Finally a photo of the ribbon cable to the floppy drive. I presume the HDD is underneath and the power supply behind. Those blue barrels are heavy duty capacitors, I presume? And what's the black grid on the ribbon, an expansion port?

Sorry for resurrecting an oldish thread. I got round to powering up this machine and it's got problems.

I removed the AA batteries that were powering the Dallas clock chip in case they got icky, but I wonder if it buggered something because when booting, there's no image on-screen and the computer makes none of the normal POST sounds and lights.

I wonder if it's stuck mid-POST with an alert about the battery having died... I've ordered a cheapo VGA ISA card to see. Does that sound plausible?

Also, I plugged in a PS/2 keyboard to this machine which does not work. It appears Amstrad did a very peculiar thing and made the keyboard port PS/2-shaped, but can only take XT keyboard signals. Weird.

Does there exist such a thing as an XT-to-PS/2 keyboard adapter? That way I could just buy an ancient XT keyboard and kludge it.

It seems to me that you could simply test for a lack of battery by putting in some fresh AA cells.