Anyone interested in an Amstrad PCW?

Here (UK, where Amstrad are based) there were many ranges of Amstrad computers. The ones I remember started with the CPC464, a home computer with a built-in cassette recorder (so no volume level troubles :-)) and which came with either a greenscreen or colour monitor [1]. Amstrad later sold an RF modulator you could use to connect the machine to a normal TV set and even a TV tuner unit to turn the monitor into a TV. This machine begat the CPC664 and CPC6128 which had built-in 3" disk drives but which otherwise were quite similar [1] IIRC the colour montor had RGB inputs each one of which could be pulled hihg. pulled low, or left floating giving a rather unuusal 27 hardware colours. The PCW series were sold as word processors, they came with a printer (dot matrix or daisywheel depeneding on the model) and word processing software. Byt they were also reasonable CP/M machines. The PC compatibles started with the PC1512 and PC1640 which were PC/XT clones (or at least close to that). One odd feature of these machiens is that the PSU is in the monitor (it's acutally one SMPSU for both the monitor and computer), so you can't easily use any other monitor with said machines. The power connector IIRC was a 14 pin DIN plug. The PPC series were large laptops (large enough to have a full keyboard including the number pad) but with a small LCD display and 1 or 2 3.5" drives. I think I mentioned that machine the other day here. Later PCs were much closer to being normal clones... One advantage of older Amstrad machines is that there were real service manuals avaiable (Amstrad service manual = schematics + parts list + not much else), and they were not expensive. Disadvantages include the fact that they were cheaply made [2] and use a lot of ASICs [3]. [2] One example of this is that one series of PC clones had a battery-backed real time clock. The battery was 4 AA cells in series (not a bad idea), whcih fitted into a holder on top of the machine. But there was no cover on this holder, the battery was covered when you put the monitor on top of the machine. [3] The logic board in a PCW machine contains a large ASIC, Z80, RAM, disk controller, etc, but _no ROM_. There's enough logic in the ASIC to provide a simple bootstrap program to load the first sector from the floppy drive. -tony