Amstrad CPC INSIGHT

A look back at the CPC and its impact from 1984 till 1990

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• amstrad
• cpc
• 464
• 664
• 6128
• spectrum
• commodore
• sega
• gryzor
• sorcery
• amsoft
• green
• beret
• z80

[khisanth75]

at the first intro text you mention a 664 plus, need to correct that to 464 plus :)

[ukmarkh]

Cheers mate... just don't have time on my side these days. I'm looking at doing a few more vids as soon as things quieten down.

[80sRadioBoy]

Really nice vid. Not sure I'd have used Wonderboy as an example of good scrolling mind! :-) Best scrolling I ever saw was some bat/ball game who's name escapes me that programmed the CRT to use both overscan and hardware scrolling. Really nice.

And yeah, Renegade and Gryzor were just awesome conversions.

[ukmarkh]

Probably Titan... but I used Wonderboy because it's an early example of games scrolling on the CPC. In fact, if you hold down the fire button whilst Wonderboy is moving, he starts to run even faster... great when you get the skateboard.

[MastroMissas]

Amstrad was the best 8bit computer

[mcklain]

I can see that a lot of the games that you are showing in the video are running faster than they use to do it on a cpc. I would say that almost all of them.

[cant1rac]

lazy speccy ports were the bane of any z80 based machine, i owned a msx first before a amstrad.

msx had a whole load of poor speccy conversions that were extremely poor.

c64 owners never suffered at all, because i used a mos 6510 cpu and was significantly different to rule out these horrible conversions.

had a zx spectrum as well, and they really are a piece of crap, even for the time. they were massively outclassed by much earlier things like the Atari 800 (79) they just got in cheap in 1982

[majorfubar69]

C64 may have edged ahead in the graphics capabilities (because of its hardware sprites, carried forward to the stunning Amiga), but the CPC tanned its ass when it came to having a useable BASIC you could actually program your own games in.

[GR8TM4N]

@ogicabp4u i'm amazed that i received a reply to a comment i made 2 years ago! :-P Thanks anyway for your reply ... and, no i fear that your notes didn't got back to the publishers, since, i believe, their purpose was to make a quick buck from these bad Spectrum ports, and they didn't care about their buyers opinions ...

Many wishes for a happy new year!

[ogicabp4u]

@dartsma464 you can see the effects of this in some 3D (2D scale sprites) racers if you watch the player carefully.

[ogicabp4u]

@Velktron c64 does have some color clash but it is very limited. CPC was the only one which truly had none.

[ogicabp4u]

@GR8TM4N I used to send speccy ports back to the shops with a notice saying the product was of inferior quality and that the publishers had 'cheated' and to return the stock to the publisher with the note. Under the sale of goods act 1972(??) they had to accept it for an exchange of another similar good. (Has to be of merchantable quality and fit for the purpose intended...one 'could' argue these points if it was a speccy conversion) I wonder if my notes ever did get back to the publishers??

[ogicabp4u]

@80sRadioBoy Chase HQ!!! FXXking Awesomeness!!

[ogicabp4u]

@macdeath69 the lack of scrolling is not a problem in Gryzor. But it's just that when scrolling was done on the CPC it was done really badly until programmers learnt how to make it scroll properly. But this was only toward the end of its life unfortunately.

[ogicabp4u]

@rugbytlse yup streets ahead of MS Basic and done by the same guys who did BBC Basic. Speccy basic was really sloppy but easy to understand. You can even split the screen modes from basic if you know the call out routines. Now thats powerful basic. It's like BBC Basic on steriods!!