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The Amstrad PcW16

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First post, by leecw16

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Howdy Folks,

Seeing how many people had an Amstrad PcW16 back in the day? Was mainly a UK machine I imagine. I bought mine from Dixons as an ex display model. Great little operating system and helped me with my college work. I sold it in the early 00s as I need cash but a few years later bought another on eBay as an homage to the device that got me into computing in general. Still have it and it sits in my office of which I still use now and again for old times sake.

There's not much information online now-a-days although I am going to make a wiki with all the content, history and software I have available for it at some point. Be great to meet other folks that may have a passing interest in the machine 😀

Thanks all!

Lee

Reply 1 of 2, by DudeFace

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these z80 amstrads are probably largely unknown to most people outside UK/europe, though i have seen a few people on here posting amstrad/schnieder pcs, my grandparents had a PCW they got sometime in the 80's i forget which model exactly but it had two floppy drives on the monitor, it was mainly used for typing up documents and printing them out on that old paper with holes down the side, it was literally that, a word processor, i used it often as a kid to type things and print them out 😀

i got my first amstrad as a kid in 92, which was a 6128k with a colour screen then just after a CPC464 keyboard, and then another schnieder CPC464 with a green screen, when my grandparents upgraded to a windows 95 pc they gave me their PCW, i had it for a number of years but dont remember actually using it as there werent really any games for it, when i got my first pc in 98 it got thrown out but i still have some of the disks for it, ive still got my CPC464 and both colour and green screen monitors, my 6128k disappeared some years ago along with half my games which i hope to replace at some point,

there is some info on wiki about some of the various models of PCW but i think thats about it, i heard some people along with alan sugar were talking about opening an amstrad museum, which i think would be awesome, the z80 amstrads were quite capable for their time when compared to other 8bits.

also theres some interesting homebrew for the amstrad CPC/6128, im not sure if they are compatible with the PCW, theres one for taito's space invaders that uses the mame rom and 2 different emulator versions for gameboy that runs tetris using the gameboy rom, both would look pretty good on a greenscreen.

Reply 2 of 2, by Jo22

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Hi there, did you hear about SymbOS already?
It's an Z80 operating system for CPC, PCW/Joyce, ZX Spectrum and other computers of the 80s.
http://www.symbos.de/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ish4ReOjdIw

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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