A8 Vs CPC (Amstrad/Schneider)

[Divya16]

Those real 16 colours (out of 27) has it's real advantages.

 

 

People who played this game back in the days, may have never missed "scrolling & sprites"...

 

It flickers and tears. Even for static images, the bad thing about 16 colors is the low palette. I mean you are forcing colors if you are showing 16 color images and the palette is only 27 colors. I did some project in college where we measured what percentage of colors actually get uses in 24-bit images, 16-bit images, etc. 16/27 is a high percentage that's highly unlikely uness you force it or some rare plan to somehow design the game knowing the restriction.

[analmux]

What about this one? It's some top 10 of CPC games.

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rouMzJsi5M8&feature=related

 

I'm not sure whether these are all standard CPC games, but many of them still look good.

[oky2000]

The CPC has some really nice advantages. Particular the real colours (4 in 320x200 , 16 in 160x200 ) and the crystal sharp display.

640x200 for hires is something the XL series clearly missed. High Data transfers..... fun machine in it's way.

 

But the Locomotive Basic was horrible (not good for learning to write Basic Programs) , scroll registers and other stuff was missed for a good homecomputer....

 

I never heard of that machine that much-- I guess it wasn't that popular in USA. From what I read, the higher resolutions cost it since you needed to get a special monitor for it instead of using a TV. And monitors were expensive back in the 1980s.

The monitor shipped with the system. You could either get a greenscreen or colour monitor IIRC.

 

Only ever met one person who had one. Then again, I only ever knew two people who had the C64 and one with a BBC Micro. All the rest had speccies or Ataris.

 

Which is why they could have also purchased the TV Modulator/PSU package too, but the sound still comes out of the tiny little dime store speaker inside the actual computer not the TV connected via the modulator/PSU house brick thing strangely enough.

[oky2000]

Those real 16 colours (out of 27) has it's real advantages.

 

 

People who played this game back in the days, may have never missed "scrolling & sprites"...

 

It flickers and tears. Even for static images, the bad thing about 16 colors is the low palette. I mean you are forcing colors if you are showing 16 color images and the palette is only 27 colors. I did some project in college where we measured what percentage of colors actually get uses in 24-bit images, 16-bit images, etc. 16/27 is a high percentage that's highly unlikely uness you force it or some rare plan to somehow design the game knowing the restriction.

 

You can't really compare the percentage of hues used in 24 photorealistic images today with abstract graphics used in 8bit computer games from the 80s really. I'm sure all or most of the CMYRGB spectrum is used to some degree in just about every 80s arcade game, hell a single screen of Gauntlet definitely could contain various shades of CMYRGB groups simultaneously AND grey scales too

 

What I did find was the colours were very very over saturated on the CPC range, almost neon tube like in intensity compared to most other 8bit machines at the time!

[ZylonBane]

I'm sure all or most of the CMYRGB spectrum is used to some degree in just about every 80s arcade game, hell a single screen of Gauntlet definitely could contain various shades of CMYRGB groups simultaneously AND grey scales too

WTF is "CMYRGB"?

[emkay]

Those real 16 colours (out of 27) has it's real advantages.

 

 

People who played this game back in the days, may have never missed "scrolling & sprites"...

 

It flickers and tears. Even for static images, the bad thing about 16 colors is the low palette. I mean you are forcing colors if you are showing 16 color images and the palette is only 27 colors. I did some project in college where we measured what percentage of colors actually get uses in 24-bit images, 16-bit images, etc. 16/27 is a high percentage that's highly unlikely uness you force it or some rare plan to somehow design the game knowing the restriction.

 

Yes, it flickers and tears. But the whole "Rainbow Island" look and feel is in there. No eye cancering by looking at the screen, just fun to watch.

[Rybags]

WTF is "CMYRGB"?

 

That's when you run out of black ink, then grab some red, green and blue and mix together hoping to end up with a dark tint.

[atariksi]

Yes. But there is a cartridge version with integrated memory extension which also saves the highscore. :-)

 

ok, but the game still need really 320k ??.

 

 

The cartridge version works on standard Atari with 64kB RAM.

 

I think he was implying that the cartridge contained the 320K (or 256K) RAM so although it ran on 64K standard 800XL, it's still employing 320K. I don't have any carts with RAM expansions but ROM banking carts were used back in the 1980s (better than doing all that slow disk i/o).

[oky2000]

CPC came third in the UK 8-bit wars after 1st: Spectrum, 2nd: C64 (source C&VG)

and also third in Germany after

1st: C64, 2nd Atari XL (source Happy Computer)

 

bit of a cheap affair like the Amstrad/Schneider music towers which always broke, but not as bad as Sinclair Spectrum.

 

Please post accurate facts, by 1986 the C64 outsold ALL 8bit computers in the UK for another half a decade and outsold that pregnant calculator by millions.

 

1. C64

2. Spectrum

3. CPC

 

Amstrad had no pixel scroll/sprite hardware, terrible AY soundchip and one joystick port.

 

For every Chase HQ conversion there is a Commando/Salamander/Space Harrier. I still laugh as hard today at CPC Commando as I did as a kid when my friend loaded it up on his CPC lol

[oky2000]

I'm sure all or most of the CMYRGB spectrum is used to some degree in just about every 80s arcade game, hell a single screen of Gauntlet definitely could contain various shades of CMYRGB groups simultaneously AND grey scales too

WTF is "CMYRGB"?

cyan,yellow,magenta,reg,green,blue. 80s arcade games didn't use 12bit or 24bit true colour palettes ever, all artificially saturated shades of cmyrgb+grey just like all 8bit computer games. Before Amiga+Cinemaware that's how it was for pixel art in games of the 80s

[Rybags]

There's no such colour model as CMYRGB.

 

Some older gear did use RGB colour space, it's just that a lot of it was only 1 or 2 bits per component of representation.

 

ie - the standard basic mix of RGB used in some "colour" computers even going back to the 1970s gave Black, Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, White.

 

If you're talking home machines like A8, Vic-20, C64 and the countless others that attached to TVs, then most of them operated in a YUV type colourspace where the controlled parameters were usually the colour delay and luminance.

Edited May 9, 2011 by Rybags

[carmel_andrews]

Interesting that both the cpc and the plus version had the same hw scroll issue as the msx did

 

shame that both machines suffered from lazy speccy ports (so far as uk published software was concerned)

 

There again, i guess this only happened so that amstrad could say 'our machine has good support'

 

Shame that atari did'nt have the same attitude to getting 3rd party support from uk publishers...i.e atari games ported from c64...at least atari would have had a half decent software library (so far as uk published content is concerned)

 

Did the cpc with colour monitor sell for more then the greenscreen version (i only had the greenscreen version)

Edited May 9, 2011 by carmel_andrews

[Jetboot Jack]

There's no such colour model as CMYRGB.

 

Indeed, but that's not what the poster was referring to (colour space), but that the spectrum displayed 8 colours:

 

Cyan

Magenta

Yellow

Red

Green

Blue

 

plus Black & White

 

Plus a bright version of each

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum_graphic_modes

 

sTeVE