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PPC512

Ruud

Ruud

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Joined
Nov 30, 2009
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Heerlen, NL
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.
 
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