EMULATION
Run the classic Amstrad CPC 464
Les Pounder goes back to the 80s, when Alan Sugar hired more people than he fired and computers came built inside the keyboards. Madness!
OUR EXPERT
Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance creative technologist. He blogs about his discoveries at bigl.es.
QUICK TIPS
Locomotive BASIC has a great interactive means to show errors in your code. When your code is run, the interpreter will step through the code and stop at a fault. The interpreter will then show the line in error and prompt you to edit it.
A lan Michael Sugar Trading, otherwise known as Amstrad, was founded in 1968 by its namesake as a general importer/exporter/wholesaler. Sir Alan was a big name in the 1980s home computer scene and received a knighthood in 2000 for services to the home computer and electronics industry and later became a life peer in 2009, known formally as Baron Sugar. Aside from these honours, Alan Sugar is perhaps best known in the UK for The Apprentice TV programme, but for many people his 1980’s home computers are a crowning achievement.
Amstrad computers came in many forms in the 80s, including IBM PC clones, games consoles, word processors and notepad computers. Amstrad was a big name with enough capital to purchase the ailing Spectrum range and Sinclair brand from Sinclair Research for £5 million in 1986. But it’ll forever be known for their CPC range of computers, and chief among them was the CPC 464.
The Amstrad CPC 464 was the first personal computer from Amstrad in 1984 and it was one of the best selling. Available for £199 with a green screen monitor or £299 with a colour monitor, the CPC 464 sold over two million units despite arriving some nine months after the peak of the home computer boom. It came with a Zilog A80 processor running at 4MHz and 64K of RAM. The CPC 464 had an integrated cassette player with which to run games. It also featured a larger keyboard layout. Both of these features contributed to the CPC 464 being a rather long computer, but it did cut down the number of cables to just the power, joystick and monitor. This ease of use helped the CPC 464 secure itself as an exceptionally easy home computer for families. Later models of the CPC 464, with an unusual three-inch floppy disk came with its own operating systems – AMSDOS – which enabled control and access of the disk.
But we start our adventure by emulating an earlier CPC 464, which used its own version of BASIC.
Amstrad CPC 464