bryce | The Amstrad CPC news portal

MITM cartridge adapter

Feb 022011

Bryce announced the MITM (man-in-the-middle) cartridge adapter, which sits between a Plus cartridge and the Plus. With this adapter, you just need an original cartridge with an ACID protection chip which is directly connected to the CPC, but it will read the contents of the EPROM on the adapter. Maybe you know the same principle from playing Super Nintendo games from foreign countries – they used such an adapter to bypass the protection chip, too.

You can find an [[MITM|article about the adapter]] in the CPC Wiki. The schematics and layout will follow soon.

Multi Cartridge for Amstrad Plus

Amstrad CPC, Hardware No Responses »

Dec 112010

Bryce finished another hardware project, this time for the Amstrad Plus series. It is a multi cartridge, which contains a 512 KB EPROM or Flash-ROM on which you can place 4 128 KB ROMs. You can use the DIP switches on the cartridge to select which of the four ROMs shall be used by the CPC. As always you can find more information about the cartridge and the board layout in the [[Multi Cartridge|Multi Cartridge]] article in the CPC Wiki. The project can be discussed here.

NOTE: You will still need a ACID protection chip in this cartridge.

MegaROM board

Amstrad CPC, Hardware 1 Response »

Oct 172010

Bryce released another great hardware project for the CPC. This time it is a ROM extension board which uses one big EPROM (1 MBit or 2 MBit) to store your ROMs instead of using small 16kb EPROMs, which are hard to find nowadays. With an 1 MBit EPROM you can use 8 16kb ROMs and with an 2 MBit you can use 16 16kb ROMs.
This is an DIY project, which means, that Bryce won’t build a batch of them, but you can get all files (schematics, board) and a description of it from the [[MegaROM]] article in the CPCWiki. You can discuss this project in this thread of the CPCWiki board.

Digiblaster v3

Amstrad CPC, Hardware 2 Responses »

Jul 012010

Bryce just finished his version of the Digiblaster – if you don’t know it – it is a device which is connected to the printer port and can play 8-bit samples which can be directly send to the printer port. He improved the v2 design be a R2R-resistor ladder (you needn’t to buy non-standard resistor values anymore), is now brought to stereo line-out level (you should use your active speakers now) and you can connect the output of the CPC to it (it will mix the signal of the soundchip to the sample output). He also designed two versions of the Digiblaster v3: one for CPCs with edge connectors and one for CPCs with centronics connectors.
Like with the PS2Mouse adapter, Bryce published the schematics and board layout in the [[Digiblaster#DigiBlaster_V3|CPC Wiki]].

AMX compatible PS/2 mouse adapter (DIY)

Amstrad CPC, Hardware No Responses »

Dec 242009

Bryce, who already wrote some great hardware articles for the CPC Wiki, released a new hardware device which allows you to connect a PS/2 mouse (or USB mouse with PS/2 adapter) to your CPC. The mouse will then behave like an AMX mouse so you can use it on all compatible software packages such as the [[The Advanced OCP Art Studio]]. You find the complete description of the device (inluding board an schematic files) in the [[PS2Mouse]] article in the CPC Wiki.

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