Kevin Thacker
I am a big Amstrad fan having got my first Amstrad (a CPC6128) when I was 11 years old. (back in 1986) My father bought me a Firmware guide and in addition he had access to datasheets, and this expanded my knowledge of the cpc quickly.
In the beginning I spent a lot of time writing a sprite editor (now lost), converting games from tape to disc for friends at school, and converting pictures and music from the Atari ST.
To convert music from Atari ST, I had written a disc reader in assembler which could read Atari ST discs, or anything with MSDOS format, and a 68000 dissassembler in BASIC. I would then convert the 68000 to Z80 asm by hand.
Then I concentrated on writing documents for the CPC called “The CPC Guide”. The aim was to present this using a hypertext/windowing system I had written (1994)
Following this I setup the first website documenting the Amstrad hardware called “The Unofficial Amstrad WWW Resource” (1995) which is still open today. A lot of these documents are my own work, with other documents by other authors.
During this time I developed a Amstrad emulator for the Amiga called A-CPC, which later became Arnold (for PC and Linux) and in addition this helped discover more accurate information about the workings of the CPC and to help make other emulators better.
In the past few years I have finally reached my long term dream of writing a game for the CPC after previously concentrating on unreleased tools/demos.
Demos of these games can be downloaded at my website, or bought through Cronosoft. I have another game already in development.
I plan to continue being active in the CPC scene for as long as possible.