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System Information: Amstrad PPC512 / PPC640 Development, History, Games, Internals, Additional Information, Photos
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| USER COMMENTS... (new comments listed first) |
| KenE Left a comment on: Wednesday 29th of February 2012 07:22:27 AM. I was given a 640 when I was with ICL 22 years ago. It WAS carryable - the bag hung over the shoulder and under the arm, with the PPC, power lead, box of floppies, manual and pile of A4 paper I was working on - and was a lot more portable than an HP dc7900sff! (I've carried both.) It was primitive, the screen was dire, and running Windows 2 and apps involved a lot of floppy-juggling, but it had a full-size keyboard and I could work from home with the internal modem AND I was the first in our team to get MS Word 5 (for DOS) working, ahead of the rest with their desktop PCs. After I customised it with a 20Mb HDD in place of one of the FDDs, and of course a CRT monitor, it became quite a sanitary PC. Thanks for the memories! |
| retrozoneorg Left a comment on: Sunday 19th of June 2011 05:27:22 PM. Got both the 640 and 512 from another collector for a very low price. He was happy that they were going to a new home. |
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Amstrad had already released the PC1512 and PC1640, their cheap IBM compatible range. The hardware for the PPC was derived from the same hardware as these 2 machines. The outward appearance of the PPC is stunning - with the full fold down keyboard and lift up screen being a real pleasure to touch, and the nice blinking lights on the top add to the whole "state-of-the-art" feel. There are trap doors hiding all the ports and even a hidden compartment to keep your modem cable in.
The PPC was not a commercial success. The machines were very large and too heavy for the average office worker to carry around. They were known to the press of the time as "luggable computers" with little difference in size and weight to their full sized desktop equivalents. They were mostly sold in the UK and europe.
The PPC is supplied with MS DOS 3.3 and can run almost all programs compatible with that operating system. In theory you should be able to run later versions of DOS on the PPC as well as any other IBM compatible operating system which uses 640K or less. When connected to an external monitor the PPC can play colour games compatible with the CGA standard. I have also successfully played a number of ASCII character based MS DOS games using the internal LCD display. Essentially the PPC is an IBM PC and so has access to a large library of software - so long as that software can run in the PPC's limited specifications.
At the heart of the PPC is an NEC v30 CPU (Intel 8088 compatible) running at 8mhz. The onboard graphics hardware is capable of producing both a CGA colour display and MDA mono display. Character modes supported are 80 characters per line and 40 characters per line. The PPC512 came with 512k of RAM whilst the PPC640 has 640k. Graphics modes were selected via a dip switch on the side of the casing.
The only cosmetic difference between the 512 ad 640 machines is the colour of the case. The 512 is white / cream while the 640 is dark grey.
