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Wow - a CPC question on /. The best years of my life were spent hacking on a CPC - I worked as freelance technical editor for Amstrad Action magazine (on which the mighty Future Publishing was founded), coded a DTP system, a load of demos, a route-planner (you know, "I want to get from London to Edinburgh, what's the quickest way?"), and so on.

I used to get a handful of letters to AA's technical Qs+As column ("Techy Forum") every month asking "how do I transfer my files to a PC?". Lots of posters have mentioned the easiest ways to do it, which would probably be the ways I'd have recommended at the time: data transfer bureaux, hooking up a drive to a PC and copying across, etc. etc.

Here's a more involved solution, which is the best long-term one for the serious CPC hacker, and is how I do it. I'm not seriously recommending you do this.

Get a CPC with second drive interface (i.e. anything except an unexpanded 464), and connect a 3.5in drive - any standard Shugart 3.5in drive - to it. Theoretically you need a separate power supply for the 3.5in drive, but you can actually hotwire this to the monitor power supply.

Then use WriteDSK on the CPC to transfer CPC discs into .DSK images on a DOS-formatted 720k disc. (The CPC's FDC can't cope with 1.44Mb discs.) Getting WriteDSK onto your CPC in the first place is left as an exercise for the reader. :)

Put that in a USB floppy drive, copy across to your Mac and run in WinAPE under Parallels - far and away the best CPC emulator there is.

For general CPC information, have a look at CPCwiki. It's a goldmine in itself, but best of all is the scan archive of Amstrad Action, Amstrad Computer User etc. etc.

Wow - a CPC question on /. The best years of my life were spent hacking on a CPC - I worked as freelance technical editor for Amstrad Action magazine (on which the mighty Future Publishing was founded), coded a DTP system, a load of demos, a route-planner (you know, "I want to get from London to Edinburgh, what's the quickest way?"), and so on.

I used to get a handful of letters to AA's technical Qs+As column ("Techy Forum") every month asking "how do I transfer my files to a PC?". Lots of posters have mentioned the easiest ways to do it, which would probably be the ways I'd have recommended at the time: data transfer bureaux, hooking up a drive to a PC and copying across, etc. etc.

Here's a more involved solution, which is the best long-term one for the serious CPC hacker, and is how I do it. I'm not seriously recommending you do this.

Get a CPC with second drive interface (i.e. anything except an unexpanded 464), and connect a 3.5in drive - any standard Shugart 3.5in drive - to it. Theoretically you need a separate power supply for the 3.5in drive, but you can actually hotwire this to the monitor power supply.

Then use WriteDSK on the CPC to transfer CPC discs into .DSK images on a DOS-formatted 720k disc. (The CPC's FDC can't cope with 1.44Mb discs.) Getting WriteDSK onto your CPC in the first place is left as an exercise for the reader. :)

Put that in a USB floppy drive, copy across to your Mac and run in WinAPE under Parallels - far and away the best CPC emulator there is.

For general CPC information, have a look at CPCwiki. It's a goldmine in itself, but best of all is the scan archive of Amstrad Action, Amstrad Computer User etc. etc.

Ask about on Usenet - comp.sys.amstrad.8bit, and on CPCZone http://www.cpczone.net/ and look on the CPC Wiki http://www.cpcwiki.com/index.php/Main_Page.

People there have working CPCs, and setups to get disk images from the CPC into a .dsk file on the PC.

You can plug PC 3 1/2 or 5 1/4 drive on an Amstrad, they use the same interface!!
http://www.cpcwiki.com/index.php/3%C2%BD%22_%26_5%C2%BC%22_Disk_Drives

This is exactly the drive, the AM5D+:
http://www.cpcwiki.com/index.php/Jasmin_AM5D_5_%221/4_floppy_drive

dK'Tronics released a silicon disc for the Amstrad CPC which could be used as either a memory expansion or as a solid state drive.