Tommorow friday the 22th 2022 at 10pm (frog hour, so 11pm for the beef eaters), Roudoudou will stream about Amstrad CPC programming : ASIC (on CPC+), hard sprites and integrating music.

Tonigh Friday the 8th 2022 at 9:30pm (frog hour, so 10:30pm for the beef eaters), Roudoudou will stream about Amstrad CPC programming : ASIC (on CPC+), hard sprites and integrating music.

The version 1.0 of Mod Master XT by FreddyV is available on Vogons.

This msdos utility lets you hear a lot of music modules formats on any PC even a PC XT (CGA), for example an Amstrad PC 1512/1640 or a PPC 512/640...

Carlc27843 has written for PICO-8 an Amstrad CPC AY-3-8910 sound chip emulator using undocumented 5512Hz 8-bit mono PCM channel, to compose or convert Amstrad CPC music by Dave Rogers.

And I just tumbled on his two other creations : a remake de Nebulus and a demo about the game Cauldron on Pico-8 of course. Hit the links so you will able to see a video of the game and the demo.

CPCDiskAdapter by Michael Wessel is an universal Floppy Disk Drive Adapter for the Amstrad CPC. It's a PCB which lets you connecting disk drives other than the standard Amstrad DD1 / FD1 drives to the CPC via the disk controller, which usually requires some floppy cable mods. Moreover, these mods usually fix the drive to either being CPC A or B drive.

With this adapter board, one can flexibly use the DIP switches to select 2 out of 3 possible disk drives, and flexibly determine which one is A or B. Moreover, no more (destructive) cable mods are required with this board.

The following drives can be used:

• the standard Amstrad DD1 / FD1 3" floppy
• standard PC 3.5" floppy (with READY signal if possible)
• 5.25" floppy (with READY signal if possible)
• Gotek floppy drive

If the drive does no emit the READY signal, then it can be "faked" by grounding the READY line with the corresponding READY DIP switch (this is a standard CPC floppy cable hack)

The python converter of MIDI music files written by Michael Wessel in python is availabe. It let you play MIDI files on an Amstrad CPC with two hardware expansions :

• The Ultimate CPC MIDI Sound & MIDI Interface Card by LambadMikel
• Willy which can use either a S2P by Serdashop to use MIDI or the OPL3LPT by Serdashop to play adlib music with SA2 Surprise! Adlib Tracker by Madram and a VGM player by PulkoMandy

Source of the MIDI player in Z80 assembly is available.

Symamp by Prodatron is a musical player for SymbOS which let you play these formats :

• MOD (4 canals)
• SA2 (Surprise! Adlib Tracker 2)
• SKM (compiled Starkos modules)
• ST2 (Soundtrakker 128 modules)
• PT3 (ZX Spectrum Protracker/6channel Vortex Tracker)
• MP3

It supports the following sound cards/chips (all internal sound chips of course) :

• Dave soundchip of the Enterprise 64/128
• CPC Playcity expansion
• MSX Darky catridge
• Dk'tronics AY soundcard for the PCW
• any MP3MSX compatible MP3 decoder on any platform
• OPL4 (MoonSound, MonsterSound, OPL4 Shockwave, Dal So Ri)
• carte Willy de Pulkomandy

I am not alone to be interested by using MIDI on Amstrad CPC : blog Amstrad Noob did write about it some days ago : First looks at the Ultimate CPC MIDI Sound and MIDI Interface Card. He will do a video soon on his youtube channel.

Michael Wessel (LambdaMikel) has written a python converter of MIDI music files which can then be read on an Amstrad CPC with a player with at least 2 hardware expansions (with 512 Kb support and soon 4 Mb support) :

• The Ultimate CPC MIDI Sound & MIDI Interface Card by LambadMikel
• Willy which can use either a S2P by Serdashop to use MIDI or the OPL3LPT by Serdashop to play adlib music with SA2 Surprise! Adlib Tracker by Madram and a VGM player by PulkoMandy

MIDI was the ultimate sound during the msdos era before windows 95 and the coming of audio card with samples like the Gravis Ultra Sound, it is time that MIDI arrives on Amstrad CPC.

If you like musical remakes of 8bit games you should go on remix.kwed where you will find a musical remake of Arkanoid.

Also of course you will find many of them on Youtube including one about Arkanoid (not the only one).

Retro Piano Guy plays on piano the music of retro games including Barbarian, give some pleasure to your ears.

An information that I missed to relate in time : RUN! is an Amstrad CPC intro by BSC (code, music) and Rexbeng (graphics).

Rex has made a video with Corrscope of RUN!'s music.

The Amstrad Fidelity CKX100 is the one and only music keyboard made by Amstrad, for more informations see this page and this other one.

Keen on Keys has made a musical album with this Amstrad CKX100 and also made a test of the MIDI keyboard on Youtube and a short preview made before the long test.

If you are curious enough, you can actually buy one being sold on Le Bon Coin.

Thanks to PulkoMandy for the information.

A new version of Mod Master XT beta 27 by FreddyV is available on Vogons. It lets you hear a lot of music modules formats on any PC under msdos even a PC XT (CGA), for example an Amstrad PC 1512/1640 or a PPC 512/640...

Soundtracker DMA v2.0 by Zik (Futurs) is released. It's a music composition software for Amstrad CPC+. It takes advantage of CPC+ audio DMA lists to allow AY-SID and AY sample sounds while keeping CPU load low. You may have heard of it before as the musics of CRTC3 demo by Roudoudou was done with a preliminary version of the tool. It needs 128 Kb of RAM, so 6128+ is needed.