Amstrad GX4000 - Reproduction Carts
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05-01-2024 8:57pm#1
Following on from my previous Amstrad GX4000 thread where I upgrade the RAM to 128k, I decided to make some reproduction carts for the fun of it. Obviously there's no real need to do this as I have a C4CPC cart, but sometimes it's nice to pop in a cart and play a single game! I originally seen Mark from Mark Fixes Stuff doing this last year, and thought it looked like a fun little project....so lets crack on!
^^ First thing's first....I needed to grab some eprom chips to burn the game files to. I decided to go with x10 carts (x7 stock GX4000 games, and x3 homebrew/port games.) All of the stock GX4000 games fit on 27C1001 chips, but the ports/homebrew might need bigger chips like the 27C2001 or the 27C4001, depending on the size of the game.
^^ My stock GX4000 files are already in *.bin format, but the ports/homebrew titles need to be converted from *.cpr to *.bin
^^ Thankfully, this wonderful little piece of software does just the job for me.
^^ All done, I can now delete the *.cpr files and keep the *.bin files. That gives me x10 *.bin files to burn.
^^ I simply load up the software, and choose the eprom type I'm using...
^^ Choose the file to burn...
^^ And burn away....
^^ The generous Chinnery from the CPCwiki forums, released his PCB design for making CPC Plus carts.
^^ Wonderfully elegant little design. It can use genuine ACID chips from real CPC Plus carts if required, or, instead of harvesting those, it can use a simple logic inverter to defeat the copy protection routines in these games.
^^ My first cart will be an eprom tester with a socket. The sockets I had were too small to fit, so I had to use one, and join another section on. It's a little crude, but it's just an eprom test cart...nothing fancy here.
^^ Some of the components added...
^^ It's a fluxey mess....
^^ Cleaned up, and ready for testing...
^^ Wow, it actually works. Sweet.
^^ x10 more to go...it's very very easy soldering work, but definitely monotonous doing this much of it. I got them down to about 10 mins per cart, which isn't bad, until you multiply 10 carts by 10 mins....
^^ Proper cart now, no eprom socket, the eprom is soldered directly to the pcb.
^^ And testing show it works as expected.
^^ @Steve X2 very kindly printed up the cart shells for me. I went with Red as the GX4000 branding/carts have red accents. This way it'll very obviously be a reproduction cart also....which is good because I'm not trying to duplicate existing cart designs. The design for the shells was released by Cwiiis on the CPCwiki forums also.
^^ They look slightly pink here in this pic, but they're more red in person, and a very nice match for the console.
^^ Ok, all done. x10 carts and an eprom test cart ready for action.
^^ Next up was to use the P^^hotoshop template from Mark Fixes Stuff (thank you so much for the file Mark!) to design the specific cart labels I wanted.
^^ I then printed them out on some nice glossy photo paper.
^^ They look gorgeous in person, I'm chuffed with them.
^^ Using a cutting mat, a scalpel set, and a ruler, I set about cutting them out...
^^ They look absolutely brilliant, I'm genuinely delighted with these and how they turned out!
^^ Testing all the games, they all play perfectly.
^^ You could easily reproduce the whole GX4000 set if you wanted. A nice little collection of reproduction carts to enjoy!
Post edited by Inviere on5
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