C64 Vs Speccy: Which one do you prefer as an Amstrad fan?

[dodogildo]

I don't think the MSX sales were very good in Europe or USA, right?

Wikipedia reports 9m MSX sold worldwide, 7m in Japan alone. Leaving 2m for US, EU and rest of the world..

[eto]

I find it a bit odd that here in Spain, none of my friends as a kid had a C64... but one had an MSX.

I don't think the MSX sales were very good in Europe or USA, right?

MSX was popular in the Netherlands. Philips produced several models over the years. 

[djaybee]

My wife and I are both into retrocomputing, and she recently asked me, if I were coding games back then, and if I could only code each game for a single 8-bit machine, which machines would be in my mix over time.

The Apple II starts the list in 1977. Since neither the TRS-80 nor the PET can do graphics, that's an easy choice.

In 1979, the Atari 800. It's got sprites, sound, a variety of useful graphics modes, support for split screen, hardware scrolling. I'm not convinced that the Apple II keeps much of an edge for any use cases other than some very specific niches.

In 1982, I add the C64 in the mix, its sprites are a major upgrade from the Atari, and its graphics modes allow for quite some tricks, such that it's awesome for platformers and for tile-based games. The Atari remains firmly in place for anything that requires a true bitmap framebuffer or hardware scrolling.

The MSX in 1983 opens other possibilities, its graphics chip is quite narrow such that it's very good at what it does well but falls apart quickly in other situations, it's in no way a generalist but I think it can do games that would have been surprisingly difficult up to that point.

In 1984, I'm adding the CPC, for games that need the specifics of its graphics modes, and are OK with the performance cost involved. E.g. 3D racing games. Oddly enough, while I feel that there are few domains where the CPC stands out far ahead of the other machines, I also feel that it's got fewer weaknesses and that there are few 8-bit games that can't be reasonably done on a CPC, and it's the first 8-bit machine that makes me feel that way.

In 1985, the MSX2 pretty much replaces everything in 8-bit, but the Amiga makes 8-bit obsolete. From here, the 8-bit world remains centered on MSX. In 1990, the MSX TurboR is incredibly advanced compared to the CPC Plus.

Note that the ZX Spectrum never makes my list, there's too little that it can do at the time that's out of reach of both the Atari 800 and the C64. Same about the BBC Micro, or the Thomson TO/MO series, or the VIC-20, or the IBM PC against their respective competition at the time, they're all too little too late in my book.

[ZorrO]

@andycadley - You are wrong about colors in 320x200 in C64. There is a whole byte for colors in the letter. 4 bits for background and 4 bits for pen. And ZX has 3 bits for background and 3 bits for pen. For example, it cannot use light and dark green in one letter, but C64 can. It's 160x200, in C64 we have 4 colors per letter, including one common to the entire screen. This allows you to flash whole screen by modifying one byte, which ZX cannot do. And ZX does not have option to use 4 colors per letter.

CPC doesn't have CIRCLE command, who cares? FOR DRAW SIN COS NEXT draws circle faster than the CIRCLE command in ZX.
It is similar with the lack of PLOT and DRAW commands in C64. One line of BASIC with FOR POKE NEXT draws vertical and horizontal lines faster than ZX. And diagonal lines are only a bit slower than ZX.

In my opinion it's not true C64 Basic is suck, and Simon's Basic not make Basic better. More useful is few short command in Final cartridge, and even better Black Box. Most important difference is C64 Basic is almost twice faster than ZX Basic, with that you can do everything easier.

There is nothing better in ZX compare to C64. Only sentimental reasons make people like ZX.

[andycadley]

@andycadley - You are wrong about colors in 320x200 in C64. There is a whole byte for colors in the letter. 4 bits for background and 4 bits for pen. And ZX has 3 bits for background and 3 bits for pen. For example, it cannot use light and dark green in one letter, but C64 can. It's 160x200, in C64 we have 4 colors per letter, including one common to the entire screen. This allows you to flash whole screen by modifying one byte, which ZX cannot do. And ZX does not have option to use 4 colors per letter.

Nope. The C64 Color RAM is only 4 bit, which means in high res character mode you can have all 16 colours with a limit of 1 chosen colour per 8*8 cell and 1 entirely shared background colour.

You can get more colours on screen by using multicolour character mode. In that case you have a shared background colour and two other shared character colours, the fourth colour is selectable on a per character basis but can only be chosen from the first 8 colours. Why 8? Well it's because the upper bit of the four bit colour RAM is instead used to indicate whether the character should be hig or low res. High res characters can only use the shared background colour and the per character colour though.

There's also Extended Multicoloured Character mode, in which case the number of characters available on screen is reduced from 256 down to just 64 and the spare 2 bits of each character code is instead used to select one of four background colours.

There are also two bitmap modes which allow more flexible colour placement at the expense of using a lot more RAM (thus really only being suitable for static images given the lack of CPU grunt)

Standard bitmap mode allows 2 colours per 8*8 cell, but you can select the two colours independently from the full 16 colour set.

Multicolour bitmap mode allows 4 colours per 8*8 cell each of which can be any of the 16 available. One is the shared background colour, the other three selectable per cell

Meanwhile the Spectrum has a much simpler display, it's a pure bitmap but colours come from it's attribute RAM. Each 8*8 cell can specify freely one of the 8 colours for the background and one of the 8 colours for the foreground. A single bit allows choosing either "bright" or "non bright" colours (which applies to both foreground and background) and another bit can periodically switch the foreground/background colours to make a flashing effect.


And, of course, none of these are as flexible as our humble CPC which can use either 2, 4 or 16 colours per pixel dependent on screen resolution without any restrictions on how many colours can be in any one area, nor on which of the available colours they can be.

[Gryzor]

I mean... Sentimental reasons aside, and I can understand those, can you really compare the two? If you were a kid again and there were only two options, would you ever go for the Speccy if you had the money?

[andycadley]

I guess that depends what "had the money" means, as well as what you wanted out of a computer. The C64 was a lot more money at the time and you could buy a Speccy and a hell of a lot of games for the same price.And if you wanted to learn programming, the C64 was a terrible choice. It was better overall if you wanted to play arcade style games, but that's because it was essentially designed originally as an arcade machine. It's all a bit moot though, we can emulate all of them and play whatever version of just about anything. We don't even have to suffer the C64's terrible loading times!

[McArti0]

I had no money, so I knew I would only buy a computer once. I borrowed a Unipolbrit, I was disgusted by the Atari, I had a C64 from a friend and I wasn't crazy about it.
So the matter was clear, 80 columns and LPT only had CPC.