, just too good! Unfortunately, shortly after, we had to give up the whole place, due to a very annoying affair with the company, that was originally renting out the house. They sold the building and urged everone out. After a while, I met the computer guy again. He had gotten himself a job in the editorial of Happy Computer and advised me, not to buy a Sinclair, like I had wanted to, but to wait and buy the new Schneider CPC (AMSTRAD's German distributor then put their name on it.) This I did and soon got into a discussion about a colour modulator for the CPC to connect it to any TV-set. Since I, too, had the green monitor on my CPC (464), I was very interested. My special friend (Andreas Hagedorn) told me, that several people had already tried, but it would be either too complicated or too expensive to build the units others had developed. I thought a while and said, that I could possibly build one for very little money. I had the restriction to only use parts available everywhere, so I had to compromise, but I went to work. [ Picture HCMDLAT2.PCX ] After 6 weeks, the layout was not only ready, but tested, photographed and a very long article written about it, describing everything, from the parts list, the function principle, and the methods used to adjust the circuitry. When in September 1985 this was published in Happy Computer, this was a real success for them. It opened many doors for me and I sort of became a specialist for everything to do with video. I wrote several articles on monitors, RAM-disks and other stuff for Happy Computer and went on the fairs with them, where I demonstrated their software (remember, M&T = Markt&Technik, was the company selling all the CP/M products for the AMSTRADs), thus I got all the software for free. This, again, enabled me to contribute knowledge to our club SCUG (_S_chneider/Amstrad/_C_pc/_U_ser/_G_roup). [ Picture SCUG2.PCX ] showing Andreas Kisslinger and Robert Steindl in front and Helmut Jungkunz rear middle right. Once, I was asked to test a RAM disk by a newcomer company (FECH & OTTEN). It turned out, the product was so poorly designed, it was useless, so I used to refer to it as FRECH & ROTTEN (frech is somewhat like fresh in that respect). I wrote my clear opinion in my article, with the effect, it never got published. CPC-International, the rival magazine, published a very euphoric test on the same thing. I was puzzled! But - I only met one living person, that actually bought that RAM-disk, and - boy!- was he stuck with problems with that device! Meanwhile, in England, a company called dk'tronics sold their RAM-expansion units, that were pretty well behaved in the sense of AMSTRAD compatibility, but showed some strange bugs, due to a hardware error in their "Operating System" unit design (the device was split in two parts, a basic O.S. part and the expansion RAM). [ Picture dktronx.PCX ] Shortly after, I was given another RAM-disk for testing. I plugged it in, followed the usual intructions to the point - and was impressed! That developer had stuck completely to all the AMSTRAD routines, behaviours, BASIC RSX conventions and everything worked like a charm. Oh, you don't know what RSXs are? The abbreviation RSX generally stands for Resident System eXtension and is sort of a software implementation of a new command into your existing system. AMSTRAD CPCs allow for this RSX technique even from within their excellent LOCOMOTIVE BASIC. I wrote to the developer of the RAM-disk for more information and he called me back on the phone. We had a few long chats, where some of my ideas flowed back to him and I offered support for people, who had bought M&T's WordStar, dBASE or Multiplan for the CPCs with Vortex-RAM-disks. Mind you, they had a nasty patch in them, in order to be able to use German Umlauts, loaded from a routine in the VORTEX RAM-disk BIOS. Due to that patch those programs, of course, would not run on any other machine then. So the patches had to be removed. Still, some problems were left, and so both mine and our club address were put onto every disk, that came with the DOBBERTIN RAM-disk. The DOBBERTIN RAM-disk enables the CPCs to use a 63K CP/M 2.2 TPA! The only disadvantage lies in the BIOS of the CPC itself. CP/M 2.2 knows a sort of standard calls to the BIOS routines, different from CP/M Plus. These standardized jump addresses are often referred to as system vectors. The CPC's CP/M 2.2 system vectors are at a very low address, so they would be in the middle of the TPA, if you consequently stuck to AMSTRAD's conventions. Whereas Vortex had patched and repatched their CP/M to be able to use those system vectors, DOBBERTIN had consequently disabled them, since the reliability of such a situation is pretty bad. The complete CP/M 2.2 fitted into the system tracks, so no extra BIOS-file had to be loaded. This my seem unimportant, but only for those never stuck with a disk capacity of only 169 K! There is a very nice side effect with that RAM-disk. When you have a minimum of 128 K RAM, you can run CP/M Plus (with a teeny-weeny patch from DOBBERTIN electronics) on both the 464 and the 664! Beautiful! I met the DOBBERTIN people (father and son, hardware and software) at one of the fairs shortly after and we had a long talk on the occasion of a dinner. I convinced them, that a good harddisk for the CPC was not only needed, but could be sold in numbers. Vortex had had a harddisk out, but didn't do too well, due to problems with the BIOS and not sticking to AMSTRAD conventions. They also suffered from a court call by AMSTRAD, accusing them of stealing their BIOS and modifying it. After a short while, the first DOBBERTIN harddisk went to my hands for testing. As I had expected, you just plugged it in, and there you had a harddisk in BASIC, CP/M 2.2 small, CP/M 2.2 with 63 K TPA and CP/M Plus in a modified BIOS, either loadable from an extended system track or a BIOS file. So, just for the fun of it, I put a different, bootable section on each of the four 5 MB partitions (20MBs is the only size they make for CPCs). Needless to say, that with a SYSCOPY command you could exchange all CP/M 2.2 boot sectors with any floppy disk. The CP/M Plus boot sector, though, was too big for a floppy system track in one of the CPC disk formats. And this is another interesting point here: since there are so many CPC programs out, that want to see the typical CPC-type sector-IDs on floppy disk, DOBBERTIN chose a system format of 80 tracks double-sided, the sector IDs following the CPC's rules. Since the VORTEX disk format had already become some sort of standard, DOBBERTIN accepts the VORTEX-format via AUTO-LOGIN in CP/M 2.2 or by pressing CTRL-C. This doesn't apply for CP/M Plus, but nevertheless, it is possible to read VORTEX disk in CP/M Plus as well. For easier handling, I forced some of our club people to help me soup up a quick format switch program, so that within DOBBERTIN CP/M the various disk formats could be changed: DOBBERTIN System (DS80), DOBBERTIN Data (DS80), VORTEX System (DS80), B360K (SS80), CPC System (SS40 on a DS80 drive). In CP/M Plus, the log-in programs for the CPCs and the PCWs are very much the same, except that the side-bit information on the CPC starts with a "0", whereas the PCW wants a high-bit "8". So the disk parameter block for a double sided CPC drive would be 01, and 81H for the PCW. Some of the programs for PCWs are written with absolute addressing, so they would only run on one particular machine configuration. Again, members of our club helped to get this mess straightened out. Now those programs use BDOS calls to get the address for the DBP and use the standardized BIOS call, to properly jump to machine routines. In my high CPC times, I had my CPC 464 equipped with the RAM-disk and the hard disk from DOBBERTIN, a second drive (5 1/4) from VORTEX, another 5 1/4, switchable as A: or B:, and a Hitachi 3" drive, that allowed for a 2ms steprate. [ Pictures 3ZOLL.PCX, AMSFLOP3.PCX, HITACHI3.PCX, FLOPSIZE.PCX ] As you might have guessed by now, yes, my CPC times are almost over, if I run CP/M, then I use my CPU280 from Tilmann Reh, about which I will write next time, when I'll describe the vast market of home-brew and kit computing in Germany. Regards Helmut Jungkunz [ Picture JK2.PCX ]