I think Sugar's big mistake with these was after he purchased Sinclair. He had the opportunity to make the ZX series the budget computers and the CPC series the premium models. Even a modest upgrade to the 80-column modes and a more serious commitment to big-boy disk drives would have gone a long way towards giving the CPC a greater impact on the adult and business markets while he could have kept up the cut-price racket with the ZX micros. Of course, the problem with Alan Sugar was always that he didn't understand the very concept of the word "premium" itself.
As the video mentioned in Spain the Amstrad was a huge success, part of it was because you could buy it's games in a lot of places like newsstands or stationer's shops, not only specialized stores or department stores.
I remember fondly Dad's hand me downs, first a green screen 6128, then the Colour version. This was back in NZ, and I am not sure if he obtained from overseas. I do remember one had pci card style connectors and the other D sub. I conned the grandparents into sending over a Multiface 2 from the UK for my birthday, and that was a lot of fun. Must of spent hours with trial and error, hiding in a corner of the newsagents reading AA. I'll admit the CPC taught me to sail the high seas and tbh there's no way I would be where I am today career wise without it's influence. (Despite lusting for an Amiga and eventually getting a hand me down 286)
If you haven't read Sugar's auto/biography then I high recommend you do so. He talks a LOT about the computers in the book and it's fascinating. Interesting side note: He said himself, "If I hadn't been distracted by the bleedin' football sagas, who knows what Amstrad would've gone on to be", and that's one hell of a what-if!
I somewhere read, that they used a 3" disc drive because they could it get much cheaper then a 3,5" disc drive. Result: in the mid 90s here in Germany you paid 7-8 DM (3,5-4 euro, without inflation) for ONE used 3" disc. A noname 10 pack of 5,25" discs for C64 was 5 DM (2,50 euro) at that time...
I had the C64, my friend had a Speccy 48k, and my other mate a CPC464. The Amstrad always LOOKED good, but when the sprites/scrolling happened it was like...... oh...... dear.....
I had a cpc464 with a green monitor, it was pin sharp, but my dad got an official colour converter that allowed the cpc to be connected to a colour TV. I have vivid memories of the most colourful explosions but I can’t remember the game, some guy dropping grenades off a platform 💥.
Nice video, thanks! But you got the wrong Schneider at 20:01 - "Schneider Electric". The CPC Schneider were this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider_Rundfunkwerke Also, it would have been nice to elaborate on the Custom Chip, the Gate Array. In particular, the KC didn't have a Gate Array.
Must admit being a teen at the time with a Spectrum and seeing computer companies folding, I was confused when this came out. I was one of those proud to have a colour computer, but only had a hand me down Black and white portable to play on in my bedroom. But it succeeded. Partially, I think, it was the bundling of everything that you needed into one package made sense to a lot of people.
In the business world, yes. But for the home market, there was A LOT of fight between Commodore and the Atart 8bit lines. The APPLEII line was also popular in homes with the cash because of their ubiquity in the education arena. x86 didn't really become a major home market player until the 8bit hardware really started dying and none of the 16bits ever caught on, leaving (generally) x86 and Macintosh as our only viable systems from around '87/88 and on.
I had the 464, friends had the 6128. Compelling packages back then because of the monitor and the built-in drives. The plus models were a joke though, people had moved to way more powerful systems by then.
Wheteher it was the best of the 8-bit micros (for gaming) depends on the style of game you liked. Amstrad had some great and colourful games, but if scrolling shooters was your thing (with a bit of a muddy colour pallette), then the C64 was one to have.
Now I need the best CPC to try this sucker out. None of my friends had one as we all had Speccys or C64s back then. Though I did use an Amstrad Spectrum to play Knightlore once or twice back then, which was very tidy. Better than my original first release 80s 48k Sinclair rubber key version, which I still have I may add. Excellent thank you. All in all as far I have ever heard is that that the CPC is that its a decent home computer. Certainly better than those dodgy HIFIs from Amstrad afterwards! You're fired.
Amstrad is a system I only spent time with in the last year and it really surprised me. It's fantastic with some brilliant modern homebrew titles. Recommend grabbing an emulator and all the ROMs on your phone.
The Z80 was not a general advantage to make ports easier. The same would have been true for the 6502 as many systems during that time had a 6502, so we would have seen ports from those systems - and not from the Speccy. Originally the engineers of the CPC wanted to include the 6502 BECAUSE it makes porting games from e.g. the C64 easy. The Z80 was chosen as they also needed Firmware and BASIC and Locomotive Software already had that for the Z80 - as pointed out later in the video. The comparison table of Speccy and CPC is misleading as it compares the late Speccy models with the early CPC models. At the time the CPC was introduced the Speccy neither had a 3" floppy nor a real soundchip. The only similarity between the original Speccy and the CPC was the CPU. The 3" floppy was (unlike the Sinclair microdrive) not proprietary - they were introduced by a consortium of manufacturers led by Matsushita. The drives came from Hitachi. The myth about 3.5" vs. 3" was already bunked several times by Roland Perry himself who explained that 3.5" would not have been an alternative. In 1983, when the CPC and its drive were originally designed, it was absolutely not clear that the 3.5" format would ever be successful on the market. That came years later. And the drives were a lot more expensive - making the whole CPC no longer affordable to its target audience. Sure, all of that changed later - but in 1983 they had no choice to make a built-in drive that was affordable. The reason the prototype was grey was because the manufacturer for prototype cases only produced prototypes in grey. As simple as that - no further reason. The CPC 664 had no different keyboard layout in Germany. The German 664 and 464 differ from the UK variants only in the key colours. This is not the case for French and Spanish CPCs which had their own keyboard layout and adapted firmware. The company logo you present at minute 20 is Schneider Electric. A French tech giant which has nothing to do with the German Schneider company that distributed the CPCs in Germany. Also in 1989 Schneider and Amstrad had long departed and Schneider was no longer interested in the CPC market. According to Roland Perry the Arnold 2 was cancelled because of a lack of resources to work on that many projects in parallel. Just one note regarding the Plus software: While it is correct hat most of the cartridges were just copies of existing tape software, the game you show mostly during that part of the video is Pang! which is actually not only of the few cartridge only games - it's also the only really good game.
I think you misunderstood some of my points, I never said they chose the Z80 to make ports easier, I explained in great detail why they used it but never said that. What I did say was once the design was finalised programmers soon discovered it was easy to port Spectrum games. When I say layout, I mean the whole look, which includes colours. I actually wrote all about the brilliance of GX4000 Pang for Retro Gamer magazine many years ago.
Considering the similarity of the graphics modes with the BBC Micro/Electron, a 6502 would have made ports from them really easy - with no compromising graphics resolution or colors. Maybe it would have been possible to be directly compatible, even.
Holy good God man, the Amstrad 6128+ in September of 1990 was 2990f! That's a whopping 3,395.45 USD! You could buy a 486DX2@66MHz, 16MB of RAM, with a 1MB accelerated video card, and a Sound Blaster for around 3,500 USD. Addendum- I can't believe Amstrad would charge that much for a 8-bit Zilog Z-80 machine in 1990. That's just crazy talk. Nothing about the package is enticing to a new customer. You could get an Atari ST or Amiga 500 for a quarter of that price. Insane.
From what I was able to gather from a quick google...The price of the Amstrad 6128+ when it first came out was only £240 (or $315 US) which today after inflation would be about £1,061 (or $1345 US). Whoa, while that's still much better than the price you mentioned that's still a lot back then...I can't imagine anyone would buy it $3,395!
The 6128+ arrived 4 years after the Atari STF and 3 years after the Amiga 500. By 1990, people were already switching to PCs. It was way too little too late, which is why it flopped.
Great video . The gx4000 was about 2 years too late bit like the c64 gs The new plus models did have some great graphics but as u say laslzy ports of current games that could be brought for 4 quid ain't gonna make u pay £20 plus to upgrade it
Another great trip down memory lane. I already had a C54 and ZX Spectrum when ts came out and with prices of tech being rather high back then, skipped it. My first ever PC was an Amstrad though, with Alan Sugar later admitting that he PC's were of such low quality the was surprised that they ever worked. His wide boy image was cemented for me with this admission, which makes me wonder how he ever got the job on The Apprentice. But then I looked at who was picked for the US version and quite a few things became clear.
Is your intro music from a game or did you create it yourself. Because it instantly puts me into a late 80's need to go play on my C=64 mood and it's an awesome intro tune as well.
gx4000 found one car boot sale once new sealed and bundle games. kid hadnt even opened them. but what ever yoiu do now dont use the original power supply.
System was stereo but output was a single speaker, so mono at the end. To get stereo you had to use a minijack cable to connect stereo speakers. And it was very picky on impedance levels, so I'm not surprised most people did not hear it doing stereo.
It had a stereo jack with 2 of the 3 channels split, so you could get stereo on external speakers or headphones. But the tiny internal speaker was mono.
There are both French and German companies called Schneider and it was the German one that sold the CPC - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider_Rundfunkwerke
I loved my cpc 464 as a kid. It was bought in 1984 for my 8th birthday, and I still have it to this day. Thoroughly enjoyed this content 👌
I think Sugar's big mistake with these was after he purchased Sinclair. He had the opportunity to make the ZX series the budget computers and the CPC series the premium models. Even a modest upgrade to the 80-column modes and a more serious commitment to big-boy disk drives would have gone a long way towards giving the CPC a greater impact on the adult and business markets while he could have kept up the cut-price racket with the ZX micros. Of course, the problem with Alan Sugar was always that he didn't understand the very concept of the word "premium" itself.
As the video mentioned in Spain the Amstrad was a huge success, part of it was because you could buy it's games in a lot of places like newsstands or stationer's shops, not only specialized stores or department stores.
I remember fondly Dad's hand me downs, first a green screen 6128, then the Colour version. This was back in NZ, and I am not sure if he obtained from overseas. I do remember one had pci card style connectors and the other D sub. I conned the grandparents into sending over a Multiface 2 from the UK for my birthday, and that was a lot of fun. Must of spent hours with trial and error, hiding in a corner of the newsagents reading AA. I'll admit the CPC taught me to sail the high seas and tbh there's no way I would be where I am today career wise without it's influence. (Despite lusting for an Amiga and eventually getting a hand me down 286)
Also forgot to mention, great trip down memory lane, thanks.
If you haven't read Sugar's auto/biography then I high recommend you do so. He talks a LOT about the computers in the book and it's fascinating.
Interesting side note: He said himself, "If I hadn't been distracted by the bleedin' football sagas, who knows what Amstrad would've gone on to be", and that's one hell of a what-if!
Saving Tottenham was bad for him, and got hi a lot of hate. it was a money pit.
I somewhere read, that they used a 3" disc drive because they could it get much cheaper then a 3,5" disc drive. Result: in the mid 90s here in Germany you paid 7-8 DM (3,5-4 euro, without inflation) for ONE used 3" disc. A noname 10 pack of 5,25" discs for C64 was 5 DM (2,50 euro) at that time...
Yes, correct
We need an Amstrad CPC mini
I had the C64, my friend had a Speccy 48k, and my other mate a CPC464. The Amstrad always LOOKED good, but when the sprites/scrolling happened it was like...... oh...... dear.....
Modern homebrew games designed for the machine show how powerful it really was. Amstrad was a fantastic machine hurt by Speccy ports
I owned CPC472 with colour monitor back in the day. Lovely memories.
I had a cpc464 with a green monitor, it was pin sharp, but my dad got an official colour converter that allowed the cpc to be connected to a colour TV. I have vivid memories of the most colourful explosions but I can’t remember the game, some guy dropping grenades off a platform 💥.
Nice video, thanks! But you got the wrong Schneider at 20:01 - "Schneider Electric". The CPC Schneider were this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider_Rundfunkwerke Also, it would have been nice to elaborate on the Custom Chip, the Gate Array. In particular, the KC didn't have a Gate Array.
I was more than happy with my 464. Many memories.
Must admit being a teen at the time with a Spectrum and seeing computer companies folding, I was confused when this came out. I was one of those proud to have a colour computer, but only had a hand me down Black and white portable to play on in my bedroom. But it succeeded. Partially, I think, it was the bundling of everything that you needed into one package made sense to a lot of people.
Man, the British had all the awesome computers. Here in North America? We were thoroughly entrenched in the IBM PC compatible market.
In the business world, yes. But for the home market, there was A LOT of fight between Commodore and the Atart 8bit lines. The APPLEII line was also popular in homes with the cash because of their ubiquity in the education arena.
x86 didn't really become a major home market player until the 8bit hardware really started dying and none of the 16bits ever caught on, leaving (generally) x86 and Macintosh as our only viable systems from around '87/88 and on.
I had the 464, friends had the 6128. Compelling packages back then because of the monitor and the built-in drives. The plus models were a joke though, people had moved to way more powerful systems by then.
Wonderful machine. Still got my CPC 464 from 1985.
My favourite computer i had, partly down to having its own monitor, when games were made specifically for it i think they were the best of 8 bits
Wheteher it was the best of the 8-bit micros (for gaming) depends on the style of game you liked. Amstrad had some great and colourful games, but if scrolling shooters was your thing (with a bit of a muddy colour pallette), then the C64 was one to have.
Some of the modern homebrew are amazing on Amstrad
Now I need the best CPC to try this sucker out. None of my friends had one as we all had Speccys or C64s back then. Though I did use an Amstrad Spectrum to play Knightlore once or twice back then, which was very tidy. Better than my original first release 80s 48k Sinclair rubber key version, which I still have I may add. Excellent thank you. All in all as far I have ever heard is that that the CPC is that its a decent home computer. Certainly better than those dodgy HIFIs from Amstrad afterwards! You're fired.
If you want the best model possible then go for a 6128+
Amstrad is a system I only spent time with in the last year and it really surprised me. It's fantastic with some brilliant modern homebrew titles. Recommend grabbing an emulator and all the ROMs on your phone.
The Z80 was not a general advantage to make ports easier. The same would have been true for the 6502 as many systems during that time had a 6502, so we would have seen ports from those systems - and not from the Speccy. Originally the engineers of the CPC wanted to include the 6502 BECAUSE it makes porting games from e.g. the C64 easy. The Z80 was chosen as they also needed Firmware and BASIC and Locomotive Software already had that for the Z80 - as pointed out later in the video.
The comparison table of Speccy and CPC is misleading as it compares the late Speccy models with the early CPC models. At the time the CPC was introduced the Speccy neither had a 3" floppy nor a real soundchip. The only similarity between the original Speccy and the CPC was the CPU.
The 3" floppy was (unlike the Sinclair microdrive) not proprietary - they were introduced by a consortium of manufacturers led by Matsushita. The drives came from Hitachi. The myth about 3.5" vs. 3" was already bunked several times by Roland Perry himself who explained that 3.5" would not have been an alternative. In 1983, when the CPC and its drive were originally designed, it was absolutely not clear that the 3.5" format would ever be successful on the market. That came years later. And the drives were a lot more expensive - making the whole CPC no longer affordable to its target audience. Sure, all of that changed later - but in 1983 they had no choice to make a built-in drive that was affordable.
The reason the prototype was grey was because the manufacturer for prototype cases only produced prototypes in grey. As simple as that - no further reason.
The CPC 664 had no different keyboard layout in Germany. The German 664 and 464 differ from the UK variants only in the key colours. This is not the case for French and Spanish CPCs which had their own keyboard layout and adapted firmware.
The company logo you present at minute 20 is Schneider Electric. A French tech giant which has nothing to do with the German Schneider company that distributed the CPCs in Germany. Also in 1989 Schneider and Amstrad had long departed and Schneider was no longer interested in the CPC market.
According to Roland Perry the Arnold 2 was cancelled because of a lack of resources to work on that many projects in parallel.
Just one note regarding the Plus software: While it is correct hat most of the cartridges were just copies of existing tape software, the game you show mostly during that part of the video is Pang! which is actually not only of the few cartridge only games - it's also the only really good game.
I think you misunderstood some of my points, I never said they chose the Z80 to make ports easier, I explained in great detail why they used it but never said that. What I did say was once the design was finalised programmers soon discovered it was easy to port Spectrum games.
When I say layout, I mean the whole look, which includes colours.
I actually wrote all about the brilliance of GX4000 Pang for Retro Gamer magazine many years ago.
Considering the similarity of the graphics modes with the BBC Micro/Electron, a 6502 would have made ports from them really easy - with no compromising graphics resolution or colors. Maybe it would have been possible to be directly compatible, even.
Thanks for the content I enjoyed it thoroughly.
I always wonder "what if" a amstrad QL was released. Could have been an interesting alternative for ST/Amiga.
Definitely!
Considering the Amstrad CPC 464 was released months later than the Macintosh, it could have had a 68000 CPU from the start.
Holy good God man, the Amstrad 6128+ in September of 1990 was 2990f! That's a whopping 3,395.45 USD! You could buy a 486DX2@66MHz, 16MB of RAM, with a 1MB accelerated video card, and a Sound Blaster for around 3,500 USD.
Addendum- I can't believe Amstrad would charge that much for a 8-bit Zilog Z-80 machine in 1990. That's just crazy talk. Nothing about the package is enticing to a new customer. You could get an Atari ST or Amiga 500 for a quarter of that price. Insane.
From what I was able to gather from a quick google...The price of the Amstrad 6128+ when it first came out was only £240 (or $315 US) which today after inflation would be about £1,061 (or $1345 US).
Whoa, while that's still much better than the price you mentioned that's still a lot back then...I can't imagine anyone would buy it $3,395!
Your exchange rates are wrong. The French Franc was about 5 USD in 1990, so 3000 FRF = 600 USD. That was already a lot of money in 1990.
6128+ was probably the best of the bunch , right before when the 16bit era emerged with AMIGA being on top.. imho
The 6128+ arrived 4 years after the Atari STF and 3 years after the Amiga 500. By 1990, people were already switching to PCs. It was way too little too late, which is why it flopped.
Great video . The gx4000 was about 2 years too late bit like the c64 gs
The new plus models did have some great graphics but as u say laslzy ports of current games that could be brought for 4 quid ain't gonna make u pay £20 plus to upgrade it
Another great trip down memory lane. I already had a C54 and ZX Spectrum when ts came out and with prices of tech being rather high back then, skipped it. My first ever PC was an Amstrad though, with Alan Sugar later admitting that he PC's were of such low quality the was surprised that they ever worked. His wide boy image was cemented for me with this admission, which makes me wonder how he ever got the job on The Apprentice. But then I looked at who was picked for the US version and quite a few things became clear.
Is your intro music from a game or did you create it yourself. Because it instantly puts me into a late 80's need to go play on my C=64 mood and it's an awesome intro tune as well.
It's the intro music/speech to the Atari Lynx port of STUN Runner.
@TheLairdsLair That's cool. I could tell it wasn't SID. But yet still recognized it. Thank you
Interesting that they had to switch from 6502 to Z80. Obviously Acorn and Oric could wrap their heads around the 6502.
gx4000 found one car boot sale once new sealed and bundle games. kid hadnt even opened them. but what ever yoiu do now dont use the original power supply.
I got mine at a second hand game shop never opened it either.
I'm pretty sure that the original CPC (non-plus) had stereo sound as well.
It didn't, it was 3 channel mono
@@TheLairdsLair Really. I thought the three channels were left, right, and one for both...
System was stereo but output was a single speaker, so mono at the end. To get stereo you had to use a minijack cable to connect stereo speakers. And it was very picky on impedance levels, so I'm not surprised most people did not hear it doing stereo.
It had a stereo jack with 2 of the 3 channels split, so you could get stereo on external speakers or headphones. But the tiny internal speaker was mono.
Interesting facts.
i hit the 464th like! :P
CPC will never die!
Excellent !
Gud vid 💯💥
RIP headphone users with the tape loading noise between transitions....
good TIMES!
Those Silica ads....
I only ever owned one CPC464 - i am sorry to the CPC fans but binned it instantly, and hacked the monitor to work with my Amiga A500+. Sorry :)
good choice , cpc games looked like msx with no real character to them
What did 6128 owners do to deserve the worse keyboard layout.
They got a disk drive, so they didn't complain!
I owned an Amstrad CPC 464 so dad could watch the snooker. An uninformed viewer may wonder why those two things would be related.
because of the monitor?
Schneider is a French company.. despite the name
There are both French and German companies called Schneider and it was the German one that sold the CPC - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider_Rundfunkwerke
Schneider Rundfunkwerke from Bavaria, Germany sold the CPC in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and I think in the Netherlands unser their brand name.
the titel sounds in your videos are horrible ! why? notagial for pain ?
Everyone else loves my intro
@@TheLairdsLair I didn't mean to be unkind. thanks for the videos. keep it on 🙂
@@TheLairdsLair I didn't mean to be unkind. thanks for the videos. keep it on 🙂
I love the intro music. I do think adding subtitles to the welcome stun runner would save some grief in the comments though lol 😅