Why did you NOT upgrade to a CPC in the 80s?

[Joefish]

Space Harrier with outlines instead of scaling sprites - ha ha ha!

I did admire some games on a friend's CPC - Nemesis and Gauntlet particularly. But the Amstrad marketing approach - you have to buy our over-priced under-specced monitors or else - was just Sugar's typical barrow-boy gobsh*te marketing that was a total turn-off. It needed more processor speed to shift its screen memory around and it just didn't have it.

If more games used the four-colour high-res mode it may have got more interest from Speccy users, but it didn't. And chunky brixels in more colours is a weak trade-off for resolution. It's certainly not an 'upgrade'.

In general, small printed screenshots looked better than both Spectrum or C64, but playability wise, it just didn't have it. This guy is clearly completely oblivious to slowdown. And conveniently forgets pricing too. The only 'upgrade' was it you wanted something for DTP, in which case the 6128 was a definite lead, for at least a couple of years. But we could already see the ST and Amiga dropping in price and they let you use a colour telly.

(Yes, I know now that a TV modulator existed for the Amstrad, but you still had to buy at least the green-screen CPC first. They didn't sell it as a home colour TV bundle).

[Alessandro]

CPC? What's that? Codice di Procedura Civile? (*)

Seriously though, Amstrad was known in Italy mostly for rebranding low-end hi-fi and car stereo systems in the 1980s, so that their home computer range did never take off here. Neither did their business machine one, for the strong presence of Olivetti on the national market - Olivetti was one of the main computer manufacturers in Europe then, before Carlo De Benedetti made a mess of it. Like Ralf wrote about Poland, the CPC was pretty much known as the 464 model here, and generically called "l'Amstrad" ("the Amstrad"). This was also, very likely, the main reason of the little success of post-Sinclair Research Spectrums in the country.

Well, "known" is quite a big word in this case; again, the 464 was almost unheard of here. Consider that none of the many ill-famed "tape magazines" containing hacked, (often badly) translated and renamed games ever contained software of any kind for it, not even homebrew. Only once I saw one with my own eyes, when I visited a classmate's friend around 1991. He had a 464 running Renegade, and I thought it was nice to look at, but still preferred the Spectrum version.

As of now, I have very little, if any at all, experience with the 464. I see our Spanish amigos are making some interesting games for it nowadays, but with due respect, I do not feel like downloading an emulator and trying them. I guess it just does not "resound" anything with me.

(*) Civil Procedure Rule. That's what the CPC acronym stands for in Italian...

[Manu128k]

@Manu128k Do you mean me with "he is trolling a bit" because I made this thread, or the French guy?

I meant the french guy. He seems to be a (way too much) hardcore Amstrad fanboy

You can enjoy your platform of choice without degrading the rest, I guess

[Joefish]

Ask him why he thinks Amstrad 'upgraded' to flogging Spectrums first chance they got?

The Amstrad was the answer to every Spectrum owner's question, "What if my Speccy had a better colour display?", and the answer was, "It'd be slow and crap, because the CPU isn't fast enough to update any more than it already has".

Although I don't recall ever asking myself, "But what if it also came with unnecessary and expensive hardware lock-in?"

[Pegaz]

Here is someone's CPC vs Spectrum games comparison and also nice set of best homebrew titles.
I played that #1 Orion Prime p&c adventure, an amazing quality game.

[berarma]

The CPC wasn't that great in comparison. Maybe it was for serious work but not for games and we know those computers were bought mainly for the games.

The only improvement was in the graphics (compared to the ZX Spectrum 128K) and it still had drawbacks. In screenshots and videos it may seem the CPC is visually superior, but the lag and jerkiness of the movement was sometimes pretty bad.

CPC users blame bad porters for the laggy games but they need to accept that the CPU and memory are almost the same, and the graphics need more memory. That means animations require moving a lot more bytes, and more memory is required to store the graphics. The more optimized Spectrum games couldn't work at the same framerates in the CPC. It simply wasn't possible to move more bytes at the same speed with a CPU at the same clock frequency.

Games with not many things moving on the screen, slow action or low performance requirements could work well, but other games would have had to reduce the size of the graphics to achieve the same speed.

The C64 had hardware sprites and scroll, and that helped, but it still dragged a bit because it was harder to program and the hardware also imposed some limits of what could be done.

The Spectrum hadn't the best graphics but games could be faster and snappy because of the simplicity of the hardware implementation and that's also important when playing games.

[Vampyre]

Simple.

1. I had no interest in it whatsoever. Saw a few games running - thought they mostly looked like Speccy stuff with some added colour and as I was using a B&W TV up until the late 80's there was no benefit there - and didn't the CPC's require either a green-screen (yuck) or colour monitor anyway (i.e. no TV connection - honestly can't remember).

2. (The most important point) No one, other than the school weirdo, owned one. So a distinct lack of games to swap or copy.

I think I know about the French guy that XTM is referring too. I may even have replied to his comments when asking about why no-one really purchased one, from a UK perspective. Complete and utter waste of breath. The guy is a complete and utter fanboy who will listen to nothing other than the sound of his own voice. Tries to reply with "FACTS" which hold no water whatsoever. I quickly escaped out of that conversation - not that it even was a conversation - just a rant.

[Joefish]

Your personal views will be very interesting to read.

That's your mistake right there - allowing for other people to have had different experiences to you.
Classical error. You clearly don't belong in the comments section at all.

[XTM]

Nice, this thread has picked up while SC was not reachable (to me at least) for a few hours.

I'm not going to respond to every post, but it seems that generally you guys simply were not convinced by what you saw or didn't have the money to "upgrade" or considered the 16-bits as the better option. Hmm, I'm sure ol' Frenchie would get whiplash from all the head-shaking that ensued if he were to read your replies. Speccy versions never ran at better framerates than the CPC ones and thus possibly were more responsive, what are you people smoking? Just look at all the emulator footage on YouTube that gives you the 100% correct 50 Hz experience I guess I'll have to grab a few dozen of those Specsaver vouchers and take them with me on my next DeLorean tour of early/mid 80's Euope

The French guy in question, you'll find him easily when you spend enough time on YouTube looking at ZX- or ZX-vs-other-version related videos, in fact one of the spoiler quotes I took was from the ZX/CPC game comparison video Pegaz posted a few posts above.

Also @Vampyre, yeah I saw that "dialogue" between him and you, that's how I found your channel (Bloodbourne videos were the giveaway). I guess us and him will have to agree to disagree, sadly us blind Speccy user literally can't see the light ...

2. (The most important point) No one, other than the school weirdo, owned one. So a distinct lack of games to swap or copy.

Well, that is because philistines like you didn't buy it right after it was released, so you held it back. Shame on you!

Oi @Joefish, you wrote that while I was typing up this reply here. Yeah, having a different experience, "how dare you"?

[AndyC]

but I recently read somewhere, that even now there are only a small number of people who are able to use the full potential of the 6845 CRTC chip, like works of Batman group, for example.

For the most part, that's demo code bravado. Exploiting some of the quirks of the 6845 and getting it to work on all the different variations is certainly a bit niche, but it wasn't something you actually had to do in order to make games for the machine. And most of the "well known" techniques are now so widely documented that basically anyone can use them quite easily.

[AndyC]

CPC users blame bad porters for the laggy games but they need to accept that the CPU and memory are almost the same, and the graphics need more memory. That means animations require moving a lot more bytes, and more memory is required to store the graphics. The more optimized Spectrum games couldn't work at the same framerates in the CPC. It simply wasn't possible to move more bytes at the same speed with a CPU at the same clock frequency.

This is a common assumption, but it's not quite as true as the raw numbers make it appear. For example, when drawing sprites on the Speccy you typically have a monochrome bitmap and then a secondary mask to handle the transparent parts (because trying to draw.sprites any other way ends up looking sh*te). On the Amstrad, you can get away without the mask and just treat one of the inks as transparent (usually colour 0), the end result of which is that sprites actually take up the exact same amount of memory on both machines. And there are other techniques, such as colour-planing, which you can use in the 16 colour mode to allow you to XOR graphics onto the screen and not see visible corruption (see Mission Genocide) at the expense of trading the number of usable colours.

Being able to hardware scroll the screen, as well as double buffer it, also opens up other possibilities for reducing the amount of drawing you actually needed to do. Especially so on 128K machines (honestly Amstrad would've been a lot better off if they'd never released the 64K machines but hey ho).

[Joefish]

They'd have been better off if they didn't try and saddle every customer with a monitor they simply didn't want, and certainly didn't want to pay for.

We know Amstrad were making them cheaper than most monitors, and then tapping the power supply of the monitor to power the computer, and pushing a cassette deck on you you didn't need if you had one already, or over-charging for a sub/non-standard disk drive, so you were being conned into paying more on at least three fronts. It was a smart way of keeping manufacturing costs down, just like those Hi-Fis that came in a big box moulded to look like stacked units, but it was just a big empty case with a PSU in one corner, a dirt-cheap amplifier circuit in the other, and a record deck motor poking out of the top.

When he was doing that with Hi-Fis, if you didn't have any of that stuff it still represented a cost saving to the consumer over more expensive options, as well as a good profit gouge for Amstrad. But when it came to his computers, most homes already had a colour display (TV) and some sort of cassette player, so it was just over-priced junk you didn't need. If you wanted a computer and were going to set it up permanently, with maybe a TV bought specifically for it, then it made sense to buy the lot as a bundle. But most families just wanted the cheapest possible route, and that wasn't it.

[PeterJ]

And most of the "well known" techniques are now so widely documented that basically anyone can use them quite easily.

Please could you point us in the right direction for the documentation. I would be interested in reading it (although it will probably go over my head!). Thanks

[Lee Bee]

While I do have a fondness for the CPC (all computers of the era have their charms), and I like Mr Sugar, I never had any interest in a CPC and felt my Speccy was way superior…

1. The graphics seemed hugely inferior to the Spectrum, with games either being low-res of only having 4-colours
2. I really hated the look and feel of the model. It had a really uncool "blocky" design (perhaps to match the graphics?)
3. The only CPCs I saw running at the time had nasty little monitors which seemed "old-fashioned" and really put me off
4. I never liked the audio. In my memory, CPCs had audio that was both "deep and depressing" AND "tinny", perhaps due to the monitor
5. Knowing little about CPCs, this could be total ignorance, but as a kid, I didn't feel there was anywhere near as much support for the machine or as many titles as the Speccy
6. Personally I LIKE attribute clash. I'm not keen on having tons of different colours crammed into small areas. The Speccy looks more elegant to me.
7. Overall, the Amstrad just didn't seem as hip, fresh, funky, happening and fun as the Speccy. It felt more like an "old person's computer" somehow.

To me, the ONLY thing that really appeals to me about CPCs are the inclusion of orange and sky blue in its colour palette. That's definitely a strong advantage, and gives the Amstrad a certain warmth and connection to nature that's lacking from the Speccy. (FYI, here's how I'd change the Spectrum's palette.)

[berarma]

This is a common assumption, but it's not quite as true as the raw numbers make it appear. For example, when drawing sprites on the Speccy you typically have a monochrome bitmap and then a secondary mask to handle the transparent parts (because trying to draw.sprites any other way ends up looking sh*te). On the Amstrad, you can get away without the mask and just treat one of the inks as transparent (usually colour 0), the end result of which is that sprites actually take up the exact same amount of memory on both machines. And there are other techniques, such as colour-planing, which you can use in the 16 colour mode to allow you to XOR graphics onto the screen and not see visible corruption (see Mission Genocide) at the expense of trading the number of usable colours.

Being able to hardware scroll the screen, as well as double buffer it, also opens up other possibilities for reducing the amount of drawing you actually needed to do. Especially so on 128K machines (honestly Amstrad would've been a lot better off if they'd never released the 64K machines but hey ho).

I'm talking about writes to memory, masks could be handled in registers. And many Spectrum games did without masks, using XOR or simply using an empty background, effectively doubling the throughput over the CPC.

The hardware scroll support in the CPC wasn't great AFAIK. I think it moved in 8 pixel blocks and getting better scroll resolutions required complicated tricks. With only 64KB of memory it would be even more of a challenge to use. I don't have first hand knowledge about this but the CPC wasn't known for its smooth and fast scrolling games.

Most games wouldn't be able to take advantage of the tricks you mention with full effect and the few which could would only have 3 colours available or ugly rectangular pixels. A well optimized Spectrum game would always be able to run at a faster speed than the Amstrad even though the graphics wouldn't look so great maybe. Graphics weren't great on either machine and the advantage of the Spectrum on speed made it better for action games, IMO.

The CPC, like the Spectrum, was oriented towards the business market. Thus, it lacked better video hardware for games. They were oriented towards screen character handling. But the Spectrum video implementation was using so little memory that the CPU could do more with less.

[spider]

Me too. Square characters had a maximum of four colours (from BASIC). The BBC had the same issue. If you wanted more than four colours on screen you had to resort to the low resolution mode. Although I remember being very excited about the included screen and early games like Sorcery. We only had one TV at home.

I had also invested money on Spectrum software (and had a positive view on Sir Clive as I had owned a ZX81) and enjoyed reading the magazines.I can't imagine my parents agreeing to buy me a new computer again! If I was picking my first computer, I may well have picked an Amstrad. Based on the games and magazines (Amtix lasted for just 18 issues) support, i think I would have been eventually disappointed by that choice.

If Amstrad has squeezed more colours into that 320 x 200 mode, then combined with the excellent BASIC I think it would have been a game changer.

Finally, the view on Amstrad in the 80s wasn't very positive. They were known for cheap hi-fi systems.

Most of these points apply to me.

Had a decent (original!) software library. I never really noticed any Amstrad magazines but our local little newsgents rarely had all three of our ones in , in fact I'm ashamed to admit I did not know about ZX Computing magazine until much later!

I will say although the startup colour choice (yellow ink on blue paper) was likely chosen as a sane compromise for those with a greenscreen monitor*** too, I could put up with that. However the font / charset even to this day pains me, its like its had one of those "thicken" routines applied to it, it just looks nasty imo in the default mode 1.

Mode 2 is better for writing Basic or code directly I think. Mode 0 reminds me of BBC Mode 2 actually. Nothing wrong with that.

I do think there was quite a bit of potential in the machine, it supported a lot of ROM's for instance as I recall but unlike the B there was no internal space for them.


*** Ah yes, originally you had to buy it with a monitor at a eye watering (to my teenage mind) price. I understand later models came with a TV modulator on the PSU too. Not an issue these days I know.

[Turtle_Quality]

Despite having many friends that played computer games, quite a few in the business, and having been to plenty of trade shows, I've only ever had one encounter with a CPC.

I was in John Menzies in Uxbridge and a CPC had just been put on display, all plugged in with the manual beside it. "Hmm... let's see what it can do" I thought. I typed on a few lines of basic designed to make some sound effect, then entered "RUN"

Immediately there was a loud, crystal clear sound of an alarm clock from above my head, in stereo. Impressive. Then I heard "Hello shoes" in the unmistakable voice of Neil from the Young Ones. The staff had started playing his "Hole in My Shoe" single over the store sound system.

And the CPC was showing some syntax error. There was some vinyl on special offer, I got distracted. Thus ended my only CPC encounter.

The answer is well covered here, but basically if an 8 bit machine was not on the market by '82 in the UK, it was already too far behind - everyone that wanted a home computer had a Spectrum or C64 (and a few rich kids had BBCs). That covered all my friends (a few had earlier machines also - Acorn Electron, ZX81, Vic20 )

So I could have spent several times the cost of my Spectrum on a machine that had a monitor I didn't need, had relatively fewer games, I would had to relearn to program games, then none of my friends could have played the resulting games. But I passed

To be worth upgrading there needed to be a big leap, the CPC certainly wasn't that.

And personally, I loved a lot of the things other people described as shortcomings on the Spectrum - the rubber keyboard, the keyword entry with syntax checking, the simple beeper

[XTM]

They'd have been better off if they didn't try and saddle every customer with a monitor they simply didn't want, and certainly didn't want to pay for.

I remember reading a comment by an Amstrad user along the lines of "while we were using our CPCs, a lot of Speccy/C64 users weren't, because dad wanted to watch football/Mum wanted to watch Eastenders".

I still believe if Mr. Frenchie were to read all the replies so far, he'd still be shaking his head, because some of you might be slightly ill-informed due to not having had actual first-hand personal CPCs experience, and by that I mean more than just watching it in a shop and messing around with its BASIC for 15 minutes.

Well, I'm not really taking any sides despite having been a Speccy owner, I want this to be objective, as hard as it feels. Here's some food for thought:
I'm probably one of the rare cases on this forum who grew up with both computers. We got our first (used) 16k Speccy in 1984 or 1985, I shared it with my older brother. Shortly after (end of 1985 or so) he got a CPC 464, and a few months later I got a 48k Speccy. We both upgraded to a CPC 6128 w/disk drive and Speccy +2 respectively around 1987/1988.

So I got to play numerous games on both computers and saw them at the *real* frame rate, not the one you see on YouTube videos. I mean, how many of us have the "environment" that will allow us to see things exactly as it was on the old computers? My monitor only does up to 60 Hz, so I'll not get to see any Speccy/C64/Amstrad stuff the proper way as there will always be some mismatch, be it sped-up video footage, skipped frames, you name it. My monitor won't switch itself to 50 Hz even when a YouTube video says "720p50" or "1080p50" and I select full screen (I'm not even sure if I can set this monitor to 50 Hz, I simply never tried as I had no reason to).

I assume this is fine with a monitor that can do multiples (100/200 Hz) of 50, provided the footage on YouTube etc. was properly recorded at 50 Hz. And I'm sure CPC/Speccy games will look a bit smoother under these circumstances. What I'm really trying to get at here is, if you've not had actual CPC experience back in the day and only base your views on what you've seen on YouTube, then you will certainly do the machine a disservice as games will likely look a little jerkier than the real deal - which of course will be bad if the game already had a shoddy frame rate to begin with. Of course, it goes the same way the other way round, as I doubt Mr. Frenchie has seen many Speccy games on original hardware, therefore his impression of Speccy games is likely also slightly flawed by this.

Also, I've seen many amazing CPC scene demos starting back in the late 80s which already used a lot of the hardware tricks that you only see being used in the more recent (last 10 years or so) games. Tons of stuff moving around the screen, updated at 50 fps, no jerky scrolling, all 27 colours on screen with no colour clash etc. Certainly far above anything you can do with the Speccy, I'm just being honest and realistic here. But of course these were "just" demos, and not the games that we all were in it for back then. Still, this is what my view on the CPC is also based on, not just the terrible Speccy ports. The CPCs graphical potential is amazing if used well.

But since I already had a brother owning a CPC, I had no reason to get one myself. "Best of both worlds" and all that. I still liked my Speccy a lot and had already gotten used to its quirks.

[Pegaz]

The CPC, like the Spectrum, was oriented towards the business market. Thus, it lacked better video hardware for games. They were oriented towards screen character handling. But the Spectrum video implementation was using so little memory that the CPU could do more with less.

Exactly.
Amstrad simply cannot efficiently handle 17Kb of video memory, whereas Spectrum and C64 only use about 6.5/8Kb respectively.

[PeterJ]

because some of you might be slightly ill-informed due to not having had actual first-hand personal CPCs experience, and by that I mean more than just watching it in a shop and messing around with its BASIC for 15 minutes.

If you are including emulators (accepting your point about things not being the same as on real hardware), I'm pretty convinced that the majority of users who answered the post will have played a number of games on the CPC for a lot more than 15 minutes. For me, I had a 464 briefly about 10 years ago, and now use emulation.

[PeterJ]

Just a few threads where some similar issues have been previously discussed;

viewtopic.php?t=8222&hilit=Amstrad

viewtopic.php?t=7885&hilit=Amstrad

viewtopic.php?t=435&hilit=Amstrad

@spider also did a great series of posts called 'across the formats'

[deanysoft]

At the time my mates and I (who used to look at the CPC in the Currys around the corner) didn't see the CPC as an upgrade. Certainly the demo that Currys had running (some awful thing written in BASIC with a ghost on it or something) did nothing to make us think it was an upgrade. It was expensive and most of us had ZX or CBM so another format perhaps seemed unwanted. Personally we'd (i.e. my Dad) invested in ZX81s and Spectrums as they were cheap and did loads of fun things. An extra half a megahertz didn't seem enough at the time to power the extra things the CPC had.

There were also Orics and Dragons and MSXs, Atari, BBC Electron... so many options to choose from including the CPC.

Also I think the 16-bit machines were on their way so why go for another 8 bit?

I came to like the CPC a lot when I was working on it and wish it had been more popular as maybe some of those cheap ZX ports wouldn't have happened (we were guilty of that too but the customer just wanted a game - quickly! so that's what they got some of time).

[SyX]

First, I like the Speccy... but I like the CPC, too.

Exactly.
Amstrad simply cannot efficiently handle 17Kb of video memory, whereas Spectrum and C64 only use about 6.5/8Kb respectively.

Sorry, but no, there is ZERO cpc games handling 17 KBs of video memory. That is the size of an standard loading screen in a CPC floppy disk (16 KBs + file header are rounded to the next KB for printing the catalog).

This fact is so "correct" as when I read that Head over Heels looks better in CPC, but in speccy only takes 48 KBs and that is a lot less than the 178 KBs that takes in the CPC.

If you don't understand the difference between a disk image and an snapshot, you should not give lessons about the CPC.

Bad ported games from ZX to CPC is a fact. If you can understand spanish, in our podcast, cepeceros; we have an spin-off called "postpodcast" where every week I analyze technically the two games that the guest brought and you can understand when a game was well or bad made for this machine. We have super funny examples where the developer forgot to delete the code for accessing to the zx ula or games like pacmania where one of the SFXs try to be played using the beeper... the CPC doesn't crash, but in MSX the same code crash the machine XDDD

In the same way, there is fast CPC games running at 50 or 25 fps, and CPC games scrolling at one or two pixels every frame. And I can give modern and old examples.

But there is a lot of bad ports that look as pure comedy, where the speccy screen is rendered in a hidden buffer and then is transfered and converted byte to byte in real time from zx video memory format to cpc one... destroying the framerate and wasting memory. Memory that it could be used as a double buffer, eliminating fully the awful tearing and improving the framerate.

For example, I have patched Thundercats by Elite for using double buffer and native graphics (in low resolution, because I love those colorful and blocky graphics), and the game went from 10 fps or less to fixed 25 fps without too much effort and no sources... I even think that I could go to 50 fps, if I apply the scroll hardware and use a few ruptures for reducing the cpu charge for the parallax sections.

In short, if you code for the CPC using the good points of the machine, then you can do things so good or even better than the best zx Russian games.

With respect to those difficult demoscene secrets about the cpc hardware, you should not believe everything that you see in the internet. The only demoscene tricks that are useful for games were well-known during the 80s (double buffer, vertical rupture and scroll hardware). Even the two first cpc games, Fred and Bugaboo, used the hardware scroll.

[Spud]

Why did you NOT upgrade to a CPC in the 80s?

It was too expensive.

[berarma]

First, I like the Speccy... but I like the CPC, too.

Sorry, but no, there is ZERO cpc games handling 17 KBs of video memory. That is the size of an standard loading screen in a CPC floppy disk (16 KBs + file header are rounded to the next KB for printing the catalog).

320x200x2/8 = 16000 bytes

Not 17KB but close to 16KB.

There were bad ports but there were also very well programmed games in the ZX that used the full memory bandwidth and those couldn't be ported without sacrificing something. That's a fact.

That's the reason I think the CPC wasn't such a big upgrade. I think an upgrade means a clear net improvement but that wasn't generally the case, there were always compromises.