| ★ HARDWARE ★ LES PC D'AMSTRAD ★ AMSTRAD PCW 9512 ★ |
| AMSTRAD PCW 9512 (Micro-Systemes) | AMSTRAD PCW 9512 (8000PLUS) | IT'S NEW STYLE (Popular Computing Weekly) |
Ian Rook gives the once over to Amstrads eagerly awaited successor to the best selling PCW 8256, imaginitively named the PCW 9512. The Amstrad PCW was code-named Joyce, after Alan Sugar's secretary Joyce Caley The machine was designed for secretaries not to replace them All that would be ousted was the Olympia typewriter which hid the waists of the nations typists. Now they are masked up to the designer spectacles by the VDU of the PCW 8256. Soon they will have to find some cushions to see over the top of the new PCW 9512 It is amazing just how successful the PCW has been The reception desk of my local Amiga software house is graced with a PCW; many of the major magazines and newspapers have their text crafted on Amstrads. Even Popular relies on a crowd of Joyces to put the words on your page You'd think that there was not much scope for improvement The PCW is two years old (Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you - blow out .the candles) at this years PCW show You don't get Ford sticking with the same Escort for that long and so the boys from Brentwood (home of Amstrad, just the wrong side of the M25 and too near Southend to pass itself off as civilization) has wheeled out a new model Unlike Ford the old Joyce stays in production but having seen the development costs amortised Ihe price drops to £299 plus VAT. The now machine is Joyce 3 Deduction reveals the Joyce 2 to be the PCW 8512. A machine which looked like an 8256 but boasted 512K RAM and a second 720K disk drive. This also has had its price pruned, to £399 plus VAT. Logic and a sense of fair play dictating that at £499 plus VAT the PCW 9512 with better bits bolted is a step above that. Pretty The PCW 9512 is the prettiest Amstrad machine ever At first glance it appears to be a PC 1512, the colour is the same But this is a deception which is laid bare by a three inch disk drive Then you notice the other differences between the PC case and the new PCW. The monitor does not tilt, but it looks smart with 8512 holes for ventilation The back of the monitor is better styled, and the top slopes sharply This means that the printer will no longer fit on top of the machine but it can go either side of the main unit. Many people found that having the position of the PCW 8256 printer dictated by a short lead was a limitation. The screen is no longer green, white is considered more exectuve. Despite Amstrad's insistence that the screen is paper white the text is white on a black background, not inverted as on a Mac or ZX81. I am assured that the workings of the keyboard are identical to those on the 8256, which m turn rs the same as the 1512 This only goes to show what a different good keycaps make. The PCW 8256 felt cramped, I often hit keys by mistake On the 9512 things are better spaced, the shift keys in particular are easier to get at The large area below the spacebar shows some concern about ergonomics. Anyone who is used to an Amstrad PC will feel at home with fingers on Joyce 3. but if you are used to an earlier PCW things get confusing. The functional keys have been moved from between the QWERTY section and the numenc pad to the' left where they mas querade as PC function keys Formidable The 720K drive has usurped the 180K drive fitted to the elder sister This means that like the 8256 the 9512 is a single drive machine and like the sibling it can be upgraded with the addition of a second drive, but not the same unit A Joyce 3 with dual drives and nigh on 1 5 megabytes of disk storage is a formidable machine Upwards disk compatibility is maintained. so the 9512 will read 180K disks but cannot write to them, and 720K disks from the 8512 are indistinguishable by their sameness The disks are Amstrad standard 3inch, no-one else uses these (OK, so the Tatung Einstein uses them but no-one uses a Tatung Einstein, consequently only Amstrad users buy 3inch disks) Suffice to say that Amstrad have built a standard by being bigger, and like the standards IBM establish in the same manner it s not the best but it works. Thanks to the widespread use of Amstrad disks the price has fallen to £2 99 (only twice the price of an Amiga style 3.5inch disk) from the quite ridiculous £5. Malcolm Miller and his cronies in the Amstrad marketing department have never been modest about the abilities of the Amstrad machines, so having exhausted the terms Near letter quality" on the PCW 8256 printer and "letter quality" on the new LQ 3500 they have been forced to call the daisywheel printer "perfect letter quality" Exaggeration apart the 9512 printer is very good, it may not be the much rumoured 24 pin dox matrix mechanism I expected but it is not as slow as the other sub £1,000 daisywheels of my acquaintance, at about 20 characters per second. The carriage is very wide, and will easily take a sheet of A4 sideways Unfortunately the printer is very big, and not really in keeping with the sleek lines of the system unit The size is essential for using the 9512 with a spreadsheet. On the 8256 you could condense the type, try that with a daisywheel and you end up with a mess Both print wheels and ribbons are freely available The wheels and codes accepted by the printer conform to Diablo 630 protocols, the daisywheel equivalent of Epson compatible Expensive There are some people who will want faster printer, graphics or both For them the PCW 9512 offers a centronics parallel port There is no need for the expensive CPS 8256 interface if you do not want to attach a modem If you do need a serial port then the interface will fit but hangs off the back like an afterthought The 9512 is more of a typewriter replacement than the other Joyces so it is unlikely, that many people will buy CPS's There is quite a price difference between the 8512 and 9512 particularly when you realise that it is the more expensive machine which has fewer disk drives. The price hike is justified by the inclusion of LocoScript 2, the improved wordprocessor from Locomotive Systems in Dorking. LocoScript 2 is sold separately at £20, but the 9512 also comes with LocoSpell and LocoMail. These are sold at £40 each and so the three Justify the extra cost of the 9512 in themselves I d argue that 'Mail and 'Spell have always been disproportionately overpriced. To drive the new printer, and any of the centronics printers you are likely to hang off the back LocoScript 2 has a number of printer drivers. The manual suggests that you will be able to buy printer drivers for additional daisywheels and printers. I'll believe that when I see them on sale LocoScript 2 offers 448 characters which can be printed on a PCW 8256 dot matrix printer. There is no way you will be able to find another printer or combination of daisywheels which can reproduce them all. You cannot attach an 8256 dot-matrix printer to a 9512, they are very different beasts Problems of printer compatibility are one of the reasons why the complete system approach of the PCW works so well Most people will only use the Amstrad supplied printer and daisywheels with the same basic character set. I'd argue that if you really need to do a lot of printer and typeface swapping then you have bought the wrong machine The dot matrix output of the other PCW's is not bad and much more flexible. Repetitive LocoScript is easy to use, you can sit down and quickly produce letters with a little help from the manual. This means that most of the users I've come across learn by doing and so miss out on loads of LocoScript's features. It is worth taking some time to learn about start-of-day disks, which reduce the time it takes to get going when beginning a session. Layouts (despite being very different from LocoScript 1 layouts) simplify the process of getting the page to look right. Blocks and Paste buffers speed up the typing of repetitive documents If time is money then reading the manual is an investment. LocoMail and LocoSpell help increase the value of the system The dictionary for LocoSpell is English, based on Chambers 20th Cdntury Dictionary as used by Scrabble players. Checking is run from inside LocoScript, which speeds up the process, suggestions are offered for incorrectly spelt words and the vocabulary can be increased through Ihe addition of user dictionaries. The best reason for upgrading a PCW 8256 was to use the LocoSpell lexicon The 9512 is already upgraded Useful LocoMail is one of those programs which a few people will find extremely useful and the rest won't touch. Mail merging is complicated It took me nearly a week to get what I wanted from MailMerge for WordStar The lessons of time have meant that Locomotive learnt to make LocoMail easier to use than that but it will still take a couple of dry runs to get what you want It takes a programmer to stretch LocoMail, there are options to test a data file for things like outstanding balances and then insert different texts ranging from "Thank uou for your prompt payment' through "this maount is now outstanding" and up to "Pay up today or we send da Boyz round You choose the text, but the meaning is the same. Most LocoMail users will probably find the nuances of < > and truth tests too confusing. Programming the software is not my greatest reservation, it is the life of the printer You could easily store enough on a 720K disk to mail over 3.000 people with customised versions of the same letter. The PCW printer would have to run for days and nights to get through that lot, only stopping for a new ribbon. This kind of hammering is more than a cheap printer should be ex- All Amstrad PCWs are supplied with CP/M+ Being an old operating system there is plenty of good software, and it is amazing how many companies have benefitted from transferring forgotten products to 3 inch disks. There has even proved to be a market for rival wordprocessors Arnor have scored quite a hit with Protext This runs perfectly on a 9512. although a modicum of printer installation is advisable. CP/M+ has the very useful ability to think of one disk drive as both A and B, swapping the definitions while you swap disks The PCW has a 368K RAM Disk so you could copy files one at a time, but a whole floppy needs the features of CP/M+ As anyone who bought a Jupiter Ace will tell you. no machine is complete without a BASIC interpreter. The language is ideal for running up the odd text processing program or complete accounts system. The PCW is supplied with a wonderful Basic. Mallard Basic was written by Locomotive software to be better than and compatible with Microsoft Basic. Mallard is fast and has a high level of mathematical precision. But it does not have any graphics of its own. You can use add-on graphics, either in the form of the Amstrad supplied GSX routines -which are a nightmare to use. or Ex-Basic from Nabitichi in Liverpool Being a monochrome machine graphics aren't exactly the PCW s long suit. Neither is the sound, a Spectrum-like beep being the best it can muster So Mallard is right for the PCW. What is very wrong is the inclusion of Logo, a mickey mouse language if ever I saw one. pd either needs their head examining or is a teacher Still it looks good in the list of bundled software and the instructions help fill the manual. The manual is large, 624 pages and unlike early PCW manuals is bound like a book This means it will not lie flat. Perhaps this is another way of generating revenue, because after a few weeks of use with a paperweight holding open the key pages so that you can learn how to work headers and footers. The pages make a bid for freedom. Soon the book becomes very loose leaf! The binding apart Amstrad and Locomotive have really learned from the stick they took over the earlier manual The new book is far better illustrated with diagrams showing what happens on the screen and which key to press. I suspect that users who upgrade from an 8256 will find the detail of the new manual tedious, but they should spare a thought for new users. We were all learner drivers once. The PCW 9512 is the best typewriter replacement ever. It is also an OK CP/M+ computer. But if you want a bit of both the 8512 probably represents better value for money. LocoScript 2 is a vast improvement on the original LocoScript, especially when you take into account the inclusion of LocoScpell. Anyone who had reservations about the print quality of the 8256 will now be swayed. After hours there are a host of games, including the best 8 bit version of Starglider. The unanswered question is why no other computer manufacturer has brought out a machine with which to compete. PCW |
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