Running an Iomega Zip Drive on an Amstrad PPC512/PPC640

I have always found the Amstrad PPC portables to be excellent and useful machines. They are made more useful because they have 3.5 inch floppy drives. However, these drives are limited to 720k and acnnot be upgraded (the hardware simply cannopt drive 1.44Mb floppies). It also isn't possible to fit hard drives to the them either. Extra storage capacity would make the machines much more useable. Having mulled over this for a while, it occured to me that it might be possible to run a 100Mb Zip drive off the parallel printer port. On the face of it, this seems rather mad. Surely, the BIOS cannot support large drives. Next stop was the garage where all my old kit is stored and minutes later I emerge holding a dusty but working ZIP drive.

Let me start by saying that it isn't just a matter of plugging it in and running up the driver disk so read on. You will need to be running MSDOS 5.0 or greater for starters. This is best achieved by using a spare PC and installing DOS 5.0 to the hard disk. Then copy the C:\DOS directory to a spare ZIP disk. Create a 720k bootable floppy using the command SYS and boot up DOS 5.0 on the Amstrad. Extract the following files from the driver disk (CD or floppy) and copy to a 720k disk:-

ASPIIDE.SYS
ASPI1616.SYS
ASPI8DOS.SYS
ASPIATAP.SYS
ADVASPI.SYS
ASPIPC16.SYS
ASPIPPM1.SYS
ASPIPPM2.SYS
GUEST.EXE
GUEST.INI
GUIUTIL.EXE
NIBBLE.ILM
NIBBLE2.ILM

The guest.ini file should then be modified to look like this:-

[----scan for existing aspi managers---]
SCAN=ON
[----Load aspi managers----]
rem ASPI=ASPIIDE.SYS /SCAN /INFO
rem ASPI=ASPIATAP.SYS /INFO /SCAN
rem ASPI=ASPI8DOS.SYS /D
rem ASPI=ADVASPI.SYS
rem ASPI=ASPIPC16.SYS /INFO
rem ASPI=ASPI1616.SYS /SCAN /INFO
ASPI=ASPIPPM1.SYS /INFO FILE=NIBBLE.ILM SPEED= 1
ASPI=ASPIPPM2.SYS /INFO FILE=NIBBLE2.ILM SPEED= 1

This disk should be inserted into drive b: (swap into a: if using a single drive) and canbe called with an autoexec.bat file that looks like this:-

@ECHO OFF
PROMPT $p$g
b:guest
path=c:\dos;a:\
KEYB UK,,a:\KEYBOARD.SYS
a:\doskey

Now attach the Zip drive to the parallel printer port and plug it into the mains. When rebooted, a message will show that the drive has been found and has been assigned a drive letter C: which is then set as the path to the DOS directory on the Zip disk in the autoexec.bat file. Typing DIR at the command prompt after having changed to the C: drive should show the directory of the Zip disk. It is always slow the first time you do it but is a little faster after that. And that's all thers is to it!!! You now have effectively a removable hard drive on the PPC.

OK there are a few things to note. You cannot boot from it so you still need a 720k boot floppy in drive a: at all times. There is a dos utility to format and copy disks called GUIUTIL.EXE on the b: drive floppy and works quite well. If you use ZIP disks formatted on another PC you must ensure it is formatted FAT16 rather than FAT32 (FAT32 is the default on XP) otherwise it won't work on the Amstrad. Software can be installed from floppy using the normal setup routines with the ZIP drive as the C: drive although you may encounter problems if the setup program needs to reboot halfway through. Some MSDOS 5.0 utilities might not work on the PPC (such as MemMaker for exampl which requires a 386 processor). It might be possible to get a ZIP drive working on a PC1512/1640 although transferring MSDOS 5.0 onto 5.25 inch disk might be a challenge. You will also find that ZIP disk access is a little slow so be patient. So all we need now is to run Windows 3.0 on it.

What? Am I mad? Surely, it won't work from ZIP on a PPC? Well I can tell you that it does. However, be warned that it is very ssssllllllooowwww. Running setup from floppy doesn't seem to work. The only way I can get it to work is as follows:-

Install Windows 3.0 on another PC. Copy c:\windows directory to a ZIP disk. Boot up the PPC with the windows zip disk inserted. Change to the c:\windows directory on the zip and run setup and change the display to CGA and switch off the mouse (still trying to get a mouse to work on the PPC). You may need to insert further Windows 3.0 floppies. Windows 3.0 will run...eventually... It is very slow. Takes around 3 minutes to boot Windows and each application takes about a minute to load (like Notepad for example). CGA icons are also a little difficult to make out. But, hey, it works!!!!