Amstrad PPC 512 and Windows 2

A good while ago I bought an Amstrad PPC512 from Ebay.

What Is It?

(Picture via wikimedia commons)

It's the same model featured on the ancientelectronics blog here

It's got an 8MHz NEC V30 (8088 compatible) CPU and a whopping 512kiB of RAM! Plus, with no hard drive, it boots from floppy every single time.

I believe it's Amstrad's first portable computer too - you can put 8 D cells in the cavernous battery compartment to run it on the go. It's no laptop though - it's massive!

...Why?

The current laptop design has undergone few major changes since it settled on the clamshell keyboard/screen (in the early 90s?). This is a beautiful piece of early design with a fixed easy-carry handle and full-size keyboard as the 'lid'. The keyboard/lid folds through a full 180 degrees, then the screen folds up from the main body. One or two floppy drives are housed in the right-hand half.

Plus, I wanted some real 8088 hardware in case I wanted to test some really old/small code projects.

Mostly though, I just wanted to get it out now and again and coo over it.

Windows 2?

The first Windows version I ever interacted with was 3.11 which is the one that really took off popularity-wise. When I found out that 3.11 is too advanced to run on the Amstrad, I was intrigued, so I did some research and downloaded the Amstrad version of Windows 2.

These are the three setup disks and it will install onto two 720kB floppies, so I needed 5 floppies (in addition to the normal MS-DOS 3 boot disk) and, as it turned out, another for the mouse drivers. I copied the Windows images to 3 floppies via a USB floppy drive.

Then, after booting the Amstrad, I formatted the other two floppies via the normal FORMAT command, put the Windows setup disk in and ran the 'SETUP'.

Following the installer instructions got me to Windows 2, but the mouse just would not work.

After many annoying re-installs with different menu options, I discovered that the installer's LMOUSE.EXE just would not work with my Logitech serial mouse. I downloaded Logitech Mouseware 5.01 from somewhere (can't remember where :/) and copied it on to another floppy. Running the mouse driver directly made me see it work in MS-DOS, but running it from within Windows did not make it work there.

What I had to do was reinstall Windows 2 but select 'other' for the mouse, then put the Mouseware floppy in when the installer asked for a driver disk.

Finally, I could get the mouse to work and play with the true glory of Windows 2!

...was it any good?

Nope. The screen has such a slow response time that it's really difficult seeing where the mouse has gone to when you move it.

I enjoyed trying out WRITE.EXE and REVERSI.EXE. The Amstrad's keyboard is pleasingly springy and clacky so I do enjoy typing on it.

Of course, I'll also enjoy showing it off as a curiosity to anyone who is interested.

Further projects with the PPC512

There is a PCB design available on GitHub for an ISA bus expansion via the expansion ports on the back of the machine. It would be lovely to be able to connect up an SD-Card via ISA so it can save to hard drive, or even to a network.