That mod gave an idea and I hope that the creator of tis or someone else from the retro community makes a design and step-by-step tutorial to do this INTERNALLY by soldering the ISA bus lines to a ribbon cable and then connecting a small backplane PCB to fit inside one of the floppy slots. That way, we could replace BOTH floppies, one with a GOTEK and the other one with a XT-IDE +removable flash adapter to make the system boot from it and look 100% factory, without anything hanging from behind. It will be tricky to fit the ISA slot length-wise but, technically it is doable!
I worked as a hardware tech (in Australia) for an Amstrad dealer in about 1990. For the small amount that were sold in our little town, it was amazing how many came in for service. Mainly power supply issues. But it's cool seeing one again. And this is in great condition.
Yes I think ultimately the poor reliability of Amstrad machines led to the brands downfall. And the build quality on this model in particular is atrocious, but it IS a very cool device and the DNA of a modern laptop is all over it. Without devices like this we wouldn't have transitioned in the same way from the luggable type devices to modern laptops
@@TechMadeEasyUK Amstrad were a very cheap and in some cases poorly made machine, but they are one of the reasons PC compatibles had such a big push (at least in Commonwealth countries). They had remarkable hardware for the price. I had a PC2286 which was a sub $1000 286-12 with 1MB of RAM, 1MB VGA, 40MB hard drive and VGA monitor - and shipped with DOS 5, Windows 3.0 a keyboard and a mouse. That was almost $1500 cheaper than most other brands at the time. And for only a few hundred dollars more, you could get a 386DX-33 with 4MB of RAM. Like you said, the DNA of lots of modern computers can be traced back to these cheap entry level PCs.
Beyond cool! I came into the computer scene in the mid 80s after being intreagued with various electronic day-timers. My first PC was an 8086 laptop from Sharp (the PC-4502). Not a later, I would upgrade to the NEC Ultralite PC-17-02. This was the first true notebook computer, and I paid $2500.00 1988 dollars for it. That's over $6000 in today's money. That was my daily driver until 1992.
I think there are only a few confirmed games that won't run on the V20 or V30 so the PPC512 should be close to 100% compatible with all DOS software written for the 8088. Games in the 1987-1989 did start to target 640k so that's more likely to be the compatibility culprit. The custom CGA graphics chip that Amstrad used on the PC1512 (that should be the same one of the PPC512) is known to have some issues and there's a least a couple of old CGA games confirmed not to work with it. However, almost all reports I've seen of game compatibility issues on the PC1512 have been memory related and were solved by upgrading to the full 640k.
Really nice video, I have a PC1512 and did the Gotek, and the Adlib clone upgrade too, plus the 128KB RAM addition. I don't think the Amstrad were unreliable, they were cheap and they feel cheap but not unreliable.
Tempted to do the RAM upgrade myself to get this up to a full 640KB. There's something about the construction of this thing that just makes me feel it wouldn't cope well as a truly portable device, and that in turn could lead to reliability issues. But then I've just dropped my modern laptop on the kitchen floor this morning and it smashed to a million pieces, so what do I know?
Yeah but the difference is that on Noels the screen was broken, whereas this one works just fine (it's just crap). Looking at utilising that external display conne tor though, stay tuned
Great video! Not a system I know. That screen is pretty bad for gaming but commend you for trying. In it's day it would of been an amazing portable productivity machine.
Thanks for the video (and to Joāo) - any recommendation for the ISA edge connector? I'm not having much luck finding a 62pin 2.54mm "connector" ... only one came up on Mouser ... $55 each ... Thanks! /Brett
@@TechMadeEasyUK ... thanks! I'm going to try to replace the internal modem card with an internal CF interface ... let's see. There's enough space on the board that it might be possible to squeeze on Adlib support as well ... /Brett
@@TechMadeEasyUK Thank you for solving this mystery ;) I have a PPC512, so no Modem. But I'll have soon a Wifi RS232 modem, so I hope to test it on this "laptop"
The PPC640 I've just stripped uses mostly OKI brand M41256A-12 (18) and then a mixture of KM4164B-15 (2) and MT4067-10 (4). I assume they used the same board between the PPC512 and PPC640 - LK4 tells how much RAM is installed. Checking the service manual it states: IC135-152 = KM41256-15 (18x) and IC153-158 = KM4164B-15 (6x) /Brett
