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At the Vancouver Retro Gaming Expo, I saw an Amstrad CPC being demoed. Since then, I’ve been absolutely fascinated by this platform.

You see, we never got the Amstrad CPC in North America.

Obviously, we got the Amiga even though it was unpopular.

We also got the Sinclair Spectrum. Over here, it was known as the Timex Spectrum. Not very popular, but we got it.

So the Amstrad was a complete mystery to me.

Today, I downloaded every Amstrad game ever made. And you know what? I still find it baffling.

in reply to Chris Trottier

craignicol
craignicol
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we had one. Compared to the competition it had a solid office suite. Definitely not a gaming machine. And I would not have predicted the man behind the company would go on to front The Apprentice.
in reply to craignicol

Chris Trottier
Chris Trottier
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@craignicol Lots of games for the Amstrad. Over 2,000, in fact.

But it’s just so strange how a machine that was, in many way, better than the C64 just didn’t do as well as the C64 when it came to gaming.

@craignicol
in reply to Chris Trottier

Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown
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@Chris Trottier basically the CPC is Alan Sugar (the British Donald Trump, literally: he was the boss in the UK version of The Apprentice) trying to make his own version of the BBC Micro out of a box of bits he found cheap somewhere.

The thing is, he actually did a half decent job.

It’s just that nobody wanted a Z80 based BBC Micro clone, and certainly not when the 8 bit era was drawing to a close.

@Chris Trottier
in reply to Sarah Brown

Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown
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@Chris Trottier I mean, it was a really weird market to try and compete in. The BBC Micro sold to people who ran the local PTA and who also read The Guardian.

There were not actually very many of those people.

And they’d already bought BBC Micros.

@Chris Trottier
in reply to Sarah Brown

Chris Trottier
Chris Trottier
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@goatsarah The Archimedes seems cool. Don’t think there were many games released for it, though.
@Sarah Brown
in reply to Chris Trottier

Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown
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@Chris Trottier Archimedes was the successor to the BBC Micro. It’s what said Guardian reading PTA chairs upgraded to. The original BBC Micro was a 32k 6502 based thing built like a tank so that school kids couldn’t break it. Its thing was that it was very easy to plug home made hardware in. It’s kinda the original inspiration for the Raspberry Pi.

Every school had one, or a few if they were well funded, but they were rare outside that environment where most people either got a Spectrum or C64. The BBC Micro, beyond schools, was bought by a VERY specific section of the British middle class.

This whole thing repeated in the late 80s, with the Amiga, Atari ST and Archimedes playing the roles or the C64, Spectrum and BBC Micro respectively.

@Chris Trottier
in reply to Sarah Brown

Chris Trottier
Chris Trottier
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@goatsarah Did the Atari 8-bit not take off in the UK? It was a big thing over here.
@Sarah Brown
in reply to Chris Trottier

Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown
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@Chris Trottier I think I met like one person who ever had one. They were not common.
@Chris Trottier
in reply to Sarah Brown

Ben Harris
Ben Harris
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@goatsarah I'm a weird outlier who had (and still has) both an Atari 800XL and an Archimedes. But then my family had a Camputers Lynx.
@Sarah Brown
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