Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/11/amstrad-cpc-40-years-old.html
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My own bday is later in the year, but this is one of the reasons I chose this username.
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That “top 10 Amstrad games” is damning with faint praise, wow: five arcade ports, one c64 port, one Speccy port, one Atari ST port. One with Amstrad/Spectrum versions developed simultaneously (Head over Heels), and one Amstrad-first (Spindizzy).
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We bought a used CPC464 in about 1990 - the computer and a crate of games for £50. It was a significant upgrade from the Dragon 32 we had before, and was our main computer for about 5 years. My mother did the essays for a professional qualification on it, laboriously saving them out to tape and printing on a dot matrix printer.
I remember some quality games for it - Titus the Fox, Turbo the Tortoise, Captain Dynamo - and it was also my first foray into programming, painstakingly copying out a ‘type-in’ from Amstrad Action magazine to make a Flappy Bird style game. I remember being able to turn the volume up on the integrated tape deck to listen to the loading sequence - I could tell when there was going to be a Read Error before the screen displayed it, from the sound.
Good times.
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The CPC 464 was my very first computer way back in the day. I’ve been tempted off and on to get one from eBay but what would I do with it?
The inclusion of a monitor when many homes only had a single TV was a stroke of genius; shame about the garish colours on the computer and the whole ‘Amstrad’ name which was already something of a joke given their crappy hifi equipment.
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My mate Dave had one.
These were the times when each friend in our friendship group generally had a different machine. Consequently, it allowed us to experience a wide range of platforms.
We really loved Captain Blood and Karnov on the CPC in particular.
But its real strength came when we started playing traditional RPGs at his house.
We each GMed a ruleset or two:
Me, D&D and Warhammer Fantasy RPG
Gary Shadowrun and Runequest
And Dave GMed Living Steel, which had a ridiculously detailed and complicated combat system that required LOTS of time to resolve. Sso much so that a standing joke became “Is it dead yet?”
So Dave wrote some programs for his CPC to resolve the combat quicker. Great stuff, and made our sessions a lot more productive and fun.
He couldn’t do it for all games, as some were a lot harder to translate to code.
But Living Steel was very maths-heavy, trying to accurately model penetration and drop-off, both for traditional firearms as well as energy weapons.
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Played GRYZOR a lot (too much). The Chase HQ game looks identical to Burning Rubber, but that was just a racing game. I only played Head over Heels occasionally, mainly because my sister hogged it all the time.
My Favourite game was Escape from the planet of the Robot Monsters which was a port from Amiga. I can still hear the gameplay music in my head. Some of the evil robots looked like Weetabix.
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It always amazes me to see how much performance people can squeeze out of old systems. I remember comparing launch day PS1 games with stuff that came out years later, and having trouble believing it was the same system. I often wish we could slow down a bit and really go deep on the incredible systems we already have. I know there’s no money in that, though.
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My first computer system <3
Oh, man, Living Steel and it’s ballistic damage tables… I’m not sure we ever got a game going properly.
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