 So, a slightly different video today. This is my trusty Amstrad NT200 laptop, which I've been working on for a while. It's a Z80-based notebook computer from about the 90s. It's got 128K of RAM, a fast Z80 processor, a 720K floppy disk drive, and I have been running CPM on it recently. Now, CPM runs really nicely on this machine. It really likes the fast processor. I can run compilers and things, and they are relatively brisk. But what's letting it down is the fact it's only got one floppy disk drive, and floppy disks are dead slow. So what I really want to make this thing more useful is some kind of fast storage, like flash. The NT100 and 200 are actually expandable using these. This is a standard PCMCA Type 1 RAM card, not flash, but actual RAM. There's a Type 1 slot here underneath the floppy disk drive. Card plugs in this way around, and that provides an extra 2MB of RAM. Now for a Z80 machine, 2MB of RAM is an enormous amount. The only trouble is that firstly is RAM, so if the power goes out or you unplug the card, all your data disappears. There is a slot here for a button cell for battery backup, but it's a weird size, and they don't have any. The other is that CPM can't actually use that much RAM. So I could easily turn it into a RAM disk, but 2MB of RAM disk isn't actually a lot. It's only about 2 floppy disks worth. So not enough storage to be useful, too much RAM to be usable. What would be really nice is if I could use some kind of more modern standard flash, such as one of these. This is a 16MB compact flash card. It's the oldest and smallest one I have, and a standard PCMCIA adapter. Unfortunately, you can't actually plug this in. It physically will not fit, because this is a Type 2 card, and Type 2 cards are thicker than Type 1 cards. You can see this card is flat, while this one has a raised area. Luckily, the actual interface does seem to be electrically compatible with Type 2 cards, by which I mean I haven't been using this card on this machine, and it hasn't exploded yet. And all you need to make this work is a fairly minor modification to the machine. So what I'm going to do today is just demonstrate how to do this. And what you will need to make this work is a small screwdriver, and one of these. And this is a rather dubiously 3D printed replacement guide for the front of the card slot. And I'm going to demonstrate how to install this, because it's not entirely obvious. So the first thing you do is dismantle the machine. To do that, you need to undo four screws, one of which is in the battery compartment here. So I shall remove these four. You also want to remove the button cell, which is here. The button cell provides battery backup for the internal RAM. The way this machine was designed to work was it stored all your data in RAM, either in the internal 128K or on one of these cards. So the button cell provided backup when you wanted to change the batteries. When I'm using this with CPM, I don't actually use any of that. But you still have to have the button cell or it won't boot up. OK, we now need to very carefully unclip the front of the case. It is connected with the usual nasty plastic clips. So you're going to have to spudge this open. It's a little bit fragile, let me actually try the other spudger. It's relatively straightforward. Things are made a bit more awkward by the fact I'm having to do this on camera. So you notice that this is broken here. This is actually supposed to be part of this. It's quite fragile. This is broken and this side is cracked. So be careful of that. OK, all the clips are unclipped. So the back shell lifts off. There's some more clips at the back, like so. And we need to unplug the screen connector. It just pulls straight out. It's a friction fit. There we have access to the board. The next stage is to remove the floppy disk drive because the PCIMCA interface is underneath. So we undo these two screws. One here and one here. I'll actually see what I'm doing. Of course, neither can you see what I'm doing. That is, hopefully you can see what you're doing. So I wouldn't recommend doing it while actually watching the video. And here is the card slot. So this is the old guide. The card goes in here and plugs into the actual PCIMCA connector there. So we want to remove this. This is slightly more complicated than it looks. It's fastened in by two screws. This one and this one. So we need to remove those. Unfortunately, while it will now come loose, it's actually hooked underneath the PCB and it needs to slide up and out. But we can't pull it up because of that PCB connection. So what we want to do is to remove this screw, which gives access to the board. And this gives enough flex to the board that this will just pull straight out. And then we put the board back and we do the screw up again because we don't need to bend the board anymore. That is a good thing. Get that in place. OK, so we now take the 3D printed replacement guide. This was my first ever design of 3D printed part. Yes, I have just bought a new 3D printer. So it's a bit dodgy. However, it works well enough. The fit's not perfect, but it's good enough. There is a link to the relevant files in the video description. So you can go and get your own. So it just slides into the guide here. And then we do up the screw. Oops. This guide is shorter than the old one. So it only does up with one screw. I would recommend putting the second screw back in so you don't lose it in case you want to put the original guide back. So we take our PCMC card and it just slides in and plugs in nicely. And the new guide holds it in place nice and firmly. And yes, you can still plug in the old Type 1 card. And that is all there is to it. So let's reassemble mounting the floppy disk drive back again. You can, if you like, replace the floppy disk drive with a Gotek floppy disk emulator. I haven't because I like real floppy disks. But you can get emulators which allow you to use USB floppies. Well, USB floppies. Floppy disk images on a USB stick. There's no performance difference. But it does at least give you rather more reliable disks. That actually worked. Yep, that's in place. So you need to reattach the screen. And this just pushes down with a bit of difficulty. I'm not keen on these friction fit connectors. There we go. And then the top case, you hook it on the clips at the back and push down. And it clips back into place nicely. Close the lid, turn it over, and we do the screws up. The long screws go here. And the short screws go in the front. And that is all there is to it. Close up the battery compartment. Reattach the button cell. They claim the button cells have a lifetime of about five years, but I don't believe it. It keeps going flat in storage. Then the system won't start. OK, so there you can see the new guide. It's not a perfect fit. And I have gotten to trim the side there. But it's decently solid and makes it hold the cards in place firmly. And there you go. And now I will move the camera and show you it in actual action. So here is the machine set up ready for use. The camera angle is a little bit weird because this was the only place I could find to put it where the screen would be visible. But still you get to see a little bit more of my workbench. So power on. And here is the main menu for the ROM software. Note that the ROM software does not know what to do with flash cards. It just doesn't understand them. You can't access files on them. It will actually mis-detect one of these as a RAM card. It just won't work. So first you need a CPM floppy link in the video description. Then you plug the card in. And now you press Function R to boot. And CPM will start. And you can see that it has detected the flash card as a 15 megabyte card. The difference between that and what's actually written on the card is because this is real megabytes, while this is manufacturer megabytes. Now this is the smallest card I have. My next biggest is 48 megabytes. CPM only supports, well, this version of CPM only supports up to a 32 megabyte file system. So anything more than that is wasted. Because I was lazy, I didn't implement any kind of partitioning. So it just uses the entire card. The card is mounted as Drive B. But before you use it, you have to format it with the MochaFS command. So that shows the statistics for the file system it's about to create. And we format it. And it's done. Now we can look at Drive B. You see there are no files. We can start Drive B. And we can see 16-ish megabytes available for use. And now CPM likes a system disk in Drive A. And every time the system returns to the prompt, it will always look at Drive A for temporary files for use with things like submit files. And because Drive A is the floppy disk, that's pretty annoying. So what we're going to do is copy all the files in Drive A onto Drive B using the copy command. I don't know if the floppy disk is coming across on the microphone. You can see the difference in speeds. OK, that's done. So we can look at Drive B. And now we're going to use the flip disk command. What this does is reassign Drive A and B. Drive A, the system drive, is now on the flash card. And Drive B is the floppy disk. So no floppy disk noises, fast return to boot. So we can run commands like the text editor. And it starts almost immediately, and there's no noise. We can still have access to the floppy disk drive. However, because it's now not the system drive, we don't need to have a bootable disk in it. We can format it. We can remove it. Everything will work fine with this thing not in place. So the downside is that you still have to start the system from a floppy disk. The ROM software doesn't know how to load software from a flash card. So you have to boot from floppy and then run flip disk. And in fact, I can demonstrate that by power cycling it. It takes us back to the ROM, put the disk in the drive, function R. And then we can just run flip disk. And everything is there on the flash card for us. And we've copied all the software from the floppy disk onto it, and we still have masses and masses of space. And it's fast. And you can easily run compilers and things. It's just generally so much nicer to use. So there you have it. CPM on a PCMCA flash card on an NC200. I hope you thought this is interesting and more importantly useful, links to CPM and the 3D printer file for the guide are in the video description. Please let me know what you think in the comments.