In this article, I’m going to describe how I’ve created a ROM Board for the Amstrad CPC 6128. This is a continuation of my previous project: Building an Amstrad CPC expansion ROM in a breadboard.

Last time, we managed to build an expansion ROM in a breadboard for the Amstrad CPC 6128. Although the prototype worked as expected, I wanted something more “permanent” and usable.

In this article, I’m going to describe how I created my own lawn irrigation controller based on an ESP8266 board.

My previous lawn irrigation system was a Rainbird WP4. My main complaint with this system was that I could not control it remotely using a Web interface or my phone.

My lawn irrigation has 3 stations. Each station has 3 to 4 sprinklers that are controlled by the Rainbird solenoids on the main central box. These solenois are activated/deactivated directly by the Rainbird WP4. This device does not support any kind of remote control (eg. WiFi). Hence, the configuration and schedule of irrigation programs had to be done directly on the WP4.

I’ve recently started to play around with an Amstrad CPC 6128. I was able to interact with the CPC using an Arduino Mega connected to the expansion port and act as a peripheral device using an IO port. This project/experiment required some programs running on the CPC, and one of the main things left to do was to include these programs in a ROM so they could be accessible using RSX extensions.

I have discovered another excellent article by KernelCrash that uses an STM32F4 to emulate a ROM. This is exactly what I’m looking for.

I’m a proud owner of an Amstrad CPC 6128 with a green monochrome monitor. I got this computer around 2004, long after its golden era – the 80’s. I feel that I’ve never given it the love it deserved. Back then, I played a couple of games and abandoned it almost immediately… until now.

I’ve recently become interested in retrocomputing (mostly because of this guy https://internalregister.github.io, so I decided to take the CPC 6128 out of the attic and give it another try.

Everything was working fine except the disk drive. I disassembled and cleaned the whole computer. After this, I fixed the drive by adding a new rubber band (a very common problem with these drives as the original rubber band will break with time).

It all started when I moved into a new house. There was an alarm system from Paradox installed named MG6250.