I got the impression the CPC was mostly big in France for whatever reason and it was like a more colourful C64.

What games are best on it? What are exclusives? Euroanons please help a burger.

>>11810563 (OP)
I'm French and you're right that it was popular even in the early 90s : I knew many people who had one as it was the cheapest computer available.

ERE Informatique (proto Cryo) and Ubi Soft made some of our French classics:
Macadam Bumper (pinball)
Sram and its sequel (adventure with text commands)
Captain Blood (weird space adventure, very unique)
Zombi (early survival horror similar to the Dawn of the Dead movie, which had a euro release titled Zombi)
Sapiens (prehistoric survival simulation)

We also played meh ports of arcade games like Bombjack, Ikari Warriors and Operation Wolf.

Some of the games I really liked:
Buggy Boy (fun racer with obstacles)
Stunt Car Racer (3D racer, this one was on every system)
Fruity Frank (it's Boulder Dash with fruits and a catchy music)
Imperialis (babby's first Cold War themed strategy game)
Target Renegade (mabye the best beat them up on the system)

I also had one and it suffers from a lot of direct Spectrum ports even though it could do much better.
>>11810606
This is a good list.
I would add
Head over heels - best 8-bit version
Renegade - a very distinct port, odd controls but good
Gryzor - excellent port
Killed until dead - unusual detective game
Curse of Sherwood - short exploration and enemy killing game

>>11810563 (OP)
>a more colourful C64
AFAIK both the C64 and CPC can display 16 colors at once, but the difference is that the entire C64 palette is only 16 colors (three of them being shades of gray), and the colors are relatively muted
Meanwhile the CPC has 27 colors and a lot of them are much brighter and more vibrant (though some might argue that they're too vibrant for things like more realistic skin colors for example

>>11810606
Frenchbro my French is piss poor, can an idiot EOP navigate the games all right?

>>11810606
Zombi is a game I've been meaning to play for a long time. Pic from another version

>>11810629
When you ask an electrical engineer to design your video chip, they pick mathematical colors. Red, Green, Blue, and half and quarter shades thereof plus some selected mixes. This leads to mostly a harsh palette of primary colors and hard mixes.
The C64 had input from creatives and not just the EEs so they extolled the virtues of pastels. It's just unfortunate that the C64's cheapening out meant with only 16 colors you can't really make a proper universal palette.

>>11811047
The action games are in English so you should be fine, just know that there usually are better ports and >>11810623 are the best there is. Zombi and Sapiens are the only ones requiring French I'd recommend.

Sram just is a pretty simple adventure game we enjoyed with friends. Part of the fun at my friend that had a CPC 464 (the one that uses tapes) was playing board games or watching cartoons while the games loaded.

A cool thing was that the computer came with a 500 pages manual, going in great details about the hardware functioning plus BASIC and LOGO languages.

Here's what the 6128 one looked like:
https://archive.org/details/amstrad-cpc-6128-user-manual/mode/2up

>>11811108
mostly a harsh palette of primary colors and hard mixes
Yeah, that's why I said it's not a great palette for skin for example

>>11811108
>mostly a harsh palette of primary colors and hard mixes
Yeah, that's why I said it's not a great palette for skin for example

>>11811131
Sram 1 was also released in English and Spanish, but Sram 2 was a French exclusive.

>>11810563 (OP)
>I got the impression the CPC was mostly big in France for whatever reason and it was like a more colourful C64.
was big in france and made it outside of europe to places like australia, new zealand etc. although nowhere near as popular as the c64. you'd find amstrad's in schools competing with the c64 and bbc micro. i never knew anyone that owned a cpc. only ever saw them at school.

>>11811108
>hat's why I said it's not a great palette for skin for example
you can come close enough to it using gradients. on a proper crt it looks great. emulator faggots just have to deal with fake blending that looks like ass.

>>11811162
ost people had left image and only had saturation by boosting the fuck out of their tv colours like a spastic. right image sucks.
>that's why I said it's not a great palette for skin for example
it's fine when used properly.

>>11811092
Fun fact: Zombi U on Wii U is a sequel to this

>>11812114
thats just a regular fact
not a fun fact

>>11811047
English is just French with Germanic grammar rules so you'll pick it up easily

>>11810563 (OP)
What happens when the tape decks on those things go bad? Are they easy to replace?

>>11812697
You can mod CPC 464 to use an external audio source instead of a built-in cassette deck.

>>11810563 (OP)
Are those CF2 disks proprietary? Were they any good or did they fail faster than France in the Battle of Sedan?

>>11812782
It's a 3 inch disk format developed by Panasonic. Several computers used it initially but it quickly lost the format war to Sony's famous 3.5 inch floppy. Amstrad then bought nearly the entire world's supply of disks for cheap and every software publisher had to buy them from Amstrad, similar to Nintendo manufacturing cartridges for NES publishers. In fact some publishers just slapped their cheaply printed labels on disk, leaving stock red Amsoft-branded disk labels visible through.

>>11812786
Why does Panasonic bother making new formats if they always just lose?

>>11812825
They had eventually found a niche in making fake DVD/BDs for Nintendo, so the latter wouldn't have to pay royalties to Sony.

Whoa mama

>>11810563 (OP)
Amstrad also had a huge advantage over both Speccy and C64 which often gets forgotten: it was actually capable of doing office work. It could output two colour 640x200 video, making 80 columns text display possible. This meant that the computer could Trojan horse it into households of office workers, making children curious about games on the system.

redundancy

Wasn't this just a speccy with colors and absolute dogshit performance?

>>11816718
>Wasn't this just a speccy with colors and absolute dogshit performance?
pretty much. was on par with a c64 in terms of performance but cpc could at least run cp/m at full speed, which wasn't possible on the more expensive commodore 128 with its z80 (ran cp/m at half the speed). by this point in time, cp/m was not a selling point for most people and nobody cared. they wanted gaymin.

>>11816718
wrong, it was so much better than the speccy that amstrad literally bought out your entire company with the profits

>>11816718
If you throw an identical code from Speccy at Amstrad, it would indeed run wotse, as despite having an identically clocked Z80 CPU Amstrad has to spend some cycles for video processing.
Don't be lazy and optimise your programs!

>>11816742
>by this point in time, cp/m was not a selling point for most people and nobody cared
Quite the opposite, they vastly underestimated how many people would buy it exclusively to run CPM and left so much money on the table several companies went from a handful of employees to several handfuls practically overnight from supporting it.
Over here the CPC was your dads home office computer at least until he replaced it with a PCW or PC1512.

>>11817584
>Quite the opposite
2 million machines sold, covering all makes and models of cpc. very few were using cp/m on it, and that number would have dropped like a stone closer we got to the 1990s.

Imagine doing COBOL on your Amcey.