Why The Amstrad CPC Kicks Twenty-Seven Shades Of Green Out Of Both The C64 And The Spectrum.

The battle between the C64 and Spectrum is rather like the 2004 F1 season. It's not a question of who wins but who gets to be runner-up to Amstrad's Schumacher. The CPC has more colours, a better keyboard, a higher resolution display, no attribute clash, hardware scrolling, a Zippy80 CPU, reliable data storage... it's cruel to go on.

But I will.

Columns – eighty. Count 'em. Not thirty-two, not forty. EIGHTY fucking columns, and not with some half-arsed, half-width, unreadable Flyspec 5 font, either. Real columns for real characters.

Relax, girls. He’s evil.

Colour on home computers was expensive and difficult to do back in the ‘80s. The Spectrum had that little rainbow sash on one corner to show it could make your TV picture crawl and warp by displaying a purple blob. The C64 had the horizontal bars next to the chicken head to indicate its capacity to display various muddy shades of housebrick pixels.

Compare and contrast with the CPC464, which had whole coloured keys. While the C64 had ‘GRN’ and ‘RED’ written on the keys, the CPC actually HAD red and green buttons. Talk about quantum leaps...

”YES! I win! I’m the winner! In your faces, Mr. Commobore Sixty-Snore
and Mr. Soiled-Kecks Speccy-Four-Eyes-Bum…”. Can we go, now?

Ah yes, Quantum Leaps. The QL – the Spectrum's paraplegic son with half his fingers cut off at birth. And the Amiga – the C64's successor bought, for filthy money, from an illegal adoption agency. The CPC was so far ahead of its time that even in 1990 Amstrad had only to put almost the same hardware in a cream case to compete with machines five years newer.

Finally, the killer blow: Amstrad Action. The machine begat the magazine and the magazine begat the Future Empire. Neither the C64 or Spectum fathered a World-Shaking Multimedia Conglomerate. I bet their testicles hadn’t even dropped…

VENUSIAN, April 2004.

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