Someone doesn't like the CPC...

[Gryzor]

Had some fun reading this this morning

(Click "Expand" at the top of the quote)

The CPC is just what happens when you have no custom chips and try to move about a 16k screen RAM. Given that the 4mhz Z80 suffers about 15-20% 'bad lines' according to Amstrad experts and the Z80 @ 3.25mhz is about the speed of the 6502 class CPU in the Commodore Plus/4 (TED has the same hardware pixel offset scroll as VIC-II) and Atari 800 etc it is pretty pathetic. Even so, 16k at 320x200 gives you a maximum of just 4 colours for the entire screen, doesn't matter if it's unlimited this is utter garbage and makes the games look worse than the ZX Spectrum 16k classics. No Color/Attribute RAM just shows it was the simplest possible design for a computer, at least the Spectrum has Attribute RAM, the MSX may have similar and the C64 and TED based C= computers all allow 320x200 (256x192 for MSX/Speccy) with 16 colours etc I think. It's a shit design.

That's probably why they allow you to shrink/increase the screen boarders of all 4 corners so most games with scrolling shrink the screen down to an actual 7 or 8 inch square area where there is any actual dynamic graphics (ignoring massive areas).

But really I am talking about the quality of the components. The computer alone cost £199.99 (a TV modulator was £20-25 IIRC) and the keyboard was garbage for this price point. The monitor is some pathetic garbage bargain basement CRT tube on the colour monitor bundle (£349.99 in 1984? vs £299.99 for green screen?) which has no saturation control (it's set to 100% saturation hence the myth it is a very colourful computer) and the brightness and contrast is combined into one control like junk bottom of the barrel TVs. There is also no speaker, the speaker used inside the case is badly located AND a pathetic 1 inch in size and shit quality, 99 pence quality at best. The YM chip isn't actually that bad but with that internal speaker sound horrendous (the RF modulator for the CPC outputs video only, no sound to the TV) and by 1987 you could get a 520STFM for the same price as the 128k CPC6128+ modulator if you shopped around.

The tape deck built in is worse quality than a Boots or W H Smiths tape deck for £9.99.

You can't have the monitor off and the computer on if you bought it with a green screen or colour monitor bundle, the monitor on off switch cuts power to the CPC, another utterly shit idea.

And finally by the time SCART RGB cables appeared which allowed people who bought a green screen bundle to use it on their colour TV too owning such low end hardware was in the 'free school meals' poverty bracket to be quite frank (and still cost the same as a much more powerful 520STFM too so probably low IQ special needs people too).

The funny thing is with such useless hardware technically the coding generally improved over time, sprites on the C64 made coders very lazy and once they discovered sprite multiplexing and using hi-res overlays trick there was bugger all of the 16kb of VIC-II RAM accessible for excellent use of Colour RAM in the character based multi-color mode (the most horrendous mode of 5 the C64 has) and so after about 1988/89 most games looked like garbage of Acorn Electron palette + 2 greys/browns bullshit. Then again to be honest if you were still playing 8bit games in 1989 I feel very sorry for you when the real action was on NEC, Sega, Amiga or even ST (that cost no more than the 128k CPC in reality from 1987 and onward).

You can say what you want but I own ALL of this stuff, I use it to run my channel. I don't use a CPC emulator to review games and then forget to tell you the screen on Road Runner CPC is about the same as the built in screen of an SX-64 to play that version etc, or that the sound volume is something you reach for instinctively because the volume of the audio of the tape being loaded is half that of the volume of the AY chip pumped through the same speaker. The fact that the 'turbo loader' built into the CPC range is only twice as fast as that of the standard tape loader in the ROMs of a VIC-20 etc etc.

Nothing Amstrad made in the 80s was of any kind of quality, nor was it a bargain, the PCW was useless garbage for that sort of money (you needed to spend about £80 for a serial interface and then add the cost of a daisywheel printer if you intended to use it seriously in even a small office, the Amstrad printer supplied is garbage quality etc etc). The PC1512 cost more than an ST and was an inferior business machine thanks to vastly superior packages like 1st Word WP bundled free with every ST vs and £50 Amsoft WP package designed to be sold for that system vs £500 Word Perfect 4.0 non WYSIWYG bullshit 'commercial quality' (if it didn't exist you could write a GEM based application in days using Computer Concepts Fast BASIC)

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

Their VCRs were garbage too, bottom of the barrel crap before that was even a thing in the VCR market.

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

Everything that Sugar did was shit quality. This is not the same as Sinclair Research, that 100% goes in the bracket of "ambitious BUT RUBBISH"

(rubbish can be down to trying to do too much for a price point hence you get shit compromises which ruin the product).
ImmortalA1000 is offline

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=1598506#post1598506

[poulette73]

Really funny 

[Squeekboxandj]

He's clearly not a fan. Probably right about the Amstrad HiFi though

[Gryzor]

He's clearly not a fan. Probably right about the Amstrad HiFi though

Sure, but bundling it together with the CPC... smh

[trocoloco]

So much hate concentrated, sounds like is holding a grude against CPCs . For some reason the user got banned, no wonder why 

[Gryzor]

Oh didn't notice that! But I'd say he does need some cooling off period...

[TotO]

Typical of people who have nothing else to talk about.
Thanks for the fun time.

[Gryzor]

Yeah, found it to good to keep to myself

[Carnivius]

What a dickhead.  No wonder he got banned if he's been posting idiotic hate-filled posts like that. 

Just a few bits that stood out to me:

"No Color/Attribute RAM just shows it was the simplest possible design for a computer"
Is he saying the lack of colour clash is a bad thing? I like being able to put coloured pixels anywhere I damn well please.

"it's set to 100% saturation hence the myth it is a very colourful computer "
How's it a myth?  The palette values worked out by technical minded folk when displaying vintage computer graphic output on PC's and such confirm the CPC palette is bolder and more saturated. By his logic then C64 gamers were missing out on a world of bright colours by having the saturation of the TV set too low?

"The tape deck built in is worse quality than a Boots or W H Smiths tape deck for £9.99. "
So how come games loaded far more reliably on a 464 than either the Spectrum or C64 connected to whatever external tape deck used for those?  I never had any loading issues with my 464 back then but at my friend's house we often had issues loading his C64 tapes even on his official Commodore tape deck.

"You can say what you want but I own ALL of this stuff, I use it to run my channel. "   
Countless other people with differing opinions also own this stuff too but apparently NOBODY can say anything to contradict the undisputable king of all vintage computer enthusiasts, Mr ImmortalA1000...   I hope I never encounter his channel cos it's probably full of the same dumbassery on display in his post.

"Then again to be honest if you were still playing 8bit games in 1989 I feel very sorry for you when the real action was on NEC, Sega, Amiga or even ST (that cost no more than the 128k CPC in reality from 1987 and onward). "
My family wasn't like super poor (we were quite early with Satellite TV at least) but I still didn't get an Amiga until 1993 (the A1200).  And NEC?  Who used NEC computers for gaming?  Did he actually mean NES?  Which is 8-bit. As was the only Sega available at the time (the Mega Drive wasn't released in PAL regions until September 1990).  I'm kinda surprised he didn't slip the word 'peasant' in there somewhere.  "I feel sorry for you peasants.. stuck on 8-bit machines in 1989..." 


I wonder if he'll pop up on here now to continue his hate now he's banned from eab.abime.net

[Carnivius]

So much hate concentrated, sounds like is holding a grude against CPCs . For some reason the user got banned, no wonder why 

Perhaps someone used a CPC to bludgeon his parents to death and he grew up angry and mad.

[TotO]

The CPC palette is created from a logic way and covers the RGB spectrum. All the values exist since the EGA on other computers.

The funny thing is that some frieds owning a C64 now discover its true palette using a well decoded S-Video signal (or more advanced RGB solutions) and it looks like a CPC with less colours. (while emulators continue to offer a fake "NTSC" palette to look nice)

[abalore]

Wrong from first sentence. The gate array is a custom chip.

[ComSoft6128]

Aside from pointing out that (not counting drive belt replacements) I used a 6128 for over a decade without any problems I'm going to move on to the PCW.

"Nothing Amstrad made in the 80s was of any kind of quality, nor was it a bargain, the PCW was useless garbage for that sort of money (you needed to spend about £80 for a serial interface and then add the cost of a daisywheel printer if you intended to use it seriously in even a small office, the Amstrad printer supplied is garbage quality etc etc)."

I knew personally the owner of a small business (4 staff) that used 3 PCWs from 1985 to 1993 or 94.
Total original cost of these £1200

or he could have bought one(!) of these:

https://nosher.net/archives/computers/adve_045

Now my memory (I may be wrong) is that by 1985 the price of the PC was £1500 to £1700 for a machine that had a similar office functionality as the PCW. So 3 for the price of 1 is very very good deal.

So to quote Nauls from the movie The Thing - "Bullshit Bwana!"

[pelrun]

> Given that the 4mhz Z80 suffers about 15-20% 'bad lines' according to Amstrad experts

They can't be very good experts because otherwise they'd know the CPC doesn't have any badlines at all...

[Bryce]

That's what you get when you ask ChatGPT to badmouth the Amstrad.

Just a few blatant mistakes and rubbish:
- The GA is a custom chip.
- The Amstrad's speaker isn't 1inch in diameter.
- Comparing ANY computer to computers that came out 3 or 4 years later is just stupid. Hey the Nokia 2600 (2004) was shit compared to the iPhone (2007) .
- "Given that the 4mhz Z80 suffers about 15-20% 'bad lines'" What does that even mean?
- Why would you want to turn off the monitor and still have the CPC running?
- The CPC tape deck was of very high quality for its time.
- Talking about quality and features and then comparing the Amstrad to a C64 The C64 "shielding" was a piece of cardboard covered in tinfoil. It didn't have a proper serial port or printer port, it had attribute RAM and still managed to make everything look brown, it came with NO monitor and still cost more and if the PSU failed it took the entire computer out with it! The SID fails if you just look at it and the PLA isn't much better, the disk drives are slower than many cassette loaders of the time.

Bryce.

[Gryzor]

I'm enjoying these comments sooo much! Thank you

[Bryce]

I'm enjoying these comments sooo much! Thank you

I can't speak for the others here, but I certainly spend my Saturday mornings sitting in front of the PC and thinking of Retro related humour purely to keep you amused!

Bryce.

[Gryzor]

I'm enjoying these comments sooo much! Thank you

I can't speak for the others here, but I certainly spend my Saturday mornings sitting in front of the PC and thinking of Retro related humour purely to keep you amused!

Bryce.

You're a good guy. 

[BSC]

And in the far far future, when humanity has long vanished from the face of this planet, a few remaining artificially enhanced life forms that slightly resemble what we now know as humans keep on fighting the eternal platform wars .. 

[lmimmfn]

I saw this over on eab and just grabbed the popcorn, post new thread dropping a bomb with simple 2 line post on Amstrad crap quality products then create a huge follow up post where 70% of the post is bashing the CPC.

Was a blatant troll post so i never replied to the thread 

I never understand why people do this, even back in the day while i had an Amstrad, i loved playing on my mates Spectrum's and C64s and enjoyed those machines for their strengths and weaknesses and i never feel the need to comment negatively on any system.

People are strange 

[Gryzor]

Yeah, I don't know either. Always loved playing at my friends' c64s or Speccies (and the one MSX), and still liked my CPC above all. 

[Token]

Funny reading. And signed "You can say what you want but I own ALL of this stuff" 
C64 loosed is mojo and this guy is distraught about CPC abilities.

[MaV]

 "Given that the 4mhz Z80 suffers about 15-20% 'bad lines'" What does that even mean?

It's obvious he's catering to a very specific audience and uses their own technical terms to fling mud at the CPC.
I think he alludes to the Z80 in the CPC rounding off the machine cycles to 4 clock cycles so that the GA can fetch bytes for the video circuitry.

That guy throws a temper tantrum on the net like a five year old. The PCW was a good business machine otherwise nobody would have bought it, even if you had to buy a serial card (which - let's get real here - has no priority for machines that close to never were even used to exchange data.)
As to the PC1512 ... anyone remember that the whole PC compatible sector was in uproar because the PC1512 did not use a fan to cool the system? It's power supply was included in the monitor, so it didn't get as warm in the main unit as the typical PC compatible. In the end Amstrad had to include a fan just to silence the crowd. The other companies feared Amstrad that much.
Besides, those who bought a PC1512 wanted a DOS compatible machine. The ST never had a chance in the business sector, regardless of the quality of software. (Why even mention a 68k there?)

And then he goes off on a tangent to mention other Amstrad products as if a Sky+ TV box or VCR had anything to do with the CPC.

Some just cannot let go. I have no qualms to call the C64 a remarkable machine with a few shortcomings which is understandable given the times.

[MaV]

Besides, the PCW was aimed at small and medium sized companies, those that would have had a hard time to justify buying IBM PCs or compatibles (before they eventually were affordable).

[Shaun M. Neary]

Huh, at least we know whatever happened to Bug Powell