Driver:pc1640

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Amstrad PC1640

PC1640 with Monitor, Disk Drive and HDD
PC1640 with Monitor, Disk Drive and HDD
Base Unit with Disk Drive and HDD, RTC Battery Holder visible
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

Picture of Amstrad PC1640 System Disks EN,FR,DE 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

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

You will be greeted with Mame greets you with the selected hardware info this shows that you got the BIOS Files at the correct location, you can simply press any key now and will now be shown a warning Most devices in Mame are not 100% perfectly emulated yet you can simply press a key again to get rid of it and afte 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 Select the Filemanager here

System Hard Disks

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

Basic Mame handling of PC1640

Supported versions of Amstrad as of Mame 0.240

get a list of available Amstrad PC1640 versions in Mame: [code] mame pc1640 -listclones [/code]

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.