Amstrad CPC, much better than I thought it would be!

[S0ulA55a551n]

Originally Posted by tomcat666

Just to rub it in a bit more... cpc fanboys should check this out:

[ Show youtube player ]

And then hide in the corner... It has colours, perfect scroll, design and it seems... playability.

impressive though massive mario ripoff

[Retro-Nerd]

Mario, Alex Kidd, Kid Chameleon etc. and the cartridge will have save support. Instant classic. Can't wait.

[Dunny]

Hang on, TC - we can't discount CPC R-Type for being modern and not discount that. Unless it was written in the 80s?

D.

[Retro-Nerd]

Well, it uses at least more than 6% of the C64.

[turrican9]

My C64 uses only 3% and if it used even 33% it would beat my Amigas which is using 97.3% all the time.

[Codetapper]

I'll admit to also lurking in this thread, it's comedy gold. My favourite nuggets so far:

- That Rainbow Arts would have sold 500,000 copies of the Turrican series had they marketed it properly (wouldn't that mean that just about every CPC owner in France would have bought the original? Laughable! Were there no pirates on the CPC in France?)

- That French people prefer "vibrant" colours on a crap computer that runs games in postage stamp size windows updating on average at about 5fps with flick screen or jerky scrolling rather than enjoying silky smooth 50Hz C64 scrolling with state of the art sound and music!

- That Turrican 2 uses the Amiga assets and everything is retained. This is simply incorrect. The first map I checked (level 1-2) has a lot of blocks changed around in the top left section alone. A section of water is missing. Blocks to jump up are missing. The Amstrad has similar levels, but that's as much as you can say.

- To say every CPC game that was naff was due to poor coders and otherwise they would have been better than the C64 versions - there were equally poor C64 coders and so a lot of the mediocre C64 stuff would have been much better too!

- The loading times stuff is just crap. Almost all my C64 game disks had the Action Replay 5 or 6 block "LOADER" file that loaded any single file game in about 10 seconds flat, without any cartridge! That beats any CPC loading times for sure. There's loads of conversion comparison pages on the net including some that measure loading times (disk and tape) and the CPC is faster on some games and slower on far more.

- To say the CPC only had 6% of it's capability is just nonsense. The amount of physical time you had to refresh the screen is the biggest bottleneck. This 6% argument implies coders just wrote incredibly poor routines and the hardware was sitting there doing nothing most of the time!

Along with most others in this thread, the C64 was by far and away the best 8 bit computer, and by a long way!

[kamelito]

>Along with most others in this thread, the C64 was by far and away the best 8 bit computer, and by a long way!

It really depends what you mean by best, the Atari 800 and MSX 2/2+/Turbo were not bad at all even compared to the C64. But if you mean games/demos I agree.
I must admit that I never liked the Amstrad at all, I even prefer the ZX Spectrum to them. I couldn"t afford a C64 back then, but this was the best experience. I even played or watched friends playing C64 games just to listen the muzaks! That is until the Amiga came out.

Kamelito
PS Sam Coupé and Entreprise 64/128 were attractive too.

[dlfrsilver]

- That Rainbow Arts would have sold 500,000 copies of the Turrican series had they marketed it properly (wouldn't that mean that just about every CPC owner in France would have bought the original? Laughable! Were there no pirates on the CPC in France?)

Hi There were 1,2 millions of CPC owners in France. Of course there was piracy. But since most owners of this machine were adults and not kids, many parents were buying games.

As said earlier, in 1990, in UK, the market was shared between the c64 and zx spectrum as far as 40% of the market.

The CPC in France at the same time was 60% of the market (softwares sold). The CPC was very profitable for the game companies.

But in the case of Turrican series, the two formats on which Rainbow Arts enforced their advertisement were the Amiga and the c64.

Problem : while the Amiga was our star computer for the 16 bits, the c64 was a dead and non-existant computer. That's why it was a commercial strategy mistake from rainbow arts from the start. Even the ST had a bigger cover and, ho well, they failed big time and they loosed a truckload of money. Really shamefull for such a great title.

- That French people prefer "vibrant" colours on a crap computer that runs games in postage stamp size windows updating on average at about 5fps with flick screen or jerky scrolling rather than enjoying silky smooth 50Hz C64 scrolling with state of the art sound and music!

That's absolutely exact What we got before the amstrad were computers with rubbish display and color scheme. The c64 was not an exception. Not only the CPC render it obsolete due to its very expensive price, but it had the oldish kind of color scheme of the 80-83 computers.

The CPC offers nice colors and a lots of other applications for which the c64 could never match up. As explained, in overall, you don't choose a computer just because it has a sound synthethizer and a 50 fps scrolling, but for the overall abilities. The CPC had those, and the whole thing for a price that commodore could never reach themselves.

Both the Spectrum and c64 failed here, the Amstrad CPC just killed them like mosquitoes with the flat of its hands.

Alan Sugar wanted Amstrad France to sell more Zx spectrum, the director of the French subsidiary told him basically "go to hell with this junk, it will never sell here. For 100 zx i sell 30000 CPC per day. Send me instead more CPC to sell, we're lacking stock!".

- That Turrican 2 uses the Amiga assets and everything is retained. This is simply incorrect. The first map I checked (level 1-2) has a lot of blocks changed around in the top left section alone. A section of water is missing. Blocks to jump up are missing. The Amstrad has similar levels, but that's as much as you can say.

The CPC version lacks the bonus as explained earlier. But nonetheless, the CPC versions of turrican I and II are great games. Not only they are in 16 colors, but they also have parallaxes, and good animation speed.

It's not my opinion, that's what they put in the game.

- To say every CPC game that was naff was due to poor coders and otherwise they would have been better than the C64 versions - there were equally poor C64 coders and so a lot of the mediocre C64 stuff would have been much better too!

I have been looking for many games and the why it is slow.

Barbarian for instance is emulating the c64 behaviour, because the developers of this game instead of converting the original c64 assets in CPC graphic format just stored the c64 graphics on the CPC disk, and they are converted them on the fly. this fact was confirmed by a known z80 coder. Of course, such a thing can only lead to slowdown because instead of running the game logic and pull the graphics on screen, the CPC is losing uselessly CPU cycle to do the on-the-fly conversion. Pretty easy to say then : "ah the CPC is damn slow".

There are other examples available too about speccy ports as well.

- The loading times stuff is just crap. Almost all my C64 game disks had the Action Replay 5 or 6 block "LOADER" file that loaded any single file game in about 10 seconds flat, without any cartridge!

The c64 floppy drives as well as the tape drive are extremely slow. This even with the epyx fast load cart connected on the c64.

The CPC floppy drive is even compared to a C64 with cart for speeding loading time faster from the start.

On tape loading, same again, i did some tests, i can load a game at 6500 bauds without any hardware mod or any speeding cart.

I did the compare with both my c64 and CPC side by side. the c64 is 10 rank behind .

That beats any CPC loading times for sure.

Even the slowest CPC games loads faster than the slowest c64 games.

There's loads of conversion comparison pages on the net including some that measure loading times (disk and tape) and the CPC is faster on some games and slower on far more.

the slowest CPC games are 1000 bauds, which is anyway faster than even some c64 games using custom protection schemes.

The fastest game i processed for amstrad is recorded at 3500 bauds, a speed that no c64 game on tape is achieving. It's a german game called Bad Cat. When they ported the game from the c64, they took advantage of the higher loading speed of the CPC.

- To say the CPC only had 6% of it's capability is just nonsense. The amount of physical time you had to refresh the screen is the biggest bottleneck. This 6% argument implies coders just wrote incredibly poor routines and the hardware was sitting there doing nothing most of the time!

the main bottleneck is that the code base for many games was the spectrum version. The spectrum is using 2bpp graphics taking a lot less room in RAM when the CPC process 4bpp graphics, taking more space in ram and needing more appropriate routines. Rhino, the batman forever demo stated this because indeed, almost no CPC commercial games used its abilities. All the very latest games no only mostly run in 16 colors mode 0, but they have great animations, and great playability. You can do many things with a CPC, and there are ways to get speed as good sound (the CPC is wired in stereo and not mono like the ST for example), by the way of soundtrackers.

Along with most others in this thread, the C64 was by far and away the best 8 bit computer, and by a long way!

It was an unbalanced machine, with oldish conceptions from early 80's.
The CPC was a balanced machine with a very large overall possibilities, which made its success everywhere it has been sold. And it's the only machine who has killed within a year of its release the zx spectrum and the c64 the 2 big contenders of the english computer market. Hand flattened !

[Retro-Nerd]

Sorry Denis, you repeat the same stuff again and again. And it doesn't make it truer, e.g. even with the links to the C64 loading times via hardware/software/cartridge you write the same nonsense. Tape was shit, no serious gamer used it (except in the UK). And here we are, at the beginning again.

CPC sales figures taken from Wiki France.

The Amstrad CPC has sold about three million copies worldwide, including approximately one million in France .

I bet they didn't sold more than 1000-2000 copies of Turrican II in France for the CPC. And this has nothing to do with marketing. It was the market limit for this specific version there.

[tomcat666]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

Hand flattened !

I hope it hurts. You deserve it after all the bullshit you say.
Nothing you say is true or makes any sense. I recommend a visit to the nearest shrink.. (after a doctor takes a look at your hand).

[hansel75]

Originally Posted by Codetapper

I'll admit to also lurking in this thread, it's comedy gold.

Yes, Yes it is!

Edit- Also why is France so important in the 8bit debate? It is insignificant when compared to the worldwide domination that the C64 had when comparing 17million C64's to 1million french CPC owners, or the 3million total units the entire CPC range sold worldwide! And you don't become the worlds NO.1 selling computer unless your better then then competition.

Edit 2- Also i don't think personal insults are needed here, just facts about the 8bit wars is all that is required to show why the C64 was the best 8bit computer!

Edit 3 lol-

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

The CPC floppy drive is even compared to a C64 with cart for speeding loading time faster from the start.

I really don't believe this, there is no way any floppy disk system is going to compare to the speed of an instant cart, regardless of what system it's on!

[dlfrsilver]

@Tomcat666 :

I hope it hurts. You deserve it after all the bullshit you say.
Nothing you say is true or makes any sense. I recommend a visit to the nearest shrink.. (after a doctor takes a look at your hand).

I was not talking about my hand XD ! Once it appeared on the market, both c64 and spectrum died within months. Before the CPC arrival, hypermarkets were selling here too a lot of c64. But it dried out very quickly, and Commodore France only remained alive due to recapitalization as well as the arrival and exponential success of the Amiga which had a greater success than the c64 here.

Originally Posted by hansel75

Yes, Yes it is!

Edit- Also why is France so important in the 8bit debate? It is insignificant when compared to the worldwide domination that the C64 had when comparing 17million C64's to 1million french CPC owners, or the 3million total units the entire CPC range sold worldwide! And you don't become the worlds NO.1 selling computer unless your better then then competition.

Each market had its importance. Every good commercial knows that.

Edit 2- Also i don't think personal insults are needed here, just facts about the 8bit wars is all that is required to show why the C64 was the best 8bit computer!

Nobody insulted anyone, i don't know where you got that from !

Edit 3 lol-
I really don't believe this, there is no way any floppy disk system is going to compare to the speed of an instant cart, regardless of what system it's on!

Of course if you're talking about cartridge only games on c64, of course it's immediate, there's no loading wait. When i plug my Robocop 3 cart, indeed the game displays right away.

I was specifically talking about disks and tape game with fast load cart plugged at the back of the computer.

Any game put on rom on a CPC also has no loading wait.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

I was not talking about my hand XD ! Once it appeared on the market, both c64 and spectrum died within months. Before the CPC arrival, hypermarkets were selling here too a lot of c64. But it dried out very quickly, and Commodore France only remained alive due to recapitalization as well as the arrival and exponential success of the Amiga which had a greater success than the c64 here.

Correction: the C64 and Spectrum died in France, but nowhere else. In fact, the CPC 464 was available in my country as well and... Almost no one bought it, they all bought C64's or Spectrums instead. It got so bad, the machine vanished from the shops altogether years before the C64 stopped selling.

I was specifically talking about disks and tape game with fast load cart plugged at the back of the computer.

I did a little test with the C64 version of Arkanoid and Operation Wolf. The Arkanoid original I had failed (the disk was bad), but the cracked copy loaded in 1min 25secs. Unless I used my fast loader cart (Final Cartridge III - which is pure software, there is no hardware upgrade for the disk in there) in which case it loaded in just 9 seconds. Not minutes, seconds. That really is fast enough.

The Operation Wolf original I had loaded from disk, not using any carts, in ~27 seconds. Which is not really that slow either - many Amiga/ST etc games loaded longer than that.

In other words, loading times on the C64 could be bad, but normally weren't. Just like the Amstrad games on tape sometimes took over 25 minutes to load. Slowest C64 game I could find on tape took 20...

[hansel75]

Denis, i respect your passion for the CPC, i just hope you can respect mine about the C64.

When i die, i want "C64 Forever" engraved on my tombstone lol, i would imagine you want "CPC Forever" on yours.

Part of the 8bit and 16bit experience when growing up was always the "Which brand is better" attitude, glad to see that 30yrs later this is still kickin on

[dlfrsilver]

Correction: the C64 and Spectrum died in France, but nowhere else. In fact, the CPC 464 was available in my country as well and... Almost no one bought it, they all bought C64's or Spectrums instead. It got so bad, the machine vanished from the shops altogether years before the C64 stopped selling.

Of course This situation was specific to France and nowhere else.

I did a little test with the C64 version of Arkanoid and Operation Wolf. The Arkanoid original I had failed (the disk was bad), but the cracked copy loaded in 1min 25secs.

OK, 1mn25s is the time needed for me to load Turrican II compact tape version game menu and then level 1-1.

A game like Operation Wolf on CPC, original disk release takes 14 seconds to load (i have monitored the time needed).

Unless I used my fast loader cart (Final Cartridge III - which is pure software, there is no hardware upgrade for the disk in there) in which case it loaded in just 9 seconds. Not minutes, seconds. That really is fast enough.

You need a special cart on c64 to achieve what a CPC can do in term of loading speed. Operation Wolf CPC disk version loads very fast without anything needed.

Nota : A level in OpWolf needs 3 seconds to load on CPC.

Also don't forget that the CPC graphics are bigger to load than the c64 ones.

The Operation Wolf original I had loaded from disk, not using any carts, in ~27 seconds. Which is not really that slow either - many Amiga/ST etc games loaded longer than that.

That's almost twice the time needed to load the CPC version.

In other words, loading times on the C64 could be bad, but normally weren't.

The c64 used slow 5 1/4" floppy disk drives. The CPC 3" inches drives, is basically running at the same speed than a 3.5" floppy drive of an ST or an Amiga.

Just like the Amstrad games on tape sometimes took over 25 minutes to load.

Yes and no. Most CPC games on tape on average do not exceed 13 minutes of data to load.

Any game with no multiload is basically 8-10 minutes long only.

When you go higher, it's multiloader games with fast loading scheme.

However, games taking 20 minutes and more on c64 are more often encountered (Commando for instance, is an horror to load on c64!)

Because of the game size, not because of the protected loader scheme speed used.

I can tell it to you because i have dump myself more than 1000 amstrad CPC tapes. Games taking this much time use already fast schemes.

The game with the longest size to load on Amstrad CPC is the game hydra from Domark. It uses a very fast speedlock tape protection, and is spanned on 2 tapes, with a length of 1 hours of tape band to play per side !

The game is in 16 colors mode and is 875kb of data crunched ! that's basically the 16 bits version of the game on an 8 bits machine lol.

I know no game needing 20 minutes to load from start to the main menu of the game.

In order to be sure, i have done some tests by load games at the same time between my CPC 464 and my C64.

My c64 games always finish to load the last. The CPC version of the game is always loaded first.

Whatever the game : The ninja Warriors, Deliverance, Total recall, Terminator 2, The simpsons, renegade, Target Renegade, Batman the movie, Commando, Operation Wolf, Operation Thunderbolt, Turrican I & II, X-Out, Golden Axe, etc, etc

Slowest C64 game I could find on tape took 20...

In fact, you can have a game with only 8 minutes of band to play, but if the loading scheme is slow, it can take 20 minutes to load. And out of the specific Cartridge game for the C64, the Disk and Tape I/O are very slow on this computer.

Denis, i respect your passion for the CPC, i just hope you can respect mine about the C64.

Disagree with somebody doesn't mean it's a disrespect or even that you don't care about the person you disagree with. It's sane to have some disagreement with people !

Being always OK and that's fine and all, all the time is not bringing anything.

I own myself a C64, for which i have the tighiest care because i know how fragile this hardware is. I have even bought the sav64 overvoltage protector for a reason, i don't want it to die due to the crap commodore PSU !

(to be honest more than with my CPCs. For instance, the C64 is capacitors city, while the CPC have almost none, it's tank built !).

[hansel75]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

(to be honest more than with my CPCs. For instance, the C64 is capacitors city, while the CPC have almost none, it's tank built !).

Glad to see the CPC was good for something

Meanwhile my 1984 Breadbin C64 keeps soldiering on with no changes!

[Retro-Nerd]

Only the old "elephant's foot" is a bad psu, the "brick" is rock solid. Just like any C64 built from 1986 to 1993/94 (C64C - C64G). There is nothing fragile. Avoid the old bread bins from 1983 and you are good.

[Shatterhand]

Originally Posted by tomcat666

Just to rub it in a bit more... cpc fanboys should check this out:

[ Show youtube player ]

And then hide in the corner... It has colours, perfect scroll, design and it seems... playability.

Wow.. this... this is better than a lot of stuff on Amiga even.

But guys, calm down. No CPC, no C64, the MSX beats everything. Come on.

I mean

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Sorry, neither C64 or CPC can compare to this in terms of either Graphics or Sounds.

No need for this silly 8 bits war, Japan > Europe.

[Retro-Nerd]

Bah. Besides a few good Konami games the MSX machines didn't have too many good stuff. And hardware scrolling couldn't even the MSX2 do. Nice graphics though. For the Sound. Konami used extra hardware, ( SCC = the Sound Custom Chip or Sound Creative Chip). Without the most MSX music in games was crap.

[Shatterhand]

You notice more than half of the games I showed above aren't from Konami, right?

Also not all games from Konami used the SCC. Anyway, Europeans were better than Japanese in taking most of a sound hardware... at least on this they were better

Konami, Compile, Namco, Taito, Irem, Sega.. and then some other Japanese developers I'd guess most European dudes don't know very well, like Technosoft, Hertz, Telenet, Wolfteam, Bit²

I mean, it really hilarious that the C64 guys think stuff like Armalyte are top notch shooters.

Also, you honestly think this:

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sounds better than this:

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?