CPC: Underpowered for 1984?

[MaV]

That's stopping the clock, which would be a weird way of trying to stop the CPU (I'd imagine a Z80 might also do strange things in that case too, such as upsetting refresh). The 6502 has a RDY line which external devices can use to halt the CPU temporarily (I'd guess that's what the C64 does but. I've never looked into it).

Right, the RDY line on the 6502 is used for such purposes. My mistake!
And you're right about the Z80 and the refresh, stopping the Z80 this way otherwise is completely safe. It all boils down to whether the processor is build with CMOS or NMOS technology.

[ZorrO]

RISC has a shorter list of instructions executing in fewer clocks than CISC. Which means it has to execute a longer list of commands than CISC to execute the same program. So the fact that it will execute more commands at the same time with the same clock does not give it an advantage. But its simpler structure requires fewer transistors, so it is cheaper to produce, and allows it to be clocked faster with a similar degree of heating. Or achieve the same performance as CISC while heating up less and consuming less electricity. And this is the advantage of RISC, especially in mobile devices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_computer_vendors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_phones

According to these sites, PCs reached their peak production in 2011, up to 352 million. A year ago it dropped to 286 million. The decline stopped during the pandemic, but it is going down again. Meanwhile, smartphones peaked in 2014, to 1.88 billion, and are falling due by recession, 1.2 billion a year ago. But it's still 5 times as much as PC. So ARMs are leading. Now even the newest MACs run on RISC.
___________

And back to the main topic. CPC, having a resolution of 640x200 and a faster processor, had a huge advantage over C64 in office programs at a similar price. (plus it had a monitor included). C128 had a similar or even better mode because it was in color, but it was almost twice as expensive and almost half as slow in CPM than CPC. Yes, C128 had Z80 ticking only 2MHz.

CPC in games was sometimes slower than C64, but for example in isometrics it had either a higher resolution or more colors. In general, it had more colorful sprites than just 3 colors in C64. And a faster tape recorder and disk drive. In 8bits, only MSX2 was better than CPC, but also clearly more expensive and more exotic in Europe. So CPC was the Top Machine. (with not always top games). And for dessert, a great quick Basic. Yeah!

But I wouldn't rate so well CPC Plus. After 6 years clock speed and RAM are the same. With almost twice the price, with an unnecessary monitor. Some 16-bit was a better choice. ST and A500 had a similar price to PLUS. Or even a PC cheaper than CPC+, e.g. Atari PC1 or Schneider EuroPC, which had a twice faster processor, 4 times more RAM, much easier to connect hard drive or cheaper quite useful DOS and Norton in ROM. And had Tandy Graphics, so utility with 640x200 in 4 colors, and hundreds of games in 320x200 in 16 colors. It really looked better than the same games on PLUS over and over again. For example Lemmings or Crazy Cars 2 & 3 in higher resolution. Just to buy AdLib for the printer port to have sounds better. So it was a much better successor after CPC than Plus with just few games with few more colors, Yuck. And I think I don't need to explain advantages of Atari ST or Amigas.

[cwpab]

Thanks all again for the super interesting information! Especially the last message from ZorrO, very clarifying!

Hey ZorrO, I'm also a CPC + PSX person... What about the other retro gens? In my case it's MS-DOS for the 16 bit and PS2. 

[ZorrO]

This is yet another offtopic, but I've never had 16bit. And I never had 8bit with recorder.
I had 6128 +5.25 +mouse, in 1992-96, then A1230 42MHz HDD CD and PSX until 2002, then 1.2GHz WinXP. Since 2007 I use laptops only.

[cwpab]

Sounds like you started really strong with Amstrad... Whoa.

" 6128 +5.25 +mouse "

That's definitely NOT underpowered. 

[ZorrO]

I start fascinated with computers in 1985 when I saw them on TV and noticed that there were some magazines about them. I was 12 years old then, but my parents didn't want to hear about such nonsense. Prices of them were sky high for me. But after 7 years I bought myself 6128 with green in 1992, when they stopped producing not only CPC but also A500. Such institutions as Police and universities were replacing then CPC into PC, so used 6128 went on sale for price like C64 + tape recorder. I wasn't rich but I was frugal so I buy it. After 2 years I bought a color TV, and a year later a big FDD and mouse from ST. Someone might think that it was already outdated, but in my block were 40 flats and I was only third owner of computer there, so I felt like a pioneer. And in other blocks situation wasn't better. Someone had XE, someone had C64, someone else had A500.

Poland wasn't rich country, in '85 only 1% of families had a micros, and in '92 about 6%. I guess in England probably were better, but not so much that everyone could afford Amiga in '85. So I think a question like in this subject "is it CPC in '84 wasn't too weak?" could asked by someone so young that he don't remember those times, or by someone from a rich family who doesn't realize that not everyone are a millionaire.

Do you remember this?

[Wanderer]

My answer is no, because "power" is what everyone is obsessed with today. Those times were more romantic for me (being a teenager at the time). The point of messing with a computer then, was not to find the more "powerful" machine but to find the easiest to learn with. That was the true "power" of those times and the CPC6128 excelled in it. It was my 2nd computer and my most loved till today. I learned tons of things on assembly, how hardware works and how software can be used to squeeze out every bit of potential of a computer. You couldn't do that with a PC or an Atari or Amiga (my third computer, which i still love but as a user/gamer, not as a computer enthusiast).

[asertus]

My answer is no, because "power" is what everyone is obsessed with today. Those times were more romantic for me (being a teenager at the time). The point of messing with a computer then, was not to find the more "powerful" machine but to find the easiest to learn with. That was the true "power" of those times and the CPC6128 excelled in it. It was my 2nd computer and my most loved till today. I learned tons of things on assembly, how hardware works and how software can be used to squeeze out every bit of potential of a computer. You couldn't do that with a PC or an Atari or Amiga (my third computer, which i still love but as a user/gamer, not as a computer enthusiast).

In those times, having a 3" disk drive in a home computer was really power.., compared to tapes..

[Wanderer]

In those times, having a 3" disk drive in a home computer was really power.., compared to tapes..

Indeed. In order to do anything other than gaming, it was a one-way street...

[Optimus]

Thanks to this post, today I learned that x86 is CISC and ARM is RISC.

My dear PSX was RISC and that apparently helped it... I believe the 3DO was not RISC. I'm not sure how many consoles use(d) RISC, but a quick search revealed RISC was only used starting with the PSX (not sure if Saturn) and stopped at the PS3 era, as PS4 and other later consoles switched back to CISC with x86.

I have also learned that RISC uses more instructions to do the same, but it saves hardware space or transistors because these instructions use only one clock (cycle?) and this allows for pipelining.

A few weeks ago, I also read that a RISC processor was about 3x as fast as a CISC processor with the same speed (at least for consoles and games).

I wonder if the industry will move to the RISC ARM processors at some point.

The 3DO has an ARM CPU which is RISC of course. I also find out the Saturn SH-2 processors are mentioned as RISC.

There is also the mythology/marketing around RISC, that it must be much faster. But it's relative. You might have thought 3DO or Saturn must be not RISC as they happen to underperform compared to Playstation. But there are a lot of other reasons they do so. Yet their CPU also seems to be of the RISC type.

The thing is, nobody can agree of a precise definition of CISC vs RISC, it never made sense to me. It's more of a chip design philosophy rather than something precise you can scientifically define.
But I can see the more registers, fewer instructions and orthogonality in ARM or others. But that orthogonality and more registers are nice on 68000 too, which I think is considered a CISC.
However, I see a lot of extra variations of instructions in later ARM. So is that a RISC now or CISC? I am not sure..

An early feature I love on ARMs btw, is that the instruction encoding allows it to do many things in one instruction that could be taking 2-3 or more on other CPUs. But it's not like extra junk instruction, but just the orthogonal design around simple instructions allows you to do things like that.

ADDEQ R1,R2,R3,LSL #4

This does R1 = R2 + (R3 << 4) only if the flag was Zero (conditional EQ)

On X86 you would need to do

JNE after
    MOV AX,BX
    MOV CX,DX
    SHL CX,4
    ADD AX,CX
after:

On X86 (and other CPUs too) you couldn't even use 3 regs as arguments,. your ADD is R1 = R1 + R2, so I had to swap around regs to do the shift (I am writing this fast, don't know if my asm is crappy).

At first I would be "Wait a minute? How is ARM a RISC?". But to counter my point, because the ARM doesn't have a lot of extra junk instructions, more bits are available in the instruction encoding to create those more parametrized simple instruction formats. The same thing is orthogonal, you can do it for MOV, ADD, SUB, AND, ORR, XOR, etc.. it's beautiful!!! One reason certain things were faster with efficient assembly on ARM than early X86 (things might be different now but for other hardware architectural reasons). But then PCs might had more bruteforce CPUs with more Mhz or faster RAM, I don't know. One architecture was never much faster than the other, they were fighting side by side. I've never seen the effect of a CPU truly outperforming the others so that it's obvious.

But anyway, I diverted. I would like to say stories of how now I am learning 68000 on Amiga/AtariST, I realize while it's so much more cool and orthogonal than x86, instruction cycles are not as fast that I perceived it to be. There are things where the 286 even spends less cycles than 68000 (don't look at the mul/div cycles my god, or even bit shifts by N positions). However, 68000 with more registers available and MOVEM instructions could counter that. So,.it's all relative. We also think 68000 must have been a beast because of the produced graphics from the custom chips of Amiga or Mega Drive, so it's misleading (See Spectrum QL with 68000 that looks and moves worse than 8088 with CGA).

[andycadley]

Modern ARM CPUs are every bit as much a CISC design as x86. It's pretty much impossible to have SIMD type instructions and not be closer to CISC ideology than RISC. The only sense it which it's really any different is that it has less baggage from old designs than x86 (less, but not none. And Intel is moving to strip Real Mode support and a bunch of other legacy bits from x86 l, which will bring it a lot closer).

But there is still a weird cult clinging to the idea of "RISC is more advanced" and so the marketing droids still try to push the "ARM is RISC" line to make it seem better.

Weirdly the same didn't happen to VLIW, even though VLIW was really just an even further extension of the principle of RISC. Possibly because the most notable VLIW CPU was the Itanium.

[cwpab]

I start fascinated with computers in 1985 when I saw them on TV and noticed that there were some magazines about them. I was 12 years old then, but my parents didn't want to hear about such nonsense. Prices of them were sky high for me. But after 7 years I bought myself 6128 with green in 1992, when they stopped producing not only CPC but also A500. Such institutions as Police and universities were replacing then CPC into PC, so used 6128 went on sale for price like C64 + tape recorder. I wasn't rich but I was frugal so I buy it. After 2 years I bought a color TV, and a year later a big FDD and mouse from ST. Someone might think that it was already outdated, but in my block were 40 flats and I was only third owner of computer there, so I felt like a pioneer. And in other blocks situation wasn't better. Someone had XE, someone had C64, someone else had A500.

Poland wasn't rich country, in '85 only 1% of families had a micros, and in '92 about 6%. I guess in England probably were better, but not so much that everyone could afford Amiga in '85. So I think a question like in this subject "is it CPC in '84 wasn't too weak?" could asked by someone so young that he don't remember those times, or by someone from a rich family who doesn't realize that not everyone are a millionaire.

Very cool story! In contrast, I feel very privileged: My dad placed his color 6128 in my room when he bought a 286 in 1989 (I was 9), and shortly after I got 80 copied games from one of his friends. Sadly, the disk belt broke and the computer was gone by 1992. But I was a "late adopter" too and was a bit confused when I read Spanish magazines, that were already focusing on the Amiga. 

From my experience in Spain, one of the kids in my class had a CPC (green monitor and tape, I guess I was the rich kid compared to him), several had a Spectrum and one had an MSX. None had a C64. And I I've heard stories about kids that received a ZX Spectrum well into the 90s. In retrospect, I wish I had a tape machine: I would have waited much longer loading games, but I'd still have the computer.

Back to Poland, I find it interesting that you stayed 7 years (from 1985 to 1992, from 12 to 19 years old) "obsessed with 8 bit computers" without having one. Could you give more details on that? Was there any magazine that hyped you? Did you had access to those machines at schools? Also, once you had the CPC, how did you get games for it? Did you use the 5,25 inch drive? Thanks!

[McArti0]

Was there any magazine that hyped you?

Bajtek   https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22bajtek%22&page=2
Komputer
IKS  (Informatyka Komputery Systemy)

Also, once you had the CPC, how did you get games for it?

Pirated software marketplace

About it ... 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSb-PPQEU7k

[McArti0]

Did you had access to those machines at schools?

Hahahahhaha!!!    80th, sometimes one BW TV for the entire school

[ZorrO]

In my generation, as I read there were only a few experimental schools with computers in the largest cities in Poland. The generation a few years younger was more lucky to attend to such a school.
I saw saloon arcade for the first time in 1981, a few years later two more such places appeared in my city. I played only once, and in 5 minutes I lost enough money to buy a monthly computer magazine that I could read and watch for weeks. I preferred reading rather than playing, so I didn't play anymore, but I often went there to watch like play others.

I guess I wasn't very social because I didn't have the opportunity to touch one until I bought a computer. Although I knew which stores had Timex and Atari on display. Before I bought computer, I read a lot of science fiction and stories about UFOs, Yeti, ghosts, etc. I rode a bike a lot, also camping, and sometimes I ran away from home. And somehow these years passed me by.

In years '86 to '90 were 5 multi-platform computer magazines in Poland. The most popular of them, "Bajtek", wrote about 8-bits until '94.
At first, most popular computer in Poland was Spectrum, then Atari 8bit, then C64 and A500 simultaneously. And according to polling, only 3% of readers had CPC. Therefore, out of 32 pages, only 2 (sometimes 4) were about CPC. Often boring about CPM.

Long listings were in the IKS magazine, about 1/8 were for CPC. But rather boring, high mathematics written by soldiers from officers' school. In others, there were only tests of Amstrads, they praised how cool they were, but there were no tips or descriptions of the software. When numerous gaming magazines appeared after 1991, they usually forgot to mention that described title also had an Amstrad version. Amstrads in Poland had a reputation as a cheap PC substitute suitable for writing texts, not a gaming machine.
But back then I wasn't planning to buy CPC, I didn't even dream about it, because I thought that if I could afford a computer one day, I would probably buy Spectrum or Timex (because it has 64 characters per line), but there were big, ugly and expensive FDD for them.

Later, all the multiplatform magazines disappeared and appeared about Atari XE, ST, C64 and Amigas. After 1995, only those about Amiga and PC remained.
Honestly, I spent more money on magazines about UFOs and parapsychology.

I stared at these magazines and liked computers with FDD and high resolution. And I read about tape recorders were suck so much, so when Amstrads suddenly became so cheap in 1991 was for me like salvation.

Around 1993 I borrowed from a friend 4 foreign magazines only about CPC. 2 English and 2 German. (he had an uncle abroad). They were from 1988, but I was enchanted by how many beautiful things I saw there, I didn't know English well at that time. And only a few words of German (till now). But I typed listings and names of several games and programs to ask pirates about them later.
MacArti0 mentions computer's market, but they were only in a few large cities, and even there it was difficult to find something for CPC, it was easier to find something in the advertisements "I have such a computer and I will exchange the software", you could order by phone, but it was cheaper to visit and copy.
My rubber belt in FDD broke too, but I used rubber band what they used to sell bunches of radishes. I am not joking.

In 1994, an anti-piracy law was introduced, but it took 10 years for piracy in Poland to drop from 99% to 50%. In the past, even if you had a pirate collection, your friends were jealous of you. Because it wasn't easy to get them. But today, just like in Western countries, if you want you can find pirates, but to make people jealous, you have to have the originals.

I seen in local club had 8 pieces of CPC 6128 and kids 10 years old try learned LOGO on it. (I was already had 20 years old). And I put an ad on cable channel that I was looking for Amstradians, four people responded, all 464.   But I also met others and I had someone to copy software from, it was more difficult to buy 3' floppy disks than to find someone who had CPC software. It wasn't as bad as imagined by Polish owners of other computers.

After two years, I replaced my green monitor with a color TV. In the early 1990s, owners of old PCs threw away those large 5.25' (40-track) 360K drives to replace them with 80-track 720K ones, and the old ones were very cheap (1/4 price of C64 FDD), but I didn't like them and resisted them for a long time. I had a scheme how to connect 5.25' from these foreign magazine, and for mouse too. In 1995, when my friend bought a 6128 with a 5.25' drive and 120 disks but he was short of money, I said that I would pay the rest but I would take 60 disks. And I got a my 5.25' from another friend in exchange for a book I didn't need. I bought the ST mouse without a cable for few pennies. And after 4 years I had 40 small disks and a total of about 500 games. Utilities for everything, digitized music and pictures. And a few full-disc demos. All pirates version. Atari and C64 owners without a FDD envied me terribly. I sold it after four years for 1/3 of price. I didn't know that someday I will be miss my CPC. I bought an A1200 030 HDD etc. And again, I was an outsider for several years when most people had a PC. After three years I bought another bare 6128 with one empty floppy and without power supply. It stayed in Poland, cause I live in England since 17 years, and I have only emulator.

My only failure with CPC was in '93 I went to the Internet to university library and I found everything up to CPC on Norwegian FTP. I copied some stuff on 3.5' floppys, and I borrowed such a drive from a friend but I couldn't get it to work.

[asertus]

Actually, what I have found is a lot of support of Atari 8bit computers in Poland. And a lot of recent homebrew games from there.. were those popular in 80-90s? More than other western computers?

[ZorrO]

After the C64 sold much cheaper than the Atari XL after 1982 and the company's collapse in 1983, Western software companies no longer wanted to develop for Atari.

But in 1984, the company was bought by Jack Tramiel. He was a Jew born in Poland, and he spoke Polish. And he was looking for sales markets for the XE in Central Europe, because in the West they were already considered obsolete. The peak of popularity of Atari XE in Poland was in the years '87-91. Before that, the Spectrum and later the C64 were more popular. The first Polish software companies (LK Avalon, Mirage Media) were established in the early 1990s and wrote for XE and C64. This was very difficult in a market so dominated by piracy.

Atarians often win short Basic competitions.
8bit Atari never fascinated me, but I think that the best reason to become an Atari owner was the community, very nice, helpful and down-to-earth people. Unlike Commodore owners who like to make fun of owners of other machines and can do nothing except break joysticks.

By the way, Alan Sugar is also a descendant of Jews who once lived in Poland. I remember when Brexit was approaching, he appeared on TV and spoke very warmly about his Polish employees, and expressed regret that recently the British had such a bad attitude towards immigrants.

 

[cwpab]

From the video about Polish "stock exchanges":

[ZorrO]

These are the number of computers on the market. Some were brought there for sale and others worked there as copying machines. And this is sum of all machines from each company. A8 and ST together, C64/16/128/+4/A500 together, CPC/PCW/PC together. There was quantity in that one day. This was in 1989, a few months before the first survey was published.

[cwpab]

Hey ZorrO... One last question. In the "what's your favorite failed vintage computer" thread, you mention the Amiga 1200 as one of the most overrated. But here you mention this machine was your chosen one to make the jump directly from the 8 bits to the 32 bits. So my question would be: how was your experience with the Amiga 1200? How many years did you use it in Poland, what year did you buy it, what games did you have, why do you think it's overrated and when did you finally play Doom, Day of the Tentacle and other MS-DOS exclusives?

[ZorrO]

I've never had MS-DOS, I've never played DotT. My first PC had WinXP, and I bought it because I wanted to watch DiviX movies and I wanted Internet. But start at start.

I bought the A1200 because I wanted a computer with a HDD, colorful graphics and a mouse. I had it from 1996 to 2002. And halfway through that time I already knew that 32bit PCs were better than 32bit Amiga.
9 of 10 my favorite Amiga games could run on A500. In my opinion, there is nothing as good like should be on 32bit. Fortunately, I also had PSX at those times, and there was plenty of gorgeous games. I've never been interested in games where you run around with a gun. Maybe because as a kid I used to run around the forest with a stick, playing war. I had demo of Doom on A1200 and PSX in late 90's, boooooring. Gloom was much more fun and it was the only Amiga game I liked and it needed a processor more powerful than 7MHz.

In the 90s, the prices and power of computers were changing rapidly. At the beginning, Polish could barely afford 8-bit. In the mid-90s it was cheaper than a PC because you didn't have to buy a monitor and it had better sound. Because for similar money you could buy 386 B/W VGA and Covox. But at the end there was no money spent on Amiga that would provide as many possibilities. Also, PSX games were much better than Amiga games from 060 or PPC, and PSX cost only a fraction of turbo with 060. Half of the best PSX games were never released on PC.

But the games aren't only disappointment. The driver for CD-ROM for A600/A1200 appeared about in mid-90s. There were difficulties finding drivers for the scanner and modem. Video codecs appeared with a delay of several years. The first scalable vector fonts with Polish characters appeared on Amiga only in the late 90s. And they were already on Atari ST a decade earlier!  In the mid-90s, if someone was rich, they could buy a much better PC than the best Amiga. But at the end, for a fraction of the price of average Amiga (I mean about 030), you could buy a PC that was 100 times better in everything.
To sum up, games from the previous era looked good, modern games didn't exist for a long time, and when they did appear, there were only a few and very slow. Apart from gaming, it was suitable for displaying photos and playing music, but if you needed something for office use, it was a real pain in ass.

I know that Amiga music was better than 8bit chip-tune, but I never heard from Amiga anything like this... (good speaker needed, that's what I call 32bit music):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e0lhwoxwGY

PS.: In my previous post #68 "These are the number of computers on the market."  As "market" I meant something like car boot sale in UK. And in Warsaw were bigest computer car boot in Poland. Source of most piracy software.

[cwpab]

This is firmly on offtopic teritory now, but it's funny that around '97 you were super pumped at 26yo or so with NFS3 on the PSX because of the TECHNO music, while at the same time I was headbanging the ROCK music in the same game when I was 18:

The game was fun, but cars looked like shoe boxes and handled as such. Those orange colors for the cars without proper "fake-reflections" applied like Gran Turismo were a bit cringey. But seriously, listen to the part at 2:10!

[ZorrO]

In NFS 3 you can choose in options Rock or Techno music. I always preferred Techno. Like most European, I guess, Rock is for American.

[zhulien]

...

[zhulien]

I already knew that 32bit PCs were better than 32bit Amiga

That is one opinion, mine differs.  My Amiga is better than my PC even though my PC now is faster, has more storage etc... and can even emulate more than one Amiga at once.