Cool! Never heard of these.

I'm assuming the 3" drive is the same as in the CPC.

Hardware integrated into the monitor?

I used one of these in the late 80's then after a PCW 9512 with the paper white screen. Locoscript that came with every machine was a great piece of software. Many, many small publishers, authors and newspapers used these machines here in the UK. they were about £400 with software and printer included, that was about 1/4 the price of a PC without a printer.
Amazingly quite a few games were released too, Batman, head over heels and starglider being highlights i remember. I used to really like one called southern Belle, a steam train simulator despite having no interest whatsoever in trains! 🤣
Great to see one again, have fun with it!
Best,
Chris

Cool machine. I remember playing Zork on one of these as a kid.

its a nice Machine, i hope i can transfer some Software soon.
Btw. is it easier to get parts for them in UK ?
i really want a serial interface, but can't find one 😒

OT:
Hopefully UK will stay in EU!
We really need to stick together in EU.
Its no perfect union but we can hopefully patch it some day.

Well I haven't seen one in perhaps a decade and they were once super common here(5 out of 10 computers were PCW's), thing is that the 3 inch drive belts failed and also the CRT's were typical Amstrad quality(cheapest imaginable from the far east at the time) so I imagine most were binned decades ago. Shame as they were really good machines, there was a lot of support for them here into the later 90's, it was the type writer with bells of it's time. I imagine a lot of half finished novels are lost to those 3 innch floppies now!
Amstrad tower Hi-Fi systems were the most popular here too back then, haven't seen one of those for ages either, and they must have sold millions. Sugar always made things of the time, but they didn't last either in quality or fashion.
I have a Amstrad E@mailer+ phone here, it was a really cool device that even played Sinclair Spectrum games, but is nothing more than a doorstop now.

I don't own one myself, but they look really cool!
Almost like the CP/M version of a Macintosh. 😀

Btw, I heard Amstrad used colour monitors with only the green tube actually connected.
No idea if thats true, though.

I believe you can play CGA PC games on this.

I have one of these, but can't get it to work. No idea what's wrong. Monitor powers up, floppy led is ON. If I put any floppy in it, nothing happens 😕

Floppy Belt ? Wrong Systemdisc ?

It was the first PC we had at home - my father brought one from his job about 1988. (he worked in the New York Times, Moscow Bureau)

My was I little different - the 8512 not 8256 it looked the same, had two floppy drives.. I learned basic on it in m childhood, and was very sad, as we didn'nt have any games on it)

Sadly it was lost - when we bought a Pentium-75 machine about 1995, we gave the Amstrad to our friends, who later thrown it out(

Errius wrote:

I believe you can play CGA PC games on this.

No, that would be a Amstrad PC1512, PC1640. The PCW has a Z80 8-bit CPU and CP/M operating system.

kixs wrote:

I have one of these, but can't get it to work. No idea what's wrong. Monitor powers up, floppy led is ON. If I put any floppy in it, nothing happens 😕

That will almost certainly be the floppy disk drive belt, they were failing back in the late 80's when I used these machines at a newspaper. Seems that you can still get replacements from ebay UK,http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/AMSTRAD-PCW-8512-FL … YUAAMXQPatTJbTa I remember changing a good few of these myself back then, it's not too hard.

Best,
Chris

there a few games around, i still did not fit the 3,5" Drive to run some games..

Some flightsimulator:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hRm9zd1v6c

Batman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuALRJyhfgw

On the Run:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF7irNtwqcc

Fairlight:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m8ck0_L56Y

There were lots more than than that, look for Head over heels and southern belle, those were my two faves. Plenty of arcade clones like pac man, invaders etc too.

The PCW was awesome - my first proper computer. I did lots of programming, assembly, word processing, and DTP on it. I've a mouse for mine for use with MicroDesign 2. Admittedly the keyboard was not great (improved in the PCW9512 and later generations), and the printer could have been improved, but it was an absolute bargain.

It supported up to 2MB RAM, more than the original PC! Of course it was all bank switched in 16Kb chunks.

There were addons for serial/parallel interfaces (The 9512 had an inbuilt parallel port), light pens, mice, hard disks (including sharing the disk amongst multiple PCWs), scanners, 8MHz Z80 upgrade, and a sound card.

It shipped with a decent and easy to use word processor, Locoscript, but the inclusion of CP/M together with a powerful, if awkward to use BASIC made it extremely useful. It also included Logo.

Game wise, the only game that supported the rare sound card was Head over Heels, as far as I'm aware. Starglider was the best/only space sim (edit: actually, there were two Tau Ceti games too)

It received native releases of a lot of the Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls games.

Unfortunately it's rather too slow for anything useful. It could possibly be used for period correct adventures/games or a slow speed scrolling terminal. I tried using Zxzvm to run modern interactive fiction, and the wait for it to process commands was too irritating to be offset by using a lovely green screen CRT.

Do you have any Infos about the Z80 Accelrator Board ?

The DK Sound with AY Chip 😀 was used in a lot of computers/arcades.
The CPC used one too ? as far as i know.

May it would nice to have the 2Mb Flash Expansion, CP/M will boot from that and no need for startup disks anymore.
I found already some schematic to make a RS232 Expansion.

The Z80 accelerator (actually a replacement Z80 at a higher speed) was the Cirtech Sprinter, see http://www.fvempel.nl/addon.html

The PCW's expansion port connects directly to the motherboard, so a fair few components can be replaced using it..

It wasn't 2MB flash - it was 2MB RAM. I can't remember if one of the SCSI drives supported booting from it without a boot floppy in the PCW, some of the others needed an addon to CP/M to operate.

It'd be tempting to patch in the soundcard and joystick and play head over heels, but there's not a lot of use for 2MB RAM. Later versions of Microdesign supported it, but it'd be quite slow at that resolution.