Amstrad PC1512 System Disks

One of Amstrad‘s earliest machines, the first computer I ever owned in fact, was the PC1512. An 8086 8mhz desktop machine with 512k of RAM, CGA graphics, and a unique base/monitor setup where the monitor acted as the power supply for the computer. My machine had the base standard 5.25″ floppy drive and no hard drive, although more expensive models had twin floppy drives or even a 10mb or 20mb hard drive!

The machine came bundles with a set of “System Disks”, colour-coded 5.25″ floppies that contained the needed operating system and utilities. The disks contained:

  • Disk 1 (MS-DOS): Red
  • Disk 2 (GEM Startup): Blue
  • Disk 3 (GEM Desktop & Locomotive BASIC2): Green
  • Disk 4 (DOS Plus & GEM Paint): Yellow
  • Disk 5 (Hard Drive Utilities): Maroon

Machines like mine, with no hard drive, only came with four disks.

These disks were unique to the Amstrad PC1512, and are quite rare to find online. Retro computing enthusiasts and nostalgic Amstrad fans looking to restore an old Amstrad PC1512 unit or emulate that model computer in a virtual machine such as PCEm need these disks for the full, official experience. Yet while the first four disks are rare, Disk 5 is nearly impossible to find!

I am therefore providing a set of all five floppy disks here in the form of IMA images, along with instructions on how to use them on a real or virtual Amstrad PC1512 PC.

Although still technically copyrighted, Amstrad as it was is long no more, and all the included OS and applications are *very* out of date and useless on modern machines. I hope given this, nobody minds me making these disks available.

Note that while disks 1-4 are true images of the original floppy disks, disk 5 is a “reconstructed” image as the only source I could find for it was the “loose” files/contents in an archive rather than an actual image file. The disk should work as if original, however, and has been tested.

The included readme contains much more information on this package, it’s history, my own notes and how to use it.

Download Links:
Amstrad PC1512 System Disks

4 comments

    1. I *believe* it uses a special keyboard and mouse. Mine is in storage and I don’t even know if it will boot anymore (I have the keyboard and mouse still, and the monitor, but I suspect the monitor is dead and it is needed to power the 1512) however I have seen a few posts of people not being able to use standard PS/2 keyboards or mice, or even serial mice, with many Amstrads.

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  2. Thank you very much for uploading those disks. I also own an Amstrad PC 1512 but it doesn’t work and shows a ram error when I try to boot it. I’m going to try to repair it but right now I want to use it in an emulator and I’ve been all the afternoon searching for the disks (including the fifth one) and I’ve finally found it in this website.

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  3. Thank you SO MUCH for these. My first computer was a Sharp MZ-80K. Just about got this emulated but my (IT course in UK) University computer (shows my age!) was an Amstrad PC1512 DD (B/W CGA16!). IT company (who sponsored me) provided me with RAM (to 640k) and an 8087. Later swapped one 5.25″ floppy for 720k 3.5″ floppy and the other for a 30MB(!) RLL hard disk (ISA card controller). I abandoned GEM and just ran MS-DOS on it. I had (pukka but scrounged) Pascal and Fortran compilers, TopSpeed Modula-2 (multi-threading!) IDE, word processors, spreadsheet, Kermit (file transfer), terminal emulator (for VAX 8650 VAX/VMS used by all students), Gopher (precursor to web pages) and FTP client. I still have the MZ-80K (working!) but alas I got rid of the Amstrad PC1512. Will be fun to try to crank up DOS/GEM again!

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