I picked up this Amstrad PPC640D from eBay and thought I’d give everyone a quick look inside while I’ve got it apart. It’s a rather nice machine for its age, and considering how long it’s been around, it’s holding up remarkably well. The camera isn’t particularly interested in focusing on any of the chips, but we’ll manage.

Inside there’s a pair of main boards, with one sitting above the other, along with the floppy-drive assembly and a removable modem board. There’s no hard drive fitted in this particular machine. The PPC640 family uses an 8 MHz 8086-2 processor and 640 KB of RAM, with a 16-bit onboard memory bus and an 8-bit peripheral and expansion bus. Amstrad also provided optional support for an 8087-2 numeric coprocessor.

I’ve got plenty more to look into when I find the time, including the various jumpers and configuration options. Just so I don’t forget where to find them later, here are the PPC640 jumper settings. For now, here’s a quick tour of the innards while everything is conveniently spread out.

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