Driver:pc1640

Amstrad PC1640

PC1640 with Monitor, Disk Drive and HDD

Base Unit with Disk Drive and HDD, RTC Battery Holder visible

This page is dedicated to the Amstrad PC1640 and how to emulate it in MAME

Prerequisites

If you want to emulate the Amstrad PC1640 you will first need the Amstrad PC1640 BIOS Files

As of Mame 0.235 (probably also earlier) I found no changes in the checksums of the BIOS Files compared to the recent version Mame 0.240

Necessary BIOS Roms names and Checksums for Amstrad PC1640

File Name	Size	CRC	SHA1
40044-1 8809.ic132	8192	f1c074f3	a055ea7e933d137623c22fe24004e870653c7952
40043-1 8809.ic129	8192	e40a1513	447eff2057e682e51b1c7593cb6fad0e53879fa8
40044 8738.ic132	8192	43832ea7	eea4a8836f966940a88c88de6c5cc14852545f7d
40043 8738.ic129	8192	768498f9	ac48cb892417d7998d604f3b79756140c554f476
40044 88xx.ic132	8192	6090f782	e21ae524d5b4d00696d293dbd4fe4d7bca22e277
40043 88xx.ic129	8192	9219d0aa	dde1a46c8f83e413d7070f1356fc91b9f595a8b6
40042.ic801	1024	607edaf6	4422c6475596c3881c11b6a6266811c336d55d19
40100.ic913	32768	d2d1f1ae	98302006ee38a17c09bd75504cc18c0649174e33

These files are necessary to emulate the Amstrad PC1640.

As it is policy that no Rom Files are distributed here , please use your googleFu (or whichever search engine you prefer) to find an Internet Archive of these Files.

They can be placed directly in Mame's Rompath or you can put them in .7z or .zip archives (named pc1640.zip/pc1640.7z)

System Disks EN,FR,DE

After you succeeded finding the roms, you will still need something to put into the "Disk Drive"

I am happy to provide the set of necessary disks here

Amstrad PC1640 System Disks EN,FR,DE

This Archive can be places either in the same Rom Folder where the BIOS resides or to keep a better overview in a separate directory referenced in the rompath inside mame.ini (Note the _flop appended to the archive name to sign mame that this archive contains floppies for the specified device)

How to use them will be covered in the next chapter

Boot from Disk

'Prerequistes reachable by Rompath in mame.ini

Rom Bios Files

System Disks

1. Let us start with booting up the Amstrad for the first time, For this example I've choosen the 20MByte version (any would do here)

   cd <your Mame Directory>
   mame pc1640hd
   

2. You will be greeted with this shows that you got the BIOS Files at the correct location, you can simply press any key now
3. and will now be shown a warning
4. you can simply press a key again to get rid of it and after a few moments the emulated device will ask you for a boot disk You need to enter UI enabled mode now which is by default done by pressing the <Scroll Lock> Key (again to turn it off later) this allows you to press <tab> to bring up the Mame Menu
5. Outside of UI enabled mode pressing the <tab> key will simply send <tab> to the emulated machine ( it will still do this in UI enabled mode, so be aware of inputs going to the device when inside of the menu! ). Now inside of the Filemanager Menu select the Floppy Disk Drive as target
6. and then we select an image from the Softwarelist
7. next step is and the disk is nearly in the drive:
8. 
9. last step now Select Disk 1 here.
10. Now you can leave the Mame UI by pressing <ESC> (do not press too often or you are closing the Mame Process!)
11. Congratulations you made it if you see

System Hard Disks

While with the provided System Disks you can create your own harddisk installation, I am planning to provide here Basic Installations in all three available languages.

How to create your own PC1640 HDD

1. Have the prerequisites ready #Prerequisites #System Disks EN,FR,DE
2. Create your Harddisk Image first (I choose pc1640_hdd.chd as filename)

   cd <your Mame Directory>
   chdman createhd -tp 6 -o pc1640_hdd.chd
   

   Output should lool like

   chdman - MAME Compressed Hunks of Data (CHD) manager 0.240 (mame0240)
   Template:     Seagate ST-225
   Output CHD:   pc1640_hdd.chd
   Compression:  none
   Cylinders:    615
   Heads:        4
   Sectors:      17
   Bytes/sector: 512
   Sectors/hunk: 8
   Logical size: 21,411,840
   

3. Start up Mame with your Empty Harddisk (follow #Boot from Disk ) Note we use the Device with Harddisk now!

   mame pc1640hd20 -harddisk1 pc1640_hdd.chd
   

4. You should have reached step 11 from chapter #Boot from Disk now
5. Now we have to initialise the fresh Harddrive, Enter

   fdisk
   

   inside the Mame Window and press <ENTER>

   

6. Select 1 here and confirm to use the entire Disk
7. You are requested to have a Boot Disk in Floppy Drive and press any key to reboot (You should still have it there so nothing to do here for you)
8. You should be back at the DOS Prompt now, if you wish to do so you could start fdisk again and us option 4 to check the new partition, the next step will be to format the drive and copy a boot sector to the harddrive

   format c: /s
   

   
9. Confirm to proceed with formatting
10. now we have formatted 20MByte Harddisk with bootable system

Basic Mame handling of PC1640

Useful Keyboard Shortcuts

While using Mame it is always good to have these ready, note that inside the emulation the keys are not recognised by Mame until you enable UI mode!

Keyboard Shortcuts

Key	Description (UI enabled Mode!)
<Scroll Lock>	Switch UI enabled/disabled
<ESC>	Exit Mame
<F3>	Soft Reset
<TAB>	Open/Close Mame Menu
P	Pause Emulation

Supported versions of Amstrad as of Mame 0.240

get a list of available Amstrad PC1640 versions in Mame:

cd <your Mame Directory>
mame pc1640 -listclones

the output will give this information (without Notes column and minues the first row)

Name:	Clone of:	Notes
pc1640		PC1640 Single Disk version
pc1640dd	pc1640	PC1640 with Two Drives
pc1640hd20	pc1640	PC1640 with Disk Drive and 20 MByte HDD (pictured on this page)
pc1640hd30	pc1640	PC1640 with Disk Drive and 30 MByte HDD (pictured on this page)

Knowns issues =

References

Technical Manual

Links

Amstrad PC1640 on Old-Computers.com

Museum Group. Amstrad PC1640 computer. Y2008.33.5Science Museum Group Collection Online. Accessed February 14, 2022.