I recently got hold of an Amstrad CPC 6128 from eBay, and found that while it generally worked, the floppy drive was not going at all.
Looking inside I could see the drive belt was broken, so I ordered a new one and today I installed it. I also wired up a PC power supply to run it, as the drive needs 12 volts in addition to the same 5 volt supply the 464 requires:
I didn’t have any 3-inch discs to test it, so I used one that we had on display in the museum. The disc was found in a box with an Oric external drive, so I wasn’t expecting it to be formatted for the CPC, but I figured it would at least let me know if the drive was able to spin up and detect the disc.
Imagine my surprise when I did a CAT (listing) command and it came up with a list of files:
I tried loading one of the BASIC files and could see that it was written for an Amstrad, not an Oric. I then ran the “LOAD-1ST.BAS” program and got this menu:
It turns out this unlabelled floppy contains an Australian-made zine from 1985:
Side 2 even includes a text adventure game:
I haven’t been able to get my Gotek drive emulator to work on the CPC yet, but I’ll try saving some of these files out to the tape port, recording the audio and then playing it into an emulator on my PC. From there I should be able to extract the individual files and upload them here!
