The weather is gloomy, with no sun at all. There's not much joy left in your heart, but maybe I have the solution for you: just watch the video the Amstrad CPC for Noobs by Nicolas PREIRE below, and maybe a ray of sunshine will appear behind you.
Interview by Felisuco of Mark Eric Jones, the engineer of the Amstrad CPC and PCW (and a bonus)
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Genesis8
Felisuco has made at the start of October 2025 an interview of Mark Eric Jones who is one of the engineer of the Amstrad CPC and PCW. The interview is in spanish but as usual there is a translation possible on Youtube.
Abatape by Abalore, tape emulation featuring multi loading on Amstrad CPC and more
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Genesis8
Abalore has a project he is working since September 2024 : the Abatape.
It is using an Arduino Nano ATMega328p@16 Mhz, a 700 mAH battery for about 24 hours of use, a SD reader and an OLED screen. It is especially able to detect the two motors making a real taping moving the magnetic band so it can support multi loading. Someone did suggest to add writing support to create new tape files. The Abatape supports of course the Amstrad CPC (.CDT) but several other computers as it is based on a Maxduino firmware :
Spectrum : TAP, TZX
MSX : CAS, TSX
ZX80 : O
ZX81 : P
Acorn Atom, Electron : UEF (without compression), TSX
Dragon 32/64, Tandy CoCo : CAS, TSX
SVI Spectravideo : TSX
Oric 1/Atmos : no .TAP support unless converted to TSX
Duke stops making the M4 wifi board after almost 1500 boards. He explains it on his web site. I want to thank him personnally as I am the happy owner of his board since years, it is still useful to me. Thanks for all these years of making board and supporting it with new firmwares and answering user on CPCWiki.
You will find below informations from 2019 about the Aleste 520EX which inspired the XiAleste.
The Aleste 520EX is a russian clone of the Amstrad CPC and the MSX. It works not with AMSDOS but with the MSX DOS (see this russian site in english). There was already a thread about the Aleste 520EX on CPCWiki, but this time Sebastian Blanco is talking about the Aleste kit he just bought. Finally he isnt the only one in the Amstrad CPC community to have one. If you are interesting it's seems to possible to buy one kit by writing to tetroid at inbox ru like Sebastian did.