I had the 1640 after my grandad upgraded to a 386. Mine had a 20MB hard disk mounted directly on an ISA card. I remember before powering off the computer, I had to type "wdpark" to park the hard drive heads.
A pretty nice computer for the time. the 8086 and EGA together would have made this a desirable home computer in the late 80's. Just add an adlib sound card and it would have been a pretty good home computer and still usable for business applications as well.
I Had I 1640, and in the UK it came with 1 floppy disk but the left drive was blanked, for the HD, for me was 10mb however you never got this as HD were not perfected and as such you got bad sectors. I am not sure what the monitor I had but I worked out through configuration I I could get EGA in the AutoExec file. Later I did get a 3.5 floppy disk that connected via a ribbon to the PC. Gem I remember and I preferred this to Windows 1 & 2. One thing we don't do now is swtich on the PC through the Monitor!
The PC1512 and PC1640 are both also really nice looking machines. Amstrad was very proud of this (Lord Sugar said so) and I think they had a right to be.
Awesome! I remember my parents buying a 1512 with a monochrome CGA display. I played Speedball on it and it was impossible to tell the difference between the two teams! I had more luck running Defender of the Crown 🥰
Oh, I initially misunderstood what you were saying. I thought this was something about the speed of the game. I see you are talking about the teams being indistinguishable without colour. Yeah, I think it is unfortunate so many monochrome displays were sold. The machine was so much better in colour. It can't have been *that* much more expensive to manufacture a colour CRT.
I also had a PC1512, though we had a colour monitor and at least at some point we got a hard drive, from memory. It's a little hard to be sure because we had a second computer eventually, and I might be misremembering the hard drive from that.
@@PCRetroTech I think misremembering happens for a lot of us. I had what I think was an AT clone after the Amstrad with a 20mb HDD and EGA monitor, then a 386 with VGA. I know for sure however, that they were always bottom of the range, a generation or two out of date, and would never run the games I wanted! Wing Commander was but a dream...
School had a few of these. Never saw the Gem desktop on those, but it's something I'd seen plenty of times on my friends' Atari ST systems, which sold with a version of Gem called TOS, which was stored in the BIOS ROM. Pretty much looks exactly like this, but in monochrome for some reason, as the Atari ST supported 32 onscreen colours.
Great video, great machine! We had the 1640 HD20 ECD when I was a child... and Driller (it came with a cardboard 3D map). We played all sorts on it - even loading Wing Commander on it one day after waiting hours for it to copy off our PS/2 via a serial cable. Slide show! But only now I have an IBM PC/XT do I realise just how much faster the 1640 is.
Yes, that really stands out to me now. I had a PC1512 back in the day and the way the marketing worked, I just assumed an XT was faster. When I finally got an XT clone I was very disappointed to find that things didn't seem to be any faster at all. Of course back then I had no idea why this was.
From memory, you missed the most hilarious feature of GEM Somewhere in the settings menu there was an on/off option ... Floppy disk clunk I nearly fell off my chair realising that the familiar clunk, clunk, clunk of a floppy drive is just a conceit to reassure you something is happening. Never seen it as an explicit option since.
@@PCRetroTech This would have been around 1990, Durham University still had lots of 1512/1640 . You still got noise of drive spinning, just minus the clunking. No where near as freaky quiet as the SUN Sparc station's 3" drive
@@taichitortoise4859 You mean while the drive wasn't in use? The clunking is the heads moving, which is an integral part of the operation of the device. They are just standard floppy drives in there, so I'm really quite sure of this.
I would've loved the EGA version. The 1512 with CGA monitor was my first PC. I upgraded to 640KB RAM and a 20MB hard drive. At the time I never knew a CPU upgrade was an option.
Those ones with the ECD monitor are difficult to find in Spain. Even in PC1640s MM and CM monitors are much more common. A few weeks ago a quite nice one came out for sale nearby, he was asking €300. It was a temptation but I already own a couple of PC1512 and I don't have that much space. It didn't last many days listed, obviously.
Yeah, they seem to be really hard to obtain these days. There was a time when they seemed to come up regularly. I even managed to get a parts machine at the time.
Nice video, I really like these early Amstrad PC's and would love to have a go on one. Interesting to see it seems to have some incompatibilities with some games, so would be something to take into account before getting one. Thanks for showing us yours!
That's correct. I didn't show it on video, but I appeared to have other compatibility issues. In fact it took hours to find games that I could actually show working. It's unclear why this is though. I can't believe those games didn't work on this machine back in the day. I think it is largely down to a number of possibilities: 1) Poor curation of abandonware, e.g. missing files 2) Games made to work with emulators that no longer work with real hardware 3) Games taken from demo CD's where certain features or compatibility options have been removed 4) Games taken from distributions that were (for cost) licensed to run on certain hardware only 5) Features left out or not available after being made to run without copy protection
07:44 > you have twice as much data to put into video memory Wait, what, no. That's the whole point of the planar structure of EGA frame buffer: you can affect multiple lanes with a single write. Did the programmers of Grand Prix Circuits forgot to correctly use the planes? (What I mean: - A single CGA byte write 4 pixels at a time. - A single byte in the older "nibble oriented" modes (e.g.: 16 colors on PC jr and Tandy) is only 2 pixels indeed. The spread-across-memory 16 colors (e.g.: on Plantronic RG and BI bits are on two separate memory addresses) modifies 4 pixels with 2 bytes, so it averages again 2 pixels per byte. Those cards are indeed twice slower for the same amount of pixels. - An EGA/VGA card always modifies 8 pixels per byte (like in monochrome modes, except that each of the for R, G, B, and I plane can be written simultaneously). So by leveraging the various write modes, masks, latches, etc. it's possible to do fast fills and fast copy from off-screen regions. Those cards are thus twice *faster* than CGA for the same amount of pixels)
The planar structure of video RAM is only relevant if you are filling large areas with the same colour. For things like sprites you have to keep changing the write mask to the colour of the pixel you are trying to write as you fill video RAM (which would be slow) or you do it plane by plane, which is going to be twice as much data to put in video RAM (16 colours vs 4).
Not sure if link to other video is authorized. Here is what I do with mine. ua-cam.com/video/jw-d2jrz1Eg/v-deo.html And my 3 Amstrad PC in action. ua-cam.com/video/KAmzNRMCclk/v-deo.html
Ya the 1640 had the RGB port rather than the 8 pin DIN like the PC1512 had. Wish I had that chess game for my PC1512 SD. I really don't need a sophisticated game as my chess needs work much like my PC.
Isn't getting a 8086 in 1989 a bit late. I bought my first pc in 1988 and it was 12Mhz 286 with 40MB hard drive, 1MB ram and vga? I thought I was late because 386 PCs were already around when I bought it.
I salvaged an Amstrad PC 1512 SD 20 years ago which has the 20MB HD and 640Kb of RAM. Anyone know where I can download the software for this gem? Mine is sorta orphan in many respects. Great retro video.
As UA-cam won't allow viewers to share links you might not get much response. However, the Internet Archive has a zip file with the system disks in case your physical disks are not working. However, you still need to get them onto 5.25" floppies for which you will need another more recent machine with a floppy drive. archive.org/details/pc1512_flop.7z/large_cd0408_002_080822_2008_33_4_Amstrad_computer_base_unit.jpg Scroll down to see where to download the disks.
Maybe someone will know... I had a 1512 with HD. All the ones I've seen have a rectangular LED activity light, but mine had a round one. Anyone know what drive that was? It was 20MB IIRC.
I bought a 1512DD with a Hercules monitor. The cheapest and what I could afford. The screen had a higher resolution than the CGA and the EGA(i think) monitor but was only black and white. To play cga games there was a programme that emulate cga, we had black and white and some "dithering" grays. Later on I also bought an Amstrad 80 column doxmatrix printer. Unfortunately I throw them in the bin when i needed the space but I think I still have my 5.25" disks somewhere.
@@PCRetroTech Thinking more about this pc I didn't buy a pc1512 but a pc1640, with hercules display. It cost me about 210000 Escudos (about 1050€) in 1987.
Does Space Station Oblivion take advantage of an FPU? I've downloaded it because I built a Micro8088 and I have an FPU in it (8087) and I wanted to try it out. I've heard the FPU is nigh useless for most stuff of the era as nobody was expected to have one so nobody coded for it.
I don't know. Interesting question. I think it is unlikely, as FPUs were not common back in the day, and it was assumed by most game manufacturers that a home user wouldn't have one, as they were quite expensive. But about this specific game, I don't have further information.
I'm recreating the disk sleeves for the four Amstrad startup disks, but can't seem to find any photos of the rear. Any chance you can share a photo or scan?
Unfortunately I don't have access to those at the moment, so I can't help. They do seem to come up for cheap online in the UK if you can get hold of them there though. Usually they don''t work, but if you just want to get a visual that may be an easy way.
@@PCRetroTech Thanks anyway. I just posted a request on one of the Amstrad forums so I might get lucky. Plenty of photos on the net, but all are of the front. I've seen a couple on eBay UK, but a bit pricey to get them to Australia.
@@austfox2170 Ah I see. Yes, shipping stuff to Australia is pretty expensive. If you still come up with nothing in about a week, let me know again and I'll have access again and might be able to do something.
@@PCRetroTech Someone on the Amstrad forums posted a photo within 3 hours of my request. Yay! I've recreated the disk sleeve, so if anyone can make use of it to print and make their own, head on over to the 'CPC Wiki' forums to grab the PDF file.
Hi, Nice machine, reminds me of my first PC compatible - Commodore PC10 512k and 2 x 360 floppy, with a hercules card, some software tools on the install floppy had a utility called simcga so you could play cga games in shades of green - there was about 3 versions of that program When you mentioned the sturdiness of the case, it reminds me of a younger person asking me why 80's and 90's PC's had the heavy metal case = i told them because beofre towers they were on there side and desktops with a type of fast slip open case on a hinge but more importantly a 40 pound CRT monitor sat on it Epx and Accolate were top sellers in there day ) test drive was cool ) that Oblivion game i believe is also sold as driller, if i remember later in the game you need to find a console with a code or similar but when viewed from the back end it spelt PEPSI - but it could have been another similar polygon style game Regards George
Yes, the game is also called Driller. The Commodore 64 version is a slide show, but people still loved it apparently. I don't know how they made the PC version so smooth.
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 Why do you believe that? The C64 has a dedicated graphics chip (VIC II). Although the CPU runs at a lower frequency, bus access is a lot quicker. I don't see any reason to think the C64 is much slower. Check out the C64 demos out there. There's oodles of stuff we can't do on PC or an 8086 clone machine. Yes, the 8086 has a 16 bit data bus and runs at 8 MHz not 4.77 MHz unlike the original IBM PC. Those are legitimate reasons the 1640 would be faster. But it doesn't really explain the enormous difference in performance of digger. Presumably available memory is an issue on the C64 or something.
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 I know you can use the latches for fast copy on VGA. I've never checked if this exists on EGA though. I'd be very surprised if an 8086 could do a mul that much faster than a C64, though yes it does have an instruction for it which is convenient. It has div too, but I doubt it is used at all in a really fast game like this. It is just too slow. As for shifting, the 8086 can only shift by 1 bit at a time efficiently. I don't think there is much advantage there. It's also surprising that Elite performs badly on a C64. It works so well on a BBC which is also very limited. As for the scene, there has to be a reason very little has been done on pre 286 PC's and yet so much is done on C64. I'm aware it is all trickery (and I know some of the tricks, obviously). True, real 3D rotation is hard, but we aren't talking about 50/60 fps here or even 2-frame demos. We are talking about just a few frames per second. Clearly sprites can't help, but I really don't see what would actually help on an 8086 machine with EGA. Bitplanes help a little I guess. I believe both C64 and EGA had vertical retrace interrupts, though I'm not sure whether they were used much on EGA as they were inconsistently implemented by various EGA implementations. I don't think EGA had raster interrupts though. On the other hand I am not sure if they would be useful here. Naturally Amiga is better than the C64. But this was a 16/32 bit CPU and ran quickly. It had a blitter and the like, correct me if I'm wrong. You are quite possibly right that there just aren't any tricks on the C64 that really benefit here. But I'm surprised to hear someone say that an 8086 machine does have hardware that helps. It's maybe the first time I've heard someone claim a PC of that era was better than a C64 for something.
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 Yeah that's cool if you can do memcopy on EGA. I should have tried this ages ago, since it is a question I've had for a while. Agreed, it would give you faster polygon fill. Who is the prolific author that you spoke of that moved to VIC20? I'd be interested in checking that stuff out. By textmode you mean hacked up for a 160x100 graphics mode? Or ANSI text? 8088 MPH is pretty well described as far as 3D goes on Scali's blog. They use a scanbuffer, which I think records the beginning and end of a section of a scanline that should be one colour. Then they can use a fast routine for just writing out all the bytes/words between those two endpoints. All the updating is then done to the scanbuffer I believe. On the other hand, with some of their effects it is not clear to what extent stuff is prerendered when doing 3D rotation. From some calculations and experiments I've done myself, it seems clear that one has to do at least some precomputation. 3D rotations themselves, unless fairly simplistic, have to be computed using sin and cos. Of course you can look the sin's and cos's up in a table, but the arithmetic itself using those values has to be precomputed as far as I can see. That's difficult in a game like Digger, which is precisely why I say it's impressive work. Same for Elite. The fill itself actually doesn't take that much time, though has to be very carefully optimised. The biggest problem with Digger is those very large areas that have to be filled. It is really hard to come up with an algorithm which just fills around the edges of those triangles (the regions that could have been modified since the last movement) and not in the centres, where likely nothing has changed. [One can do it in the horizontal direction ok, but for almost horizontal lines that move this will not be sufficient.] I should check out some of these games you mention. I have either forgotten some of these over the years, or never seen them before. And I love looking at games where there is convincing 3D. It is one of my current hobbies, amongst other things. One really important reason Elite was so optimised is that they used very carefully chosen data structures to store the information. These really saved a lot of bits. I am not super familiar with the BBC. I recall one of them has two CPUs (unless I've mixed that up with something else) and at least one of them uses the same CRTC as the IBM CGA card.
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 You are from Finland, into the scene but live in Thailand!? Wow! I won't ask. Yeah Ville-Matias Heikkilä says on his site he is going to fix the world and he has relevant computer experience. Given the experiences I've had this week with automated customer service after locking me out of my accounts with a certain online financial service, I do wonder how he thinks his computer expertise will help with that. LOL. But I will watch his stuff (thanks for the references), as I somehow missed it in the 90's. Perhaps he was prominent in the early 90's. I only discovered the scene in about 95 when I got internet access having only met one scener by accident before that (I've not managed to identify him since; he was working on the 286 in Tasmania, had a lot of silver coloured text scroller effects that I remember). [In case you go looking, I still don't have any prods myself yet, though I am working on that one.] And I mainly watched stuff from the Assembly competition back then and a couple of other big ones which I've forgotten now. Revision has an Oldskool compo which has attracted little pre-286 PC stuff so far (other than Same Old Song and 8088 MPH and at least one other that I forgot the name of right now). I often wonder if it is just because it is harder or something like that. Other than these, there's basically just 8088 Domination and 8088 Corruption that I'm aware of, and a few old demos from the one-time "The 8086 Compo", which are mostly single effect "demos". Recently there was PC-jam. There's probably more I'm forgetting, but not much. So much stuff gets traced back to Trixter in one way or another as far as promoting pre-286, Same Old Song being the stand out exception that I know of so far. Can you perhaps order computer parts from Australia? That should be relatively nearby. Perhaps Japan or China are also possibilities? I guess time is also a major requirement. I can sympathise with that! I'd love to do the demo/retrocomputing stuff full time, but that is currently impossible due to work. By the way, what is isaes? I assume that was a typo, but I didn't figure out what you meant.
You call this discoloration? My 1512 is actually yellow!!! Nice that you got the 1640 with the EGA display, CGA is nice for a while but besides nostalgia it really sucks compared to the EGA or VGA version of any game if they're available.
Maybe i have been living under a rock (for knowing so little about ms windows pre-3.0) but the mention of "folders and icons is not an invention of Microsoft in case you didn't know" is a joke, right? Pc compatibles until the end of the 80s were never mentioned with a graphical user interface, except in exceptions, WordPerfect, the above GEM, and jokingly with windows 1, 2, idk, any dos shell with mouse support..? Anyway years after Mac, Amiga, Atari ST.
@@PCRetroTech Ofc it is true, would anyone think otherwise? You think old or young live under rocks that long? Otoh, there are other problems in the world ;)
I had the 1640 after my grandad upgraded to a 386.
Mine had a 20MB hard disk mounted directly on an ISA card. I remember before powering off the computer, I had to type "wdpark" to park the hard drive heads.
A pretty nice computer for the time. the 8086 and EGA together would have made this a desirable home computer in the late 80's. Just add an adlib sound card and it would have been a pretty good home computer and still usable for business applications as well.
I have one of these with the hard drive. I hope to get around to turning it on again
Never had an Amstrad PC, but enjoyed looking at your video. A bit of nostalgia. Thanks
I Had I 1640, and in the UK it came with 1 floppy disk but the left drive was blanked, for the HD, for me was 10mb however you never got this as HD were not perfected and as such you got bad sectors. I am not sure what the monitor I had but I worked out through configuration I I could get EGA in the AutoExec file. Later I did get a 3.5 floppy disk that connected via a ribbon to the PC.
Gem I remember and I preferred this to Windows 1 & 2.
One thing we don't do now is swtich on the PC through the Monitor!
Thanks. Just thanks for this video.
I love the build quality of these old machine's.
The PC1512 and PC1640 are both also really nice looking machines. Amstrad was very proud of this (Lord Sugar said so) and I think they had a right to be.
That is an absolute dream machine.
Yep!
@@PCRetroTech I would so like to have a 1640 with ECM in addition to my (much yellowed) 1512 with Hercules mod.
@@okona1up The best place to get them is the UK. But people often don't offer international shipping.
@@PCRetroTech \-: Happy brexit...
@@okona1up LOL!
My first PC was also an Amstrad. with Grand Prix Circuit :D
I didn't have GPC back in the day, but I certainly had the Amstrad. Happy days!
Awesome! I remember my parents buying a 1512 with a monochrome CGA display. I played Speedball on it and it was impossible to tell the difference between the two teams! I had more luck running Defender of the Crown 🥰
Oh, I initially misunderstood what you were saying. I thought this was something about the speed of the game. I see you are talking about the teams being indistinguishable without colour. Yeah, I think it is unfortunate so many monochrome displays were sold. The machine was so much better in colour. It can't have been *that* much more expensive to manufacture a colour CRT.
This is the exact configuration I had in the late eighties. 🤩
I had a PC 1512 with a monochrome monitor. It was great, but I really wanted a 1640 with a hard drive
I also had a PC1512, though we had a colour monitor and at least at some point we got a hard drive, from memory. It's a little hard to be sure because we had a second computer eventually, and I might be misremembering the hard drive from that.
@@PCRetroTech I think misremembering happens for a lot of us. I had what I think was an AT clone after the Amstrad with a 20mb HDD and EGA monitor, then a 386 with VGA. I know for sure however, that they were always bottom of the range, a generation or two out of date, and would never run the games I wanted!
Wing Commander was but a dream...
School had a few of these. Never saw the Gem desktop on those, but it's something I'd seen plenty of times on my friends' Atari ST systems, which sold with a version of Gem called TOS, which was stored in the BIOS ROM. Pretty much looks exactly like this, but in monochrome for some reason, as the Atari ST supported 32 onscreen colours.
Wonderful video on this old computer!
Thanks.
I had Driller on the C64. It ran at an abysmal
I must have that chess game on a floppy somewhere, but I've only ever played it on a green screen.
Great video, great machine! We had the 1640 HD20 ECD when I was a child... and Driller (it came with a cardboard 3D map). We played all sorts on it - even loading Wing Commander on it one day after waiting hours for it to copy off our PS/2 via a serial cable. Slide show!
But only now I have an IBM PC/XT do I realise just how much faster the 1640 is.
Yes, that really stands out to me now. I had a PC1512 back in the day and the way the marketing worked, I just assumed an XT was faster. When I finally got an XT clone I was very disappointed to find that things didn't seem to be any faster at all. Of course back then I had no idea why this was.
From memory, you missed the most hilarious feature of GEM
Somewhere in the settings menu there was an on/off option ...
Floppy disk clunk
I nearly fell off my chair realising that the familiar clunk, clunk, clunk
of a floppy drive is just a conceit to reassure you something is
happening. Never seen it as an explicit option since.
I've never seen that and don't know what that would be. Are you sure it was a real floppy drive and not some modern floppy emulator?
@@PCRetroTech This would have been around 1990, Durham University still had lots of 1512/1640 . You still got noise of drive spinning, just minus the clunking. No where near as freaky quiet as the SUN Sparc station's 3" drive
@@taichitortoise4859 You mean while the drive wasn't in use? The clunking is the heads moving, which is an integral part of the operation of the device. They are just standard floppy drives in there, so I'm really quite sure of this.
I'll have to give it a try and see what it does. Maybe it caches the directory or something, though I'm not sure how file writing would work then.
I would've loved the EGA version. The 1512 with CGA monitor was my first PC. I upgraded to 640KB RAM and a 20MB hard drive. At the time I never knew a CPU upgrade was an option.
Yeah it's a shame upgrade from CGA doesn't seem to have been an option on the 1512.
Those ones with the ECD monitor are difficult to find in Spain. Even in PC1640s MM and CM monitors are much more common. A few weeks ago a quite nice one came out for sale nearby, he was asking €300. It was a temptation but I already own a couple of PC1512 and I don't have that much space. It didn't last many days listed, obviously.
Yeah, they seem to be really hard to obtain these days. There was a time when they seemed to come up regularly. I even managed to get a parts machine at the time.
there was a pcb assembly to display 16 shades of grey ega on the MM Version!
Nice video, I really like these early Amstrad PC's and would love to have a go on one. Interesting to see it seems to have some incompatibilities with some games, so would be something to take into account before getting one. Thanks for showing us yours!
That's correct. I didn't show it on video, but I appeared to have other compatibility issues. In fact it took hours to find games that I could actually show working.
It's unclear why this is though. I can't believe those games didn't work on this machine back in the day. I think it is largely down to a number of possibilities:
1) Poor curation of abandonware, e.g. missing files
2) Games made to work with emulators that no longer work with real hardware
3) Games taken from demo CD's where certain features or compatibility options have been removed
4) Games taken from distributions that were (for cost) licensed to run on certain hardware only
5) Features left out or not available after being made to run without copy protection
Can still find in France for not too much
07:44 > you have twice as much data to put into video memory
Wait, what, no. That's the whole point of the planar structure of EGA frame buffer: you can affect multiple lanes with a single write.
Did the programmers of Grand Prix Circuits forgot to correctly use the planes?
(What I mean:
- A single CGA byte write 4 pixels at a time.
- A single byte in the older "nibble oriented" modes (e.g.: 16 colors on PC jr and Tandy) is only 2 pixels indeed. The spread-across-memory 16 colors (e.g.: on Plantronic RG and BI bits are on two separate memory addresses) modifies 4 pixels with 2 bytes, so it averages again 2 pixels per byte. Those cards are indeed twice slower for the same amount of pixels.
- An EGA/VGA card always modifies 8 pixels per byte (like in monochrome modes, except that each of the for R, G, B, and I plane can be written simultaneously). So by leveraging the various write modes, masks, latches, etc. it's possible to do fast fills and fast copy from off-screen regions. Those cards are thus twice *faster* than CGA for the same amount of pixels)
The planar structure of video RAM is only relevant if you are filling large areas with the same colour. For things like sprites you have to keep changing the write mask to the colour of the pixel you are trying to write as you fill video RAM (which would be slow) or you do it plane by plane, which is going to be twice as much data to put in video RAM (16 colours vs 4).
It's GEM2x, GEM1x is much better, but got sued by apple.
was it mentioned that GEM was Atari ST series' default GUI?
Not sure if link to other video is authorized.
Here is what I do with mine.
ua-cam.com/video/jw-d2jrz1Eg/v-deo.html
And my 3 Amstrad PC in action.
ua-cam.com/video/KAmzNRMCclk/v-deo.html
Ya the 1640 had the RGB port rather than the 8 pin DIN like the PC1512 had. Wish I had that chess game for my PC1512 SD. I really don't need a sophisticated game as my chess needs work much like my PC.
Isn't getting a 8086 in 1989 a bit late. I bought my first pc in 1988 and it was 12Mhz 286 with 40MB hard drive, 1MB ram and vga? I thought I was late because 386 PCs were already around when I bought it.
Sure, but they were cheap.
I salvaged an Amstrad PC 1512 SD 20 years ago which has the 20MB HD and 640Kb of RAM. Anyone know where I can download the software for this gem? Mine is sorta orphan in many respects. Great retro video.
As UA-cam won't allow viewers to share links you might not get much response. However, the Internet Archive has a zip file with the system disks in case your physical disks are not working. However, you still need to get them onto 5.25" floppies for which you will need another more recent machine with a floppy drive.
archive.org/details/pc1512_flop.7z/large_cd0408_002_080822_2008_33_4_Amstrad_computer_base_unit.jpg
Scroll down to see where to download the disks.
@@PCRetroTech Thanks guy!!! You made my day!!! 👌
Maybe someone will know... I had a 1512 with HD. All the ones I've seen have a rectangular LED activity light, but mine had a round one. Anyone know what drive that was? It was 20MB IIRC.
I had a 1512 which only had "CGA" graphics, but GEM was in 16 colours. It must have been some custom extension.
That's correct. The PC1512 did have a custom 16 colour mode.
Yes, i have one and if i remember, deluxe Paint works too, 640x200 16 colour. If my memory is correct.
I bought a 1512DD with a Hercules monitor. The cheapest and what I could afford. The screen had a higher resolution than the CGA and the EGA(i think) monitor but was only black and white. To play cga games there was a programme that emulate cga, we had black and white and some "dithering" grays. Later on I also bought an Amstrad 80 column doxmatrix printer. Unfortunately I throw them in the bin when i needed the space but I think I still have my 5.25" disks somewhere.
Yeah maybe now it is possible to afford a 1512DD. Many of those disks probably still work. They do come up from time to time online.
@@PCRetroTech Thinking more about this pc I didn't buy a pc1512 but a pc1640, with hercules display. It cost me about 210000 Escudos (about 1050€) in 1987.
I have an orphan Amstrad PC 1512 SD without the software. Interested in selling your 5.25's?
Amstrad PC was for Europe what the Tandy was for the US
Does Space Station Oblivion take advantage of an FPU? I've downloaded it because I built a Micro8088 and I have an FPU in it (8087) and I wanted to try it out. I've heard the FPU is nigh useless for most stuff of the era as nobody was expected to have one so nobody coded for it.
I don't know. Interesting question. I think it is unlikely, as FPUs were not common back in the day, and it was assumed by most game manufacturers that a home user wouldn't have one, as they were quite expensive. But about this specific game, I don't have further information.
I'm recreating the disk sleeves for the four Amstrad startup disks, but can't seem to find any photos of the rear. Any chance you can share a photo or scan?
Unfortunately I don't have access to those at the moment, so I can't help. They do seem to come up for cheap online in the UK if you can get hold of them there though. Usually they don''t work, but if you just want to get a visual that may be an easy way.
@@PCRetroTech Thanks anyway. I just posted a request on one of the Amstrad forums so I might get lucky. Plenty of photos on the net, but all are of the front. I've seen a couple on eBay UK, but a bit pricey to get them to Australia.
@@austfox2170 Ah I see. Yes, shipping stuff to Australia is pretty expensive. If you still come up with nothing in about a week, let me know again and I'll have access again and might be able to do something.
@@PCRetroTech Someone on the Amstrad forums posted a photo within 3 hours of my request. Yay! I've recreated the disk sleeve, so if anyone can make use of it to print and make their own, head on over to the 'CPC Wiki' forums to grab the PDF file.
@@austfox2170 Great news! Glad you managed to find someone who had them to hand.
Must try some sierra games.
Yeah they work really well on the Amstrad machines.
When did you move to the UK, or is there a UK region that sounds like Australia?
I had it shipped to me from the UK, though I did live there once.
@@PCRetroTech Threw me off when you said "so popular over here in Europe" haha
@@dwindeyer I still live in Europe, just not the UK.
@@PCRetroTech The plot thickens
@@dwindeyer As you correctly guessed, I am Australian.
Hi, Nice machine, reminds me of my first PC compatible - Commodore PC10 512k and 2 x 360 floppy, with a hercules card, some software tools on the install floppy had a utility called simcga so you could play cga games in shades of green - there was about 3 versions of that program
When you mentioned the sturdiness of the case, it reminds me of a younger person asking me why 80's and 90's PC's had the heavy metal case = i told them because beofre towers they were on there side and desktops with a type of fast slip open case on a hinge but more importantly a 40 pound CRT monitor sat on it
Epx and Accolate were top sellers in there day ) test drive was cool ) that Oblivion game i believe is also sold as driller, if i remember later in the game you need to find a console with a code or similar but when viewed from the back end it spelt PEPSI - but it could have been another similar polygon style game
Regards
George
Yes, the game is also called Driller. The Commodore 64 version is a slide show, but people still loved it apparently. I don't know how they made the PC version so smooth.
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 Why do you believe that? The C64 has a dedicated graphics chip (VIC II). Although the CPU runs at a lower frequency, bus access is a lot quicker. I don't see any reason to think the C64 is much slower. Check out the C64 demos out there. There's oodles of stuff we can't do on PC or an 8086 clone machine.
Yes, the 8086 has a 16 bit data bus and runs at 8 MHz not 4.77 MHz unlike the original IBM PC. Those are legitimate reasons the 1640 would be faster. But it doesn't really explain the enormous difference in performance of digger. Presumably available memory is an issue on the C64 or something.
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 I know you can use the latches for fast copy on VGA. I've never checked if this exists on EGA though.
I'd be very surprised if an 8086 could do a mul that much faster than a C64, though yes it does have an instruction for it which is convenient. It has div too, but I doubt it is used at all in a really fast game like this. It is just too slow. As for shifting, the 8086 can only shift by 1 bit at a time efficiently. I don't think there is much advantage there.
It's also surprising that Elite performs badly on a C64. It works so well on a BBC which is also very limited.
As for the scene, there has to be a reason very little has been done on pre 286 PC's and yet so much is done on C64. I'm aware it is all trickery (and I know some of the tricks, obviously). True, real 3D rotation is hard, but we aren't talking about 50/60 fps here or even 2-frame demos. We are talking about just a few frames per second.
Clearly sprites can't help, but I really don't see what would actually help on an 8086 machine with EGA. Bitplanes help a little I guess. I believe both C64 and EGA had vertical retrace interrupts, though I'm not sure whether they were used much on EGA as they were inconsistently implemented by various EGA implementations. I don't think EGA had raster interrupts though. On the other hand I am not sure if they would be useful here.
Naturally Amiga is better than the C64. But this was a 16/32 bit CPU and ran quickly. It had a blitter and the like, correct me if I'm wrong.
You are quite possibly right that there just aren't any tricks on the C64 that really benefit here. But I'm surprised to hear someone say that an 8086 machine does have hardware that helps. It's maybe the first time I've heard someone claim a PC of that era was better than a C64 for something.
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 Yeah that's cool if you can do memcopy on EGA. I should have tried this ages ago, since it is a question I've had for a while. Agreed, it would give you faster polygon fill.
Who is the prolific author that you spoke of that moved to VIC20? I'd be interested in checking that stuff out. By textmode you mean hacked up for a 160x100 graphics mode? Or ANSI text?
8088 MPH is pretty well described as far as 3D goes on Scali's blog. They use a scanbuffer, which I think records the beginning and end of a section of a scanline that should be one colour. Then they can use a fast routine for just writing out all the bytes/words between those two endpoints. All the updating is then done to the scanbuffer I believe. On the other hand, with some of their effects it is not clear to what extent stuff is prerendered when doing 3D rotation. From some calculations and experiments I've done myself, it seems clear that one has to do at least some precomputation. 3D rotations themselves, unless fairly simplistic, have to be computed using sin and cos. Of course you can look the sin's and cos's up in a table, but the arithmetic itself using those values has to be precomputed as far as I can see. That's difficult in a game like Digger, which is precisely why I say it's impressive work. Same for Elite. The fill itself actually doesn't take that much time, though has to be very carefully optimised.
The biggest problem with Digger is those very large areas that have to be filled. It is really hard to come up with an algorithm which just fills around the edges of those triangles (the regions that could have been modified since the last movement) and not in the centres, where likely nothing has changed. [One can do it in the horizontal direction ok, but for almost horizontal lines that move this will not be sufficient.]
I should check out some of these games you mention. I have either forgotten some of these over the years, or never seen them before. And I love looking at games where there is convincing 3D. It is one of my current hobbies, amongst other things.
One really important reason Elite was so optimised is that they used very carefully chosen data structures to store the information. These really saved a lot of bits.
I am not super familiar with the BBC. I recall one of them has two CPUs (unless I've mixed that up with something else) and at least one of them uses the same CRTC as the IBM CGA card.
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 You are from Finland, into the scene but live in Thailand!? Wow! I won't ask.
Yeah Ville-Matias Heikkilä says on his site he is going to fix the world and he has relevant computer experience. Given the experiences I've had this week with automated customer service after locking me out of my accounts with a certain online financial service, I do wonder how he thinks his computer expertise will help with that. LOL.
But I will watch his stuff (thanks for the references), as I somehow missed it in the 90's. Perhaps he was prominent in the early 90's. I only discovered the scene in about 95 when I got internet access having only met one scener by accident before that (I've not managed to identify him since; he was working on the 286 in Tasmania, had a lot of silver coloured text scroller effects that I remember). [In case you go looking, I still don't have any prods myself yet, though I am working on that one.] And I mainly watched stuff from the Assembly competition back then and a couple of other big ones which I've forgotten now.
Revision has an Oldskool compo which has attracted little pre-286 PC stuff so far (other than Same Old Song and 8088 MPH and at least one other that I forgot the name of right now). I often wonder if it is just because it is harder or something like that. Other than these, there's basically just 8088 Domination and 8088 Corruption that I'm aware of, and a few old demos from the one-time "The 8086 Compo", which are mostly single effect "demos". Recently there was PC-jam. There's probably more I'm forgetting, but not much. So much stuff gets traced back to Trixter in one way or another as far as promoting pre-286, Same Old Song being the stand out exception that I know of so far.
Can you perhaps order computer parts from Australia? That should be relatively nearby. Perhaps Japan or China are also possibilities? I guess time is also a major requirement. I can sympathise with that! I'd love to do the demo/retrocomputing stuff full time, but that is currently impossible due to work.
By the way, what is isaes? I assume that was a typo, but I didn't figure out what you meant.
You call this discoloration? My 1512 is actually yellow!!! Nice that you got the 1640 with the EGA display, CGA is nice for a while but besides nostalgia it really sucks compared to the EGA or VGA version of any game if they're available.
Maybe i have been living under a rock (for knowing so little about ms windows pre-3.0) but the mention of "folders and icons is not an invention of Microsoft in case you didn't know" is a joke, right? Pc compatibles until the end of the 80s were never mentioned with a graphical user interface, except in exceptions, WordPerfect, the above GEM, and jokingly with windows 1, 2, idk, any dos shell with mouse support..? Anyway years after Mac, Amiga, Atari ST.
It was said jokingly, but also happens to be true. They were invented in 1981, and not by Microsoft.
@@PCRetroTech Ofc it is true, would anyone think otherwise? You think old or young live under rocks that long? Otoh, there are other problems in the world ;)