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PPC512

Ruud

Ruud

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I asked this in the PC thread but no reaction at all so I give it a try here.

I know I will get a PPC512 as Christmas present (I know because I bought it myself) and I'm looking for information about it. I already found Amstrad XT Pages and that covers a lot of info. But I'm more interested in not-common info like tips & tricks, special software and hardware expansions.

Thank you in advance!
 
The last time I poked at a PPC512 (15 years ago?) I recall that even then the expansions were impossible to find and everyone was telling me to just pull the floppy drives for an Amiga and chuck it. Otherwise it's a PC clone that can take a buttload of C cells and gives 45 minutes (I've done this) run time.
 
They had a parallel port and I think a serial port. You can program them from BASIC. They are OK to tinker with. I had one many years ago and gave it to the neighbor's kids with a copy of QBASIC.EXE so he could learn to program with it. i wired him up a parallel port to LED adapter so he could turn LEDs on and off.
 
I have a PPC640 and PPC512. I plan to upgrade the LCDs to color IPS screens (I purchased the 4:3 panels and driver boards from Aliexpress), using an RGB2HDMI inside the case with a 'flat' hdmi cable. There are videos online showing how this can be done and I've seen an 'internal' ISA board with soundcard/XT-IDE compactflash. I've upgraded the RAM in the PPC512 to 640k which was quite straightforward and will install Gotek drives as the 2nd floppy.
 
A PPC with a color IPS screen will certainly be a step up from the brown LCD, and will turn it into a normal CGA machine. If the screen is still working, it's easy enough to run the display externally and you won't affect the value of the screen, but if it's dead, then it's a great idea to upgrade it into the main case :) It's a pity they didn't have any EGA support in those machines. But they were notable as one of the few early LCD laptops with a 4:3 display. A lot of early cheap laptops had a 640 x 200 display and were 8:3 in aspect ratio so the 4:3 on the Amstrads was a nice change.
 
Ruud said:
The V20 and V30 can run 8080 code and I'm busy to find out if I can run CP/M on a PC equipped with a V20/V30. The V20-MBC can do it, so why not a PC?
Click to expand...

A little late I suppose, but the TL;DR answer to this is a PC has most of its I/O at ports higher than FF, which can't be accessed from the V20/V30's 8080 mode without switching back to 8086 mode. (There's a secondary issue, I guess, that if you want to use the built-in video there's no way you can set up the 8080 mode's 64k work segment in such a way that it overlaps both system memory and the video memory, so you'll also need to switch to 8086 mode inside your BIOS terminal emulator to write to the screen.) This isn't necessarily a complete deal-breaker to running a specialized version of CP/M-80 directly on the bare hardware of a V20/V30 equipped PC, but the BIOS/BDOS will have to be written to call 8086 code for most I/O.

The V20-MBC, on the other hand, doesn't have PC-compatible I/O, it's based on a Z80 SBC that uses 8080 compatible 8-bit port addressing. Therefore it's directly capable of running Altair BASIC, CP/M, what have you, merely by switching the V20 into 8080 mode in a preboot BIOS before booting the desired 8-bit binary code.
 
Vintage Computer Club CH said:
I have the same idea for mine... where did you find the internal soundcard with CF?

There are some videos from Noel's Retrolab going into this topic

Click to expand...
It was covered in this video which manages to squeeze it all into the case. It looks like hard work though.

cj7hawk said:
A PPC with a color IPS screen will certainly be a step up from the brown LCD, and will turn it into a normal CGA machine. If the screen is still working, it's easy enough to run the display externally and you won't affect the value of the screen, but if it's dead, then it's a great idea to upgrade it into the main case :) It's a pity they didn't have any EGA support in those machines. But they were notable as one of the few early LCD laptops with a 4:3 display. A lot of early cheap laptops had a 640 x 200 display and were 8:3 in aspect ratio so the 4:3 on the Amstrads was a nice change.
Click to expand...
Yes I do agree about preserving the original screens. My one had bad damage/leaking which is what sent me down the replacement LCD route.
 
I picked up one of these a few days ago as it's always been a machine I've been curious about. The LCD supertwist screen is in good condition and it even came with the original PSU. I don't have any plans to modify it extensively although I will upgrade the memory to 640k. I did consider a GOTEK but I've got plenty of 720k floppies. I'd also like to get it running CP/M-86 if that's possible.

I spent some time trying out various file transfer options. Zmodem works OK up to 9600bauds but starts to throw a few errors at 19200. 38400 was a total failure. I also tried mTCP with a SLIP packet driver running the ftp server which worked at 9600. I have yet to try Laplink.

Big disappointment is that the keyboard is not detachable!

I do like the external monitor connection, I can use it with my amber Philips MGA CRT!

PPC512_amber_MGA.jpg
 
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nickb333 said:
I picked up one of these a few days ago as it's always been a machine I've been curious about. The LCD supertwist screen is in good condition and it even came with the original PSU. I don't have any plans to modify it extensively although I will upgrade the memory to 640k. I did consider a GOTEK but I've got plenty of 720k floppies. I'd also like to get it running CP/M-86 if that's possible.

I spent some time trying out various file transfer options. Zmodem works OK up to 9600bauds but starts to throw a few errors at 19200. 38400 was a total failure. I also tried mTCP with a SLIP packet driver running the ftp server which worked at 9600. I have yet to try Laplink.

Big disappointment is that the keyboard is not detachable!

I do like the external monitor connection, I can use it with my amber Philips MGA CRT!

View attachment 1307400
Click to expand...

I plan to do the RTC chip mod to avoid the message on start up each time.
They are not that easy to take apart and reassemble though :rolleyes:
 
I started work on an internal combination XT-IDE/CF-Lite board that would replace the internal modem in 2023 but I never got around to testing it.

I really need to re-visit the design and get it completed/working ...

Info is here:
github.com

Amstrad-PC/Amstrad_PPC_Internal_Expansion at main · 0ddjob/Amstrad-PC

Projects for Amstrad's PC compatible computers. Contribute to 0ddjob/Amstrad-PC development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com
 
Just bought an PPC512 off eBay. Unfortunately, even though it was well packed there were many broken pieces after delivery. Since it had been in a loft for years I guess the plastic had become very brittle. I will try and glue it back together and then if it works upgrade to 640K. Last did that 30 years ago.
Can get to the “insert disk in drive A” prompt so quite optimistic. Sadly missing the boot disk and it’s many years since I had my box of floppies out that I can’t remember where it is! I’ll find a 720K disk somewhere….

Really bought to try out my old EGA monitors after 30 years in the loft/garage, so glad I kept them. Back then we just got rid of the old kit and adopted the new. Nobody thought about nostalgia then. Once VGA became standard in the very early 90s the old monitors were just chucked.
 

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Ruud said:
Thank you!

I like to tinker with 8088-era machines.So far I have only one working 8086 computer: an IBM PS2/2 mod 30. The main reason I bought this particular machine is because it has a NEC V30 on board. The V20 and V30 can run 8080 code and I'm busy to find out if I can run CP/M on a PC equipped with a V20/V30. The V20-MBC can do it, so why not a PC?
Click to expand...

Back in the day I had an Amstrad PC1512, and I put a V30 in it, and ran a CP/M-80 "emulator" at 8 Mhz. There was a special DOS PD program to do this, strictly speaking a DOS to CPM80 bios translator rather than emulator. I cant remember the software name offhand, but it should be on some of the CDROM DOS PD library collections from that time (PCSIG etc).

At that time the downside was that so much CPM PD software needed the z80. I thought it was a shame that the V30 didnt offer an option to trap the extended z80 codes and generate an interrupt for emulation. There were also some true shareware z80 CPM emulators, the best gave the equivalent of about a 0.5 Mhz z80, but with fast disk/screen access felt faster than CPM on a CBM128+1541.
 
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Well I did the memory upgrade on mine last weekend. A full 640k! Unfortunately I only had 4164s in stock (which are used for the parity bits) so I had to buy 4x UD61464DC (1996 vintage). There's just enough room after removing the bottom PCB and a few cables, then clipping the others back out of the way. The floppy cable is the fiddly but but once the solder holes have been cleared it's possible to fit the sockets that are under the floppy cable.

I was looking at changing the UART but I don;t think I'll bother. I've found a ZIP100 drive that I'm going to try with the PalmZip driver but the ISA bus expansion projects do look interesting. There's also plenty of internal space as the PPC512 doesn't have the V22 modem board fitted.
 
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