Fantam 39 Amstrad Action Revised There's Something About The Amstrad CPC By Fantam 39

                  There's Something About The Amstrad CPC

  The thing you realize about the CPC range is it's unique in it's own right sure somebodies got a ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64 but seldom is it when somebody told you they had a CPC that's why I'm looking in to the days of people who played used programmed on a Amstrad in the early nineties, the CPC+ range have always intrigued me so maybe it was the bright color palette and sharp noise or always looking at the system as how's it going to handle this title but the CPC wasn't really a machine to mock it usually came up trumps when converting a arcade conversion and it was astonishing to see the likes of Final Fight actually looking like a proper conversion of the arcade version as you can see in the screenshot below

 with the characters been really big on screen which leads me to believe there's a lot of good technology inside the CPC that's more than capable as a premium 8 bit computer, I suppose whatever developer want's to play with the graphic engine and produce new tricks is the one to show the Amstrad CPC's true potential, another example of excellence was Chase H.Q which ended up been the best conversion out of all home formats including the 16 bit incarnations, If you want to know about conversions that the CPC shined to the public was a conversion of Pit Fighter that I was playing the other night I noticed it could handle scaling and decent digitized graphics by keeping the basics of the look simple as there was about three colors and everything the arcade version had was there with the screen scaling the fighters to small in the background to large as they came down the playing area and all the animation was there no holds barred what Tengen/Domark compensated with color it retained everything that the arcade version was the digitized graphics converted perfectly to the CPC, So the CPC was looking more reliable for a decent conversion of your favorite games, it's strange how the Commodore 64 messed up on a few big name games because it couldn't do what the Amstrad was capable of at the time but having said that all credit goes to the 64 for it's excellent music chip which was a lot more impressive than the CPC's beeps and loud music at the time. Amstrad wasn't a cheap machine either when it came out in the early eighties the price for a complete set was in the £400 region including monitor and keyboard, I got given the CPC 6128 back in 1984 and the market for it's services lived on till the mid nineties making its life span around ten years before everyone went 16 bit with Atari, Commodore, SNES and Megadrive. But there was one country that still believed in the Amstrad and that was France where you'd find Nintendo big in Japan or Sega huge in America it's France that looked upon Amstrad as it's religious computer France was absolutely dedicated to the CPC with a huge PD scene and a following of there favorite computer like when the world went crazy about the Nintendo Entertainment System or Sega Master System. Amstrad was the favored computer out of all the systems in France, I remember going over there and coming home with two French CPC magazines that were twice the size of the magazines in England, they like bibles full of type ins and articles it's unfortunate to say I couldn't read them as they were written in French obviously.