Really good video(s) 😉 Obviously the 464 is the greatest micro ever (i.e. was my first) but was there ever a good time to release the 464+ and 6128+? Maybe if they had come out in 1988 there would have been a couple of extra years in them, and people could have taken advantage even more of the expanded capabilities and developed new hardware hacks - but that would have made new games incompatible with the old systems, and by the 90s 8-bit micros were already done to the Amiga and the ST. Sugar forgot all the lessons that you talked about in the 464 part - when people wanted 'cheap', they wanted it to be like what was on the market, not be something that was on the market 6 years earlier in a snazzier case. Now if Sugar had turned his attention to making a 16 bit with the ethos of the 464/6128.... And the poor GX4000 - used as a joke on a Christmas episode of Eastenders when one of the Beales bought one for his nephews.
Cheers matey I think they did need to arrive earlier, or Amstrad needed to release a 16-bit machine of its own for it to act as a little brother to - but yeah, unlikely to have worked either way and Amstrad was well into their PC clone era
@@ReEnthused I live in Portugal, and here Amstrads were very expensive. They were sold as office computers in my home town. Always hoped for a 16 bit machine from Amstrad, in 1986/87, along the lines of the Amiga/Atari ST. But it never happened. As for the CPC+ it just came too late, in my opinion. In 1989/90 nobody bought Spectrums and CPCs here. We all boarded the Amiga/Atari ST/PC train 🙂
@@ReEnthused We were Spectrum maniacs really. 😁 In the early 80s very few had any kind of computer in my home Town. I suppose in Lisbon could have been a different story. In the mid 80s everybody bought Spectrums. We also had the Timex computers. One of them was manufactured in Portugal and that clone was actually better than the rubber keyboard Spectrum. We all learned to program on the Spectrum. 😁
@@ReEnthused The C64 e Atari 8 bit was not available in most towns. First time I saw a C64 for sale was in 1989. By then, everyone was buying Amigas. The Atari 8 bit was not very popular here. I saw a few Msx for sale, but I think sales were quite poor
Fun fact: CP/M had bad performance on most integrated micros like the CPC. That is because CP/M was designed to be used with a serial terminal, and has no concept of a graphic screen. If CP/M wants to write to a new line, it will just send a carriage return character and a linefeed character to its console port, expecting a terminal to handle the rest. But on an integrated system, the CPU has to handle all that. So the CPC has to run not only CP/M itself and any program running in CP/M, but it also has to emulate a terminal in the background. I have written my own terminal emulation for a TMS9918 VDP in Z80 assembly, and it is pretty complex. Handling the screen coordinates, evaluating control characters and managing a cursor is a lot to ask from a slow CPU. My (very simple) implementation is almost 900 lines of assembly code, just for the terminal emulation.
Poor Z80 having to lug around 16K of screen memory with nary a helping hand from the gfx chip. I know, in modern times the hackers have been able to bend the output to their will, but I don't think there was much of that in its commercial years.
You mentioned Amstrad. I'm here.
I know how to bait the line
🤣
😂
I clicked on the video knowing I would hardly learn anything new. Boy was I wrong!
Really good video(s) 😉
Obviously the 464 is the greatest micro ever (i.e. was my first) but was there ever a good time to release the 464+ and 6128+? Maybe if they had come out in 1988 there would have been a couple of extra years in them, and people could have taken advantage even more of the expanded capabilities and developed new hardware hacks - but that would have made new games incompatible with the old systems, and by the 90s 8-bit micros were already done to the Amiga and the ST. Sugar forgot all the lessons that you talked about in the 464 part - when people wanted 'cheap', they wanted it to be like what was on the market, not be something that was on the market 6 years earlier in a snazzier case. Now if Sugar had turned his attention to making a 16 bit with the ethos of the 464/6128....
And the poor GX4000 - used as a joke on a Christmas episode of Eastenders when one of the Beales bought one for his nephews.
Cheers matey
I think they did need to arrive earlier, or Amstrad needed to release a 16-bit machine of its own for it to act as a little brother to - but yeah, unlikely to have worked either way and Amstrad was well into their PC clone era
@@ReEnthused I live in Portugal, and here Amstrads were very expensive. They were sold as office computers in my home town.
Always hoped for a 16 bit machine from Amstrad, in 1986/87, along the lines of the Amiga/Atari ST. But it never happened.
As for the CPC+ it just came too late, in my opinion. In 1989/90 nobody bought Spectrums and CPCs here. We all boarded the Amiga/Atari ST/PC train 🙂
@@GandaMelgao Ah interesting, I know very little about the computer market in Portugal - did you have any home-grown machines?
@@ReEnthused We were Spectrum maniacs really. 😁
In the early 80s very few had any kind of computer in my home Town. I suppose in Lisbon could have been a different story. In the mid 80s everybody bought Spectrums. We also had the Timex computers. One of them was manufactured in Portugal and that clone was actually better than the rubber keyboard Spectrum. We all learned to program on the Spectrum. 😁
@@ReEnthused The C64 e Atari 8 bit was not available in most towns. First time I saw a C64 for sale was in 1989. By then, everyone was buying Amigas. The Atari 8 bit was not very popular here. I saw a few Msx for sale, but I think sales were quite poor
Fun fact: CP/M had bad performance on most integrated micros like the CPC. That is because CP/M was designed to be used with a serial terminal, and has no concept of a graphic screen.
If CP/M wants to write to a new line, it will just send a carriage return character and a linefeed character to its console port, expecting a terminal to handle the rest.
But on an integrated system, the CPU has to handle all that. So the CPC has to run not only CP/M itself and any program running in CP/M, but it also has to emulate a terminal in the background.
I have written my own terminal emulation for a TMS9918 VDP in Z80 assembly, and it is pretty complex. Handling the screen coordinates, evaluating control characters and managing a cursor is a lot to ask from a slow CPU. My (very simple) implementation is almost 900 lines of assembly code, just for the terminal emulation.
Poor Z80 having to lug around 16K of screen memory with nary a helping hand from the gfx chip. I know, in modern times the hackers have been able to bend the output to their will, but I don't think there was much of that in its commercial years.
There were a few stand-out titles, but yeah, it's third place in the UK market meant devs didn't spend that long on many of the games.