Amstrad PCW 8256. Do you have any idea what this is?

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Vipp

Vipp

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Hi all.
Some years ago when i was a lot younger and around the same time Peter Jackson made Meet the Feebles i was helping a family member clean out a garage attached to a house they were newly renting. In said garage was a computer so odd to me that in all the years i remember it i never bothered to ask if anyone could tell me what it was because i was sure it would never have made it to the mainstream user. Scrappysphiny yet again prooved me wrong and like a dog to a bone he not only told me what the computer was but had me links to photos, explained what the floppy disks were and also said that i might be able to find someone who has experience of this machine right here on Amibay.

So the question is, now i know what the machine is called what does it do? all i can remember is finding a handful of bootable disks that all held local countycouncil documents on them describing nothing important at all.... for that reason i never thought it to be anything more than an office prototype pc.


Can anyone give me a rundown of this machine and what it does? i found a Batman game on Feebay (Super Rare of course!) but i can't imagine playing a game with a green screen?

Thank you for anyone sharing their knowledge and memories.
 
sweet

sweet

Thanks Roy, i have some reading material i am currently working through, it would be nice to hear some hands on advice also if anyone has any with his machine? After reading for a while i can understand why the material on the disks would have been work related. (not sure how they ended up in a shed).
I might see if i can track one of these machines down, i have no use for it really other than getting to see one again but it was the first PC style computer i had ever seen at that point and i remember being impressed by it.
 
i dont really remember much about these,but i have seen a 512kb machine thats all i remember at the moment.:)
 
They were even games made for this machine, many of them were Spanish made, here is a short list :

http://computeremuzone.com/?id=pcw


Thant games were mainly adaptations from speccy games, thus with monochrome graphics.

You'll find some more famous classic eighties games such as Batman.

Appart from that the PCW AFAIK was mainly a Z80 CP/M OS based machine mainly intended for office purposes with word processing as its main role.

Kinda of an electronic typewriter on steroids or a cheap office PC (much cheaper than an MSDOS based IBM XT clone + printer at that times). :)
 
Ah. The machine known as Joyce.

It was a z80 machine that ran cpm. It used the same disks as the amstrad 6128, and a few titles were cross-compatible. Its floppy drive was in the monitor this time.

It could be upgraded to 512kb and dual floppy.

Its target audience was the small business. I have a feeling it came with everything needed, which seemed to be amstrads general philosophy at the time.

It only had a green screen as its main function was word processing, spreadsheets... general office stuff. Colour wasn't needed so, to keep costs down, it wasn't provided.

Games did come out for it, as they do for all business platforms. Remember the IBM pc? That ended up with some games on it too.

In the amstrad world, green screens were common. Parents would buy their children an amstrad as it was often cheaper than a tv and spectrum-c64-etc and it wouldnt hog the family tv. This was 1984 remember?. Tellys were expensive. Again, green screens were common due to the price... some £100 less than their colour equivalent.
 
I used one back in 1994
Running Word Star ? on an
Information Technology Course

They must have been badly funded
because a course I went on in 1990
had better machines.
 
lostrego said:
Kinda of an electronic typewriter on steroids or a cheap office PC (much cheaper than an MSDOS based IBM XT clone + printer at that times). :)
Click to expand...

Yeah they came bundled with the printer too. Thought they were a solid seller for amstrad.
 
They were indeed a solid seller for Amstrad. If you can believe their site, they sold 8 million units, the CPC sold 3 million.

http://www.amstrad.com/products/archive/index.html

I like the green monitor and the resolution is brilliant (720x256), but then I had a CPC with a green monitor in the 80s so I'm quite used to it.
Amstrad green monitors supported the high resolution well with a sharp picture, a CPC colour monitor for example happens to be a bit less clear in mode 2 (the high resolution 640x200 mode on the CPC).
 
If you can't imagine playing games on a Green Screen you are missing out on a valuable development of video gaming!

I had an Amstrad 1512 with green screen that I had Bruce Lee on and it was in Green Screen :D Was epic! :D The monitor I had wasn't a green screen but there was a little button that switched the screen from black and white into green! :D haha. Brilliant.
 
I remember seeing these in the Argos catalogue in the 1990's maybe 93-96, If I remember right they were advertised as word processors & I think the appeal was that they came bundled with a printer, If my memory is right (could be wrong, lol) there were about 3 models all very similar.
 
I've got one of these with boxes and boxes of books, magazines, disks, dual 3.5" drives, spare printer, hand scanner, mouse, and various other odds & sods that I picked up a while ago, and still not (as is the way with a load of my retro stuff) had a chance to unbox it all and play with it properly.

When I collected it, it filled up the entire boot and back seat space of a Mk4 Ford Fiesta.

I had one years and years ago and used to busy myself writing various daft games and things in Locomotive BASIC. Kept me amused through a 6 month spell of unemployment, that did. :)
 
I have a soft-spot for the CPW series, and should I find one locally I shall nab it and claim it my own!

Head-over-Heals PCW + DK sound
[m]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7HsI460U2U[/m]

I am sure I remember reading something about adding colour to the CPW range... I shall google - although if there was anyone one fellow member on here that would know it would be Bryce
 
We had some of these at school, I dont think they ever got used. I vaguely remember some maths type program on them, and the word processor, and thats about it.

I do remember that other than that one maths lesson, I dont think anyone used them, we used the bbc in the re room more (as I had a beeb at the start of secondary school and therefore had quite a few games :)
 
Thanks!

Thanks!

Thanks everybody for that response, i have a much better understanding of it now. I think i also might have missed out on green screen games so i will be looking to track some down. The head over heels game Zetro posted above is actually a nice looking and sounding game.
 
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