Memories of Amstrad sh*t quality products

[ImmortalA1000]

Why was everything Amstrad made in the 1980s such pathetic build quality AND ugly?

The man had the faecal touch as far approving designs and specs for his products.

[zenox98]

Everything from uncle Alan was definitely on the cheap side, but I still really liked my Amstrad CPC 464.

[alexh]

They had a price point well well below anything anyone else was doing. And you might not like the styling now but they were very contemporary at the time. Even innovative.

I used my Amstrad CDX400 from 1988 until 1999 and the styling was spot on for the late 80s. Build quality was sh1t, sound quality was acceptable, the price was amazing.

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[dreamkatcha]

Sugar embraced the 'tech for the masses' mantra of Tramiel and Sinclair, naturally resulting in cost-cutting, yet they don't seem to have been tarred with the same brush regarding computer build quality. Maybe Alan's materials were even cheaper with a greater profit margin built in?

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Why was everything Amstrad made in the 1980s such pathetic build quality AND ugly?

The man had the faecal touch as far approving designs and specs for his products.

That's bizarre, because the amstrad cpc has the best build over all the 8 bits computers existing on the master, 2 hands up !

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

That's bizarre, because the amstrad cpc has the best build over all the 8 bits computers existing on the master, 2 hands up !

I think the bbc micro is the most solidly built machine. I guess it had to be though. The acorn electron isn't bad for a lower budget machine.

[Seiya]

some Amstrad games were very beautiful, many other not. CPC for sure have better colors compared to C64, but very bad scrolling.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Seiya

some Amstrad games were very beautiful, many other not. CPC for sure have better colors compared to C64, but very bad scrolling.

Very bad scrolling because the programmers never tried to use it correctly.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

I think the bbc micro is the most solidly built machine. I guess it had to be though. The acorn electron isn't bad for a lower budget machine.

For the metal parts, yes. But the Amstrad CPC is very very hard. So hard that you would injury yourself if you try to break it.

[Megalomaniac]

It wasn't the best unit to look for, and the integrated 'monitor' was just a TV with no tuner, but the CPC was probably the most powerful 8-bit computer of the era. Sadly, it was released a bit too late, cost a bit too much (assuming you had a TV, even an ST was cheaper before long) and suffered from lazy Spectrum ports even more than the Amiga did with ST ports. Check out some of the French games to see what it could do.

[Megalomaniac]

Remember that if you bought an ST you still needed a TV or monitor to run with it, and the software was more expensive, so a CPC was still cheaper than an ST in practice. An ST cost a lot more than £200, and while it's a system I respect, its games have the same issues with screen size and scrolling as the CPC does. Obviously I'm a bit younger than yourself, but I'm glad I started in 1990 with a second-hand Spectrum and loads of games, rather than an Amiga (where most of the best games were still to come) living on coverdisks and maybe the odd budget game for most of the year, even if it obviously wasn't as good it gave me a good grounding in different types of games. If you'd had an 8-bit computer for more than about 3 years it was time to move on by 1990 though.

Having to leave the monitor on to keep the computer on was a ridiculous flaw though, I guess nobody had heard of carbon footprints back then. Maybe the sheer cost of running a CPC took the effective price closer to that of the ST?

Still, hardware limitations generally improve the quality of programming. Most great European-developed Amiga games were made by ex Spectrum / Amstrad / BBC people who had to push the hardware and could do innovative unusual game designs, rather than C64 people who could just throw sprites around but couldn't do anything that challenged the processor.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Their hi-fis are crap too, even the gimmicky vertical turntable/CD tower thingy as the audio quality is £50 system quality at best.

Not true. You couldn't get a CD Hifi for £50! Your memory is wrong.

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Amstrad's Sky+ satellite TV set top boxes were the least reliable and the only ones that needed cooling fans (unlike those from Pace etc) so there's that too.

If that were true, why did Sky buy Amstrad? Their work evolved into SkyQ and Sky Glass.

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Remember I am an engineer, this is our collecting experience at the Sky installation company I worked for briefly.

I am an engineer too. I design microchips and at the time I was a designer of chips at the heart of set-top-boxes (DVB-C demodulators, DTV SoCs.) My feeling at the time was "Is this the first really good thing Amstrad has made?"

[Bruce Abbott]

The CPC664 was the first computer I bought with a built in floppy drive. It was also my first computer with an 80 column mode. It was awesome. I loved the case styling. The drive was reliable. Its BASIC was faster and nicer than the Microsoft BASIC supplied with most home computers.

Having the power supply in the monitor was neat and convenient. I got the green screen because I wanted sharp 80 column text for programming (the color screen used a standard TV tube that produced nice bright colors but horizontal resolution was poor). Unfortunately the green screen didn't a have carry handle like the color monitor did, so I put one on it.

A few months after the 664 was released Amstrad introduced the 6128, which had twice as much RAM. There was a RAM pack you could plug into the back of the 664 to get more, but I had a better idea. I unsoldered the 64k RAM chips from the board and replaced them with 256k chips. Then I designed a memory management unit that duplicated the 6128's PAL but did 256k instead of 128k. With this I could flip between up to 15 screens, or use some of the RAM as a disk sized RAM disk and still have some left over above 64k. It was awesome. I did the same RAM upgrade to about a dozen machines for other people around the country.

Build quality was pretty good, and it was very reliable. The case plastic might have been 'cheap' but it looked good and didn't suffer from fading. The 664 keyboard had a light springy touch that was easy to type on. Special keys were a pastel blue color which looked very nice (unlike the 464 which was a bit garish).

I ported an assembler package from the ZX Spectrum called CHAMP that came on a magazine cover tape, and put it in ROM. It made full use of the extra RAM for writing, assembling and debugging programs. I used it as a cross assembler for other Z80 based machines, even after I got the A1000.

Eventually I stopped using the 664 as the Amiga took up most of my time, and I gave it to my father. A few years later I swapped it for my A1200, and it sat in the cupboard for many more years. Next time I tried to use it some of the keys weren't working, so I did something stupid - I threw it away! I later found out that new keyboard membranes were available. The CPC664 is now quite rare and expensive, so I will probably never own another one.

I do have a 6128 that I fire up occasionally, but it's not the same with that flat slab-like keyboard.

[manossg]

I think the aesthetics aspect is a bit subjective (although the 464 looked...yuck!), but the build quality of the Amstrad computers was fantastic.

[NorthWay]

I wouldn't mind a 6128+. The 664 sits collecting dust (like most of my stuff).

[alexh]

Originally Posted by NorthWay

I wouldn't mind a 6128+.

Prices for 6128+ have gone a little crazy but you can still get GX4000s cheap add in a new PSU and a C4CPC flash cartridge and you're in business.

https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/128k_on_GX-4000

[Total Eclipse]

Originally Posted by alexh

If that were true, why did Sky buy Amstrad? Their work evolved into SkyQ and Sky Glass.

Though ImmortalA1000 does seem to like a moan, I've got to agree on that point.

The first exposure I had to Sky was when we had Sky+ installed. At the time there were a couple of Sky+ STB suppliers - Amstrad and Pace.

Before we were installed, I'd done some reading on the Sky+ box, and the Amstrad was definitely the one to avoid. So imagine how excited I was to be given an Amstrad box

That lasted about two weeks before we had Sky out to replace it due to the audio randomly dropping on recordings. The new box was an Amstrad as well, which lasted us a couple of years until the PSU died, at which point we figured we were mostly watching FTA channels anyway, so cancelled and moved to a Freeview PVR (which is still working fine 12 years later).

So while I'd argue that Amstrad did produce some OK stuff (to a budget), some of their satellite kit did suck.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

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I know the Amstrad CPC very well, better than you and i'm not even a coder.

The ZX spectrum bullshit regarding the scrolling only applied to the UK coders that were not able to handle correctly the CPC (reminder: this computer has an hardware scrolling and software sprites).

The games made during the commercial era were bad simply because coders didn't gave a flying fuck about the Amstrad CPC. Not because the computer was not capable.

You're comparing the Commodore 8 bits (machines i would not sell any CPC for) with the CPC, only the sound saves the C64 and other models. Graphically those were terrible machines, while the CPC had vibrant colors like the Amiga did.

CPC (demo) coders show what the machine was really capable of, and quality hardware wise, the CPC shits over a building top on the C64 and commodores alike (better built with no questions, less capacitors shit, because PCB had better manufacturing, less breakdowns than the commodore 8 bits, etc etc the list is long).

So yeah, once again, we read the usual shit about the cXX and the same old biased stories about CPC with coders that never tried (knew) to use them correctly when simple home demo coders could do 10 times better on it.

[rare_j]

Rarely saw any of his products back in the day, save for a mate who had a cpc464+green screen.
But I remember going into the post office one time, maybe the mid 00's, and seeing his em@ilers piled high going for £20 apiece or something like that. I'd be surprised if they could give them away.
Poor old Alan, apparently he really wanted that one to work out.

[Megalomaniac]

What would we consider to be the CPC's "Killer Apps" to show its full potential? Stuff like Pinball Dreams, Zap't'Balls, Baba's Palace, Fres Fighter II Turbo, El Tesoro Perdido de Cuauhtemoc, Xythoes Fantasy, both versions of Megablasters and the unofficial R-Type are all more impressive than almost all commercial stuff developed in Britain, proof that its potential was well beyond the Spectrum's in most areas. You wouldn't judge the Amiga based on ST ports.