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To cut a long story short, my brother and I played many, many games for many hours. Sat on the table was a shiny new ZX Spectrum +.
In 1984 I remember coming home and seeing my Dad reading a book about the ZX Spectrum + and my brother and I both asked "Are we getting one then?" to which my Dad replied, "Go and look in the other room." Axial caps are not available for the required values so radials are used and installed in the same way that Joulespercoulomb installs his. The recommendation is that these are installed with a higher temperature rating than the usual 85 degrees. Also note new resistor at R60.įinally, two of the caps are located VERY close to the heatsink. After a bit of 'origami' with the cap leads, I managed to get it looking OK. Secondly, on the issue 2 boards there was an engineering improvement made to the DC-DC converter circuit which required an additional capacitor to be added and a resistor replaced. C46 is the first horizontal cap on the board on the top right of the picture below - just above the keyboard connector. To start with, the capacitor at position C46 is labelled incorrectly on the motherboard and has to be installed the wrong way around (according to the silkscreen). My buddy's main board is an issue 2 which has a few additional things to consider other than just doing a one for one swap of capacitors.
In any case, there are several retro suppliers who will provide a made up kit of either axial or radial caps, such as the aforementioned .uk. This makes finding exactly the right caps a bit more problematic but not impossible. the leads protrude from the bottom of the capacitors can. The only slight snag is that most caps nowadays come in radial form i.e. None of that awkward surface mount nonsense here. The nice thing about the caps on the Spectrum is that they are all through-hole caps. Not everyone subscribes to this view, but I do. Electrolytic capacitors dry out and become faulty or, worse, leak corrosive electrolyte over the delicate motherboard tracks. My long time readers may remember when I re-capped my (now sold) Amiga A1200 a few years ago. Except for the keyboard.Īnyway, as is fairly typical for this age of equipment a lot of people recommend that the capacitors are replaced. He's had a new RAM chip, diagnosed thanks to the great Smart Card V2 available from .uk and now he's working. Early 464s had a cable to connect the keyboard but later ones switched to using membranes, and it's this type that I have. Six screws in the bottom, lift up the top carefully and remove the cable from the motherboard and the keyboard connections. Dismantling these things is straightforward. I decide to start with the non-damaged unit (comes with the 40007 ULA). It's a surprisingly interesting read.Ĭlean up time. It's worth reading the entire article linked to above.
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But with typical AMS business sense he made sure that there was software available and the machines just worked out of the box (unlike the Sinclair QL). Amstrad released the CPC464 on 12th April 1984 following a bit of a false start. Alan Sugar saw the computer market and wanted in. One of them has been clearly dropped at some point too as there is damage to rear of the case at the cassette recorder end (also visible in the photo above).Ī very brief CPC464 history. In the photo below, there is a big gap with the outline of a chip just above the 40010 ULA - this is where the 40007 is on the other board. The 40007 is heatsinked and is located in the 'other' space for a chip on the board.
The motherboards are very slightly different to each other though. The joystick port and headphone socket are at the end of the case too, rather than on the back. They may have been in a barn given the amount of dirt (not dust - actual dirt) that caked every inch of both of them.īy peering into the user port (and then I took them apart) I can see that they are both slightly later versions of the CPC 464 as the motherboards only occupy half of the enormous case. They look like they've been in a very dusty, dirty environment for a very long time.
For the CPCs I just needed a 5V, centre positive supply which I happened to have already, and a video cable.
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There were no power supplies with any of them but, as luck would have it, I managed to acquire a Plus 4 power supply which could have been problematic - but the Plus 4 is another post to come.
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For a modest sum I bought a job lot of computers which included:ġ x Commodore Plus 4 with cassette drive, joystick and manuals
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C) selling broken crap - "sold as untested as I don't have the TV cable that I could get for £1 from Wilko 'cos I know my dog peed in it and it's never gonna work again.".