Great Games on a Word Processor? Amstrad PCW Stargliding

hello chip dippers welcome to retro recipes now if you've been watching this channel for a while you'll know that i have a bit of a soft spot for the amstrad pcw-8256 but why is that you might ask it's just a word processor after all that's a personal word processor well not really see when my dad bought it to replace the apple 2e he got it for spreadsheets and of course word processing but i discovered the wealth of games that were written for it because it was so popular of course inside there is that powerful xylox z80 processor same as the zx spectrum there's one problem that really stops me enjoying it today and that is getting hold of those three-inch floppy disks finding pcw games on ebay is a little tricky these days and there's still some that i'm trying to hunt down that was until today because i've just been donated to this it's a gotek solution specially made for the amstrad pcw but the only problem stopping me enjoying that is my hands are a little big to get inside those tiny drive bays now i thought about employing puppy fractic um with her tiny paws but she's got an important doggie business meeting to go to but then it occurred to me babe how do you feel about installing a gotek drive in an amstrad pc w8256 sure i've done hundreds oh okay oh sorry can you get up you're sitting on my three-inch floppy oh these things are hard you want a treat welcome to perifractic's retro lady fractix retro recipes oh so we'll come to that installation in a few moments but first you know puppy fractic wasn't always that big a fan of those three-inch discs as we'll find out after this commercial unlike typewriters the amstrad 8256 word processor and computer comes with a monitor disk drive and printer included from around 1099 it's leaving the future of typewriters up in the air it had 256 kilobytes of ram oh you don't like these i know they're a bit weird they're three inch discs not three and a half inch all right i'll get it away from you put it in there no food doesn't come out of those slots hey look i'll show you where the light pen goes and we explored this word processes light pen feature using high speed photography of a crt screen let's freeze time and from freezing time to going back in time with a quick bit of amstrad history with ashley do you know what amstrad stands for no so it was founded by a gentleman called alan michael sugar ams and trad was for trading so it's alan michael sugar trading that's my initial stupid ass what so i should get some something in all of this uh i'll tweet him see what he says well i did tweet him and i didn't get any reply can't think away any idea how many this sold seven million pretty close to eight million oh wow so what about those discs why were they so strange i've seen a floppy disk but not this so these are three and a half inch tests but i'm trying to use these because they were cheaper oh of course of course good old ashley michael sugar insert insert okay well feel free to check out those light pen and ashley fractic videos at the end of this one but before lady frantic rips out one of those drive bays there is a really interesting story about this particular machine's disk drives that i want to share i recently found this when i was going through some stuff at my parents house it was my original locoscript disc and i knew that on it were all of the files that i'd created in my teens and i finally procured an 8256 in america which is quite hard because they weren't very popular here put the disc in and it reported disk unsuitable for drive and then i remembered my dad had upgraded from the 8256 to the 851.2 it had double the memory 512 kilobytes but also featured a high density second disk drive so i was able to finally procure one of those actually from an abstract cpc and install it in that second bay by removing this plate i did that a while ago so i didn't actually film the process but finally i was able to access all of my teenage files there's a lot of fun things on there like my high score list from the commodore 64 and other computer games and i'd even written a lot of letters to zap 64. none of them ever got published but i have heard a rumor that this letter might finally make it into the 2020 annual oh exciting [Music] yeah well according to this i was into modding commodore 64s even when i was 14. and now that i've got that second drive installed it's time to rip out the first one and for that i'm going to hand you over to the capable hands of lady fractic but i'll be standing just in the wings to make sure she doesn't electrocute herself on that crt and to give her a few pointers as we go tech and if you're thinking of making your own pcb like the gotek i recommend using pcb way and as we all know pcb stands for printed circuit personal computer processor personal computer bird processor thank you [Music] [Music] first we're going to take the back off [Music] [Music] handy-dandy assistant thank you and as bjork taught us this looks like a city like a little motto of a city but this city is a bit dusty so let's give it a spring clean it's snowing [Music] so this is drive a the one we're actually going to be working on so first we're going to remove the power cable and the ribbon cable very carefully so we have two screws and a ground cable [Music] oh it's fine it lifts there now [Music] and then we're just going to take the ground cable out from here [Music] [Applause] so there's driving put that on ebay [Music] all right can i have it back now okay keep it so i've secured the ground cable to drive b because the gotek doesn't use any metal so these are the handy instructions that tell us where to apply the screws so here's the gotek it's going to go straight down just like that one screw here one screw there matches up with the case that we have should be pretty easy it fits perfectly [Music] great and then just reconnect the cables so this is going to connect to the power cable just as we had before so the most important instruction it said that when you take the old ribbon and the new gotek rainbow ribbon you want to make sure that the brown one in our case it's on the far right matches pin one which is the colored wire on the old ribbon so we're just going to rotate it like that and it should fit huh it doesn't so as we just noticed it didn't work so in the instruction it says please note that some of the black connectors on the pcw ribbon cable usually ones with the blue wire on the ribbon which is exactly what we have have two plastic tabs protruding that prevent the ribbon cable being plugged into the adapter the correct way around wish me luck [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right we're just going to plug this back in brown wire on the right and [Music] perfect now we'll replace [Music] there we go not bad okay well see i told you it was easy we're just gonna put the back back on and test it out [Music] see i told you you've done it a hundred [Music] [Applause] times now that all the hard work's done i'm going to give it to perifractic he'll boot it up and see how it works [Music] well god bless her for doing that while she was recovering from the flu i don't think pcws can get viruses can they well either way let's see if it works now with mr ladyfractic [Music] put in the usb drive of course the usb is always the second way around all right here we go fantastic so as the instructions explained it boots you up with disk one which is cpm and that's basically the standard boot disk of the pcw and it gives you the well-known cpm plus prompt so i can actually look at that disk and all it's doing of course is reading the virtual disk image which is on this usb drive but if we cycle through these disks we can see all the other games and there's actually 150 games that have been archived onto this usb and i'll give you all these games ready to go it really is plug and play so just for fun i chose guild of thieves there one of my favorite adventure games see what happens [Music] there it is so you could run game.com and it should boot i don't know about you but there is something very majestic about this green screen it was not only pretty high res i mean it's an 80 column display effectively but there's just something special about the dithering and just the way it looks maybe it's just my personal nostalgia now unlike me mrs recipes has a proper job but she did come home from work albeit having lost her voice and i asked her to choose a game gnome ranger [Music] this looks pretty cool actually ingrid was beside a sturdy little stone-built shop at the end of the road which we ended north uh good to know exits lead north go north east east and northwest you think we're friends but you don't know me that says president where's the any key i don't think this has one hack what no go good norse ingrid went to north well we went on like this for a while but really it was going gnome where sorry we didn't come here to play adventure games i've been waiting maybe 30 years to boot up stardlider on a word processor and fingers crossed i'm about to do that now and while i cycle through the games see if you recognize any [Music] there it is okay uh we'll go with deutsch just kidding ah oh wait i remember uh in the instructions psychofox even very handily gives you some program protection codes including start lighter five one ten mind which is what we've done here right now it's still a word processor but [Music] okay [Music] wow that is beautiful oh and this now the pcw is showing off here we oh go gosh yes my first kill guys trying to launch a missile here yeah these keys did not make it easy yes yes this of course is where this game got very star warsy all right let's try and get this tank yes thank you very much [Music] yes remember these guys through the legs well this is definitely tricky without a joystick so that may have to be my next addition [Music] okay i'm gonna come back to that sometime in the future but psychofox recommended a game called on the run so i'm gonna see if i can load that up [Music] how do we run this so what we can do is get a disk cued up on the go tech and then on the keyboard we hit shift extra exit and that reboots the machine and loads that game there it is on the run collect the seven flasks and bombs if it moves shoot it oh man [Music] probably still look like i'm using a word processor but i'm playing an amazing game i'm sure it would have got very good reviews if it was this kind of quality even in green screen grayscale green scale i don't know but of course there are many other games that we could enjoy [Music] so pac-mania is a recent port from the cpc version by habisoft and you might have wondered if all these games were indeed easy to port well not really you see aside from the obvious lack of color or a proper sound chip programming the pcw's graphics was also very different even though the machines share similar ram structure and the same processor speed floppy controller and the cpm operating system but that's what happy has done here so let's go to block town and see how it looks so i want you to imagine that you're 14 years old and your dad has a word processor and spreadsheet computer in the office that you get to use at night time and imagine you find games like this exist this is your only computer in the house this is going to be and it really was for me such an enjoyable experience to play around on this unassuming but majestic device so i hope you've enjoyed coming with me and lady fractic and puppy fractic on this little journey to prove that there really are great games that you can play on a word processor and with a little ingenuity it can even become a portable games machine that's all for this time but as always don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on the future recipes coming up and as always i appreciate any support you're able to give this small retro channel on the patreon i will see you next time what do you think about these word processing games comment below and cheerio [Music] [Applause] it's pcb way pcb

Channel: Retro Recipes

Views: 131,577

Keywords: computer, retrogaming, retro, retrocomputing, commodore, commodore 64, commodore amiga, electronics, refurbs, refurbishment, restoration, soldering, how to, refurbish, atari, apple, c64, a500, retro gaming, music, chiptunes, 8-bit, chip tunes, Sid chip, ASMR, amstrad, cpc, 8512, lord sugar, alan sugar, locoscript, cpm, zilog, zilog z80a, zx spectrum, schneider joyce, geek girl, gamer girl, perifractic, ladyfractic, lady fractic, word processor, perifractic retro recipes

Id: bwuH09S5YSE

Length: 23min 25sec (1405 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 10 2019