Adventures with an Amstrad PC1512 - The Hard Disk

Hard drives are very rare because, as this is an XT machine, modern drives won't work on it. The HD MUST be supplied with its own controller (usually on a card) that will only work with that particular drive (you can't use another drive with the controller ven it is by the sam manufacturer) which is a bit of a pain. The best type is a Hard Card which is a card that plugs into an 8 bit slot that contains both controller and drive which has the advantage of allowing both 5.25" floppy drives to be retained.

Adventures with an Amstrad PC1512 - The GUI

The PC1512 is one of the few PC's of the era that shipped with a Graphical User Interface (GEM) - most were shipped only with DOS. There are various versions of GEM available on the Internet as it has been released as GPL as have all the software which includes Paint and Word Processor programs.

Adventures with an Amstrad PC1512 - The Display adapter

The display adapter is CGA but has access to a pallette of 16 colours but software has to be written to access it. The only software I have found that will work with it is GEM although not the version shipped with the PC1512. The driver can be found here on John Elliots site.

Adventures with an Amstrad PC1512 - The Monitor

The monitor is CGA only although it can display the extra 16 colours provided by the display adapter (more on that another time). It has non-standard connectors (good old Amstrad) and will only work with a PC1512 and it is impossible to connect any other type of monitor to it so you're stuck with it (the PC1640 is upgradeable - sort of).

Adventures with an Amstrad PC1512 - The Mouse

It seems that the mouse on the PC1512 is non-standard. The port it is connected to is NOT a serial port (despite looking like one) and only the Amstrad mouse can be used. It seems compatible with most programs except DOSSHELL and Windows 3.0 (yes, you can run Windows 3.0 but more on that later) both by MS. However, all is not lost as a serial mouse can be plugged into the serial port at the back (with a 25 pin to 9 pin converter) and run with an MS driver. However, the only mouse I have found that will work (PS/2 mice with 9 pin converters DON'T work) has a switch underneath marked MS/PC and works fine in MS mode (this is the same mouse I use with an Amstrad PCW16 strangely) with both DOSSHELL and Windows 3.0 (watch this space).

Adventures with an Amstrad PC1512

I've just got hold of an Amstrad PC1512 (been after one for ages) and I'll be playing with it over the coming weeks so watch out for more info on this blog soon...

Problems Reading MSDOS disks on an Amiga A1200

I was having difficulty reading DOS disks on an Amiga A1200. I could get it to mount the disk but not read it. After much head scratching I discovered the following file was missing in the L directory:-

CrossDOSFileSystem

It seems that version 3.1 of AmigaOS doesn't have this file. However, all is not lost as version 3.0 does. Transferring from the Workbench disk of version 3.0 (show All files first) to my HD cured the problem. I have no idea if this is just my (genuine) copy of 3.1 has this problem. Moral of the story is hold on to your version 3.0 disks, they may come in handy...