Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/01/10/remembering-the-amstrad-cpc-a.html
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Nah, everyone’s got nostalgia for the eighties machines of their youth, but the CPC was terrible. I was always a Spectrum kid, but even I recognise that the king of the crop was the C64.
8-bits were quite easy to outgrow. I think it’s time we as a species accepted that 16 bits was the correct amount and by extension the greatest computer ever designed was the Amiga.
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Heathen. Clearly the best was the BBC Micro!
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Remembering the Kaypro
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Alright, moneybags… I bet your mum “cooked dinner” instead of making tea!
(Elite was alright though…)
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I was an Apple ][ fan myself (well, technically I had the knock off clone Franklin Ace 1000), but for some reason the Apple ][ never really hit Europe (or most European micros vice-versa). Pretty much the only 8-bit computer popular on both sides of the pond was the C64.
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Trash 80 all the way!
Seriously, i mainly remember trying to program this thing with it’s pixels the size of dimes.
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Amen. And for some strange reason, I and all of my high school friends insisted on writing drawing programs for the thing.
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Was this the machine responsible for many many spectrum kids looking at the screenshots on the back of the game boxes and knowing, but still hoping, the game will never look that good.
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I still have my Amstrad CPC464 in the cupboard under the stairs. The vertical scan circuitry in the monitor failed decades ago, so the entire picture collapsed into a single bright scanline mid-screen. I really should look into finding someone who can fix that.
Games I remember enjoying: Sorcery and the excellent Spindizzy.
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I picked up a CPC664 with floppy drive (took these weird, 3" rectangular floppies) and a shitload of pirated games in a second-hand shop sometime back in the 90s. Fun bit of kit.
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I still maintain that the 3" floppy was far superior to the 3.5" ones we ended up with.
The number of times I had to get into a 3.5" drive with tweezers and pull out one of those metal “shields” that had bent out and got stuck in the drive…
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I wish mine had been one of those. As far as i can tell from Wikipedia i had the Model I. And the picture to the right of this section of the article is what i was talking about (six pixels per character space in graphics mode).
My dad still has a Model 100 somewhere. Very cool.
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The BBC Micro was 8 bits (too few)
The Archimedes was 32 bits (too many)
The Amiga was 16 bits (just right!)
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We had the Model I/II/III in school (mostly Model I). I recall making a space shuttle launch with ascii for one of the projects.
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