The ironic thing is, I watched this yesterday since i back in the days had a CPC 464. Today I brought some old furniture to the junk yard and lo and behold; in one of the containers sat a Schneider CPC 6128, and in pretty good shape...of course I gave the Keeper 5 bucks to look in the other way and took it back home with me. It's just the base unit, no screen or anything around, but my bets are on it being still in working condition, board is dry and no corrosion, so probably something that was boxed away a few decades. Here's hoping I can relive my childhood memories with it, and thanks for this amazing videos about these amazing and often forgotten machines.
Your conversation with your brother was just wonderful, from the argument about "who owned what" to everything else. My older brother and myself had the same relationship, albeit with the Spectrum. Sadly my brother is no longer with us, however this episode brought up some fond memories. Your guests are great too, this is rapidly becoming one of my favourite retro channels on TH-cam. Your videos are always such a calming watch. All the best to you :)
Tuesday morning, Australian time, has to be one of my favourite times of the week. British TH-cam's Monday uploads go up, their softly spoken, classy videos gradually easing me into the day, before the flashy, loud, American TH-camrs get their videos into my feed. Really, with the exception of Clint from Lazy Game Reviews, there is a stark divide not only in the style of videos between Britain and America, but also in the community of TH-camrs. British and American TH-camrs rarely reference or collaborate outside their national community. Not a problem, in my eyes, just an observation.
Thank you I'm glad you enjoy it. I guess we do tend to flock to those closest to us although I do like to collaborate further afield, with Winston and Naomi in China most recently and Bastien from the Minitel episode returns soon for another French collaboration. Maybe I should look to the US in a future one for some more perspectives
Of the American TH-camrs I watch, I think The 8BitGuy's videos are most similar to yours in content (a lot of computer restorations), while Lazy Game Reviews is most similar in overall style. It might be interesting collaborating with them, because from what I've seen, the 8-bit era seems to have been like a different world, over there. Fewer microcomputers, consoles were more prevalent, and, of course, the video game crash they seem to think was global was a large shaping force. If I recall, The 8BitGuy has been working for some time on a video series on the Timex Sinclair machines.
@@NoobixCube There was definitely a different computer/videogame culture in the US than in the UK and Europe. There wasn't a nationwide push to teach all children programming like what you had with the BBC Micro and the Computer Programme. There were computers in schools, but they were expensive Apple IIs and IBM PCs, and there were hardly enough to go around, so during our limited computer time we worked a lot more with learning office applications and running educational software like the Oregon Trail than learning BASIC. There was also a stigma against kids who could program, because Americans, then and now, are anti-intellectual bullies. We also didn't have cheap entry-level computers like the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad. Timex tried selling the ZX81 over here as the Timex Sinclair 1000 and it was a colossal flop. The Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit computers were here, of course, but most people just used those for games and then promptly abandoned them when the NES rolled around. Software was also more likely to come on disk or cartridge instead of tape so that brought the price of computer games up. We didn't have any £1.99 special budget releases like the ones that I hear Kim Justice going on about all the time, except for all of the Atari 2600 games they were liquidating after the crash. And if your family had a computer, most likely your parents bought it for work and it was undoubtedly an IBM PC or Macintosh, neither of which had games anywhere near the quality that you saw on the NES or Master System. That and the huge advertising push Nintendo had in the US (along with illegal monopolistic tactics designed to keep Sega and Atari from putting their consoles in the same stores that sold Nintendo's) meant that if you gamed in the mid-to-late 80s and early 90s, it was most likely on a NES. So yeah, it was a completely different world over here. But certainly UK and US TH-camrs could find some common ground...?
got my 6128 xmas day, spent hours and hours playing Ghostbusters, it was set up in our hallway, at the same time our Lab was given a xmas squeaky toy, my dad lost the plot, all he could here was was the Ghostbusters theme from the 6128, and our Labrador running around squeaking his new toy, so so happy times.
It's like a Marvel Universe movie with all the retro TH-camrs doing cameos. Great to see the gorgeous OcataviusKitten as well! Some of may favoutire Amstrad games not mentioned Dynamite Dan (1, not 2) Renegade Get Dexter, my absolute favourite. Keep up the good work!
It's nice to see kids of today enjoying old games/computers. I've familiarized my four year-old nephew with my DOS-machine and my C64, and he seems to enjoy that stuff a lot too.
Thank you for watching, and a very special thank you to the guests in this video who you can find using the links below. How do our memories of the CPC compare to yours? Did we miss your favourite game? Do you agree with Novabug's top 5? Are YOU the real Roland? Neil - RMC ● Guest Links ● Oliver Twins: th-cam.com/channels/rgVGc3hfr_b16zXDu9tqUg.html ● Octav1us Kitten: th-cam.com/channels/z5Kx6dP6rHRf9yLY1tnelw.html ● NovaBug: th-cam.com/users/novabug ● EVOpinion: th-cam.com/channels/6ePGHwMBH-Ow4gHuIKJ9oA.html ● Support The Cave ● Patreon: www.patreon.com/RetroManCave ● MonsterJoysticks: monsterjoysticks.com/RMC ● 1ClickPrint: www.1clickprint.com#retromancave
What an awesome episode, sharing your memories of the machine you used to share with your brother makes this doubly retro viewing. Would love to see a similar video of your Amiga memories again with your brother & friends. Also nice to see the Oliver twins especially as their games played a large part in my spectrum/Amiga years & it`s great to see they are still programming. Thank you all for sharing your memories with us. Take care.
It was great to see Thomas and Max playing at the end. Thanks for inviting them to play (although you've turn turned Max into a Tekken addict at the ripe old age of 6 ) 😁
We never had the money in our house to buy a home computer when I was at school but the Amstrad CPC models were what I lusted after. I loved the size of them. It just looked like a supercomputer to my schoolboy mind.
Ross Atkin I don’t usually get the chance to appear on Neil’s channel as I normally act a chauffeur for Thomas. It was great to have a trip down memory lane.
I love it when the Venn diagram of non mainstream interests overlap in this way much like the 8-bit Guy i3/Volt videos. I will figure out one day how to interface my Sam Coupe to my i3......
It was actually quite a common trick. I think Ultimate were using a SAGE machine to do the same thing, and Bell and Braben did something similar similar with the Acorn Atom and the BBC for Elite. Probably a safe bet that any developers who were knocking out games at the rate the Oliver Twins were was probably doing something similar.
GREAT Episode! I loved the old days of the 8-bit computers. Of course being a Yank, my first computer was an Atari 800xl. :) But I had the 410 datasette for a while and saved all my BASIC programs, including magazine type-ins, to those "high-tech" Tandy "computer cassettes. :) Ahhhh the good ol' days. :)
Retromancave Some great memories here. As a kid my grandad had a series of Amstrads in his shop, my favourite games were Dynamite Dan and all of the Dizzy games. Even more special about that time was a certain pair of twins who rented the office space above our shop and developed some of the most enjoyable games I've ever played. 😁
Ghoul's at 12:57, I remember me selling my Texas Instruments TI99/4a configuration (over 2500 Euro) and getting with that money the first CPC with green monitor together with external 3inch disk drive and brother matrix printer, ready to go! Ghoul's was the first received from our Schneider computer club in Belgium
The C16 was my first computer, but the Amstrad dominates my memories of early computing because I had it for a long, long time. My next system after the Amstrad was a SNES. Top games - Renegade - Exolon - SAS Combat Simulator - Feud - Olli and Lissa - Who Dares Wins II - ATV Simulator
Indeed, I remember it being super hard though, makes Dark Souls look like a Kirby game! Oh to be young and have tonnes of time to pour into a mega hard game
Paperboy was the best game on the Amstrad and Indiana Jones and the temple of Doom was brill and dripzone these were my favourite 3 games. I had the 464 with the external dd and the EPROM programmer and the colour screen. I loved it but n came the Amiga and I sold the Amstrad to fund the Amiga. It's nice to see the old games n action and your 6128 like great. Excellent vid Neil 😋 Kim 😋😋😋😋
My childhood PC. While all my friends had a C64, Amiga, Atari ST or even the Amstrad CPC 464, I was the sole one with the disk based Amstrad. Still, a great machine and did some very early coding on it too. Wish I still had mine! Brings back memories of Operation Wolf, Bad Dudes vs Dragon Ninja, Ghostbusters 2, Ninja Gaiden and Robocop to name a few. Not forgetting some bundled software like Arknoid, Freddy Hardest, Game Over and Head Over Heels. Ah, memories!
The original Roland reminds me of Roland Rat, maybe the differences and back story about being named after Roland Perry was just to avoid accusations of copyright infringement.
Very capable little computers. In the final year of my Eng degree in 1990 we were using them as z80 assemblers and then to burn an EEPROM to go into an embedded temperature monitor running a Z80.
Epic video. Easily the best of the series, while the others really enhanced the experience by a lot. Thanks! Please make more like this! Would love a few videos like this on the Genesis and the 32X.
RetroManCave i think you have an unique recipe here and would love to see your take - it seeks you talk about these things in a way different to most people who do, on the surface similar, videos
Great being a part of this, Thanks again dude. Of course, by choices are entirely subjective because there is a myriad of excellent games on the CPC. An extended version of my top CPC games can be found here. th-cam.com/video/k4cGSRyXyDw/w-d-xo.html
Excellent documentary. I loved Sorcery + although I could never get it to complete despite finishing the final room. I've still got my 6128 in the garage somewhere for nostalgic reasons....
My CPC6128 had a ton of stuff hanging off the back - a Romantic Robot Multiface for stopping and analyzing games, a home made ROM box with Protext, Maxam amd Utopia ROMs, and a pair of external disk drives. One was a 3 inch and the other a 3&a half inch 720K. I put a switch on the drive cable to select between them, and another switch on the 3 1/2" drive to switch between sides, since the CPC's FDC did not have the SIDE output attached. I wrote a suite of programs for patching the CPM+ system to use all the tracks on the big disk, formatting them and copying files from one system to the other. These programs were copied on to Track 0 on the disk, so that to use a 720k disk , you just typed |B followed by RUN"Disk.
i so have to find my amstrad action mags. awesome dude. i too had a cpc464 as my first computer.....and only just got my cpc6128 for xmas in 2017. i made my own cable to my 1084P commodore monitor and just use a PC power supply for 12 and 5, with the poles reversed where necessary.
You forgot to mention the business side of cpc 6128.. I had protext on Rom with spelling. I had cpm on disc. A 5.25 inch drive and driver to use 410 kb a side. I used dBase and supercalc. And did mail merge from sql. In many ways a very very capable machine.
So many great UK exclusive units the country had that I wish were widely available here in America Neil. Too bad that I had to buy them at import stores or from UK sellers...But in truth, it's well worth it to see why you great men and women had these splendid consoles to play on. Well done as usual Neil, you know how to outdo yourself. 8^) Anthony..
My best friend at elementary school had a Schneider 464 while I had an 130XE. I was jealous of the graphics and that all the games the magazines talked about were available for it, but I do remember how much faster and smoother many common to both games, were on mine. I couldn't really understand the framerate etc concepts but it was obvious to me that they played better on the Atari. Still I would have loved better graphics.
Massive CPC fan here who used to run CPC Zone (a few years back) and I've not seen the artwork for that AMSOFT pack for *YEARS*. That brings back some serious memories! Such good memories with the 464 back then. Actually the first computer ever owned. Chris playing WEC Le Mans in the corner.... I'm kidding, I know it's Crazy Cars. Yes I know, Chase HQ.
I'm watching these with great interest, as I got an incomplete one for free a few weeks ago and would like to get it going with the help of your video :)
Still got my CPC6128 - Still works (changed the floppy drive belt 5 years ago) - Learnt C and Z80 Assembler on it in the late 80's - The external floppy drive interface was great - still got a 5.25 Inch drive attached. And out the I/O Romantic Robot Multiface II, Siren Softwares Hack-IT, Rombo Vidi (very neat hardware video capture box), and light pen. Did you know you can change the region (copyright language and keyboard) by changing a link on main board. Gauntlet I and II great games. The Amstrad Firmware made really good use of the Z80 alternative (shadow) CPU registers. Spent many an hour loading games, freezing using the Hack-IT and searching for Z80 op-codes to load number of lives and/or decrement lives. Then using the Multiface to try them out. Magazines paid a few quid per "poke"/"cheat" code. Great videos, keep up the good work.
My first 3 games for the 6128 were Sorcery +, Cyrus 2 Chess and Amsoft Grand Prix. I acquired a new psu for my machine just a couple of weeks back and happy to say that all 3 game disks still worked. In fact I found only 1 or 2 disks that had a read error. I have that book you were typing from too. Such a great machine and it’s good to see that it is still having amazing things done with it. Have you seen the demos Logons Run or Eerie Forest? I have really enjoyed this series of videos, well done.
Oh Mummy was the only game in that pack I ever played more than once, apart from Animal Vegetable Mineral when I wanted to show off to aunts, uncles and other older family members who couldn't believe the witchcraft displayed by a computer reading their mind. As for the best game on the system, I had a pack called something like 50 great games...In it was a semi text based trading game called Truckin' where you run a haulage company. Either that or Emlyn Hughes International Soccer.
Just remembered, I paid £15 for a TAPE version of Strider from WH Smith or maybe Boots when they used to sell games. That was amazing but partly that might be me wanting it to be as I'd paid my entire birthday money stash for it.
Spindizzy yes! That was a really fun one and any of those Domark Freescape games like Driller, castle master and total eclipse. A little slow to play these days but astounding at the time
Top 5 games? Difficult choice, but being an actual CPC owner in '88-'89 i got few to tell: -- Into The Eagle's Nest -- Barbarian -- Saboteur II -- Death Wish III -- Target Renegade (i hope i'm allowed to post this? I mean all the SJW's nowadays...) 5 worth mentioning: -- Ikari Warriors -- Great Escape -- Rampage -- Strike Force Cobra -- Turbo Esprit (one of the first 3D games you could drive in a city... mind blowing back then)
I had barbarian too. I can vividly remember being able to cut your opponents head off and blood coming out. My parents used to make me show all of the visitors who came over. They thought it was hilarious.
Wow a lot of effort went into this collaborative video, well done to all. I would say for a machine released in August 1985, which the CPC6128 was, 128k is the bare minimum you would expect. The Sinclair QL from Jan 1984 wasn't noteworthy for having 128k either. The C64 was really the first machine that came with a huge amount of RAM for the time. The next would have been the June 1985 Atari 520ST (Mono Macintosh/Amiga 1000 minimum spec was 256k at the time) however not too long ago I acquired a retail Boxed PAL Atari 260ST so they were obviously manufactured in quite large quantities, either way 256k was kind of the minimum for a machine with small business applications like the CPC/ST/Amiga 1000.
Someone was saying they had to dig out their old copies of Amstrad Action. Sadly, I didn't keep any of mine, but I found this web archive of them archive.org/details/amstrad-action-magazine?sort=titleSorter I found my name/letter printed in one of the hints sections, from 35 years ago!
My main memory of Amstrad machines is having an epileptic fit after a long session of Ikari Warriors on my mates 464. Remember the way your character flashed when you respawned? apparently my brain didn't like that... :)
I was a Spectrum kid back in the day and I don’t recall any of my peers having an Amstrad either (mostly C64). I eventually picked one up at a carboot sale with over 100 games for around £5 in the mid 90’s (you could throw a stone at a carboot sale and guarantee to hit an 8 bit computer for a fiver back then). I still enjoy that same system today. The only downside for me is the abundance of games that I would consider to be “lazy ZX Spectrum ports” that made no effort to take advantage of the Amstrad’s superior colour palette. A great system but it’s still the Speccy that holds that special place in my heart.
Even though paperboy was good on the amstrad the one thing i hated was the lack of any sound at all, i seem to remember reading an article at the time where the programmers did say that the game used every byte of available memory which left no space for any kind of music or sound effects.
I always felt almost fortunate that my ZX +3 failed on the Boxing Day of '89 because in a weird twist of fate I ended up with the CPC6128 as a replacement and until the callings of an A500 became too strong in 1991, it was such an amazing little machine that provided me wth hours and hours of gameplay.... If only I was a tad older, I might of enjoyed all the BASIC coding that seemed so bloody popular ..yet so bloody boring and pointless at the time (10yr old me) :D
It came in the Amstrad Pack 12 bundle, with the likes of Fruit Machine and Galactic Plague. :)It was also in the spectrum and even later down the years, the Mega Drive.
The ironic thing is, I watched this yesterday since i back in the days had a CPC 464. Today I brought some old furniture to the junk yard and lo and behold; in one of the containers sat a Schneider CPC 6128, and in pretty good shape...of course I gave the Keeper 5 bucks to look in the other way and took it back home with me.
It's just the base unit, no screen or anything around, but my bets are on it being still in working condition, board is dry and no corrosion, so probably something that was boxed away a few decades.
Here's hoping I can relive my childhood memories with it, and thanks for this amazing videos about these amazing and often forgotten machines.
Your conversation with your brother was just wonderful, from the argument about "who owned what" to everything else. My older brother and myself had the same relationship, albeit with the Spectrum. Sadly my brother is no longer with us, however this episode brought up some fond memories. Your guests are great too, this is rapidly becoming one of my favourite retro channels on TH-cam. Your videos are always such a calming watch. All the best to you :)
I still think it all belonged to me :p I'm glad you enjoyed it and some old memories of your brother, it was a pleasure to make
Tuesday morning, Australian time, has to be one of my favourite times of the week. British TH-cam's Monday uploads go up, their softly spoken, classy videos gradually easing me into the day, before the flashy, loud, American TH-camrs get their videos into my feed. Really, with the exception of Clint from Lazy Game Reviews, there is a stark divide not only in the style of videos between Britain and America, but also in the community of TH-camrs. British and American TH-camrs rarely reference or collaborate outside their national community. Not a problem, in my eyes, just an observation.
Thank you I'm glad you enjoy it. I guess we do tend to flock to those closest to us although I do like to collaborate further afield, with Winston and Naomi in China most recently and Bastien from the Minitel episode returns soon for another French collaboration. Maybe I should look to the US in a future one for some more perspectives
Of the American TH-camrs I watch, I think The 8BitGuy's videos are most similar to yours in content (a lot of computer restorations), while Lazy Game Reviews is most similar in overall style. It might be interesting collaborating with them, because from what I've seen, the 8-bit era seems to have been like a different world, over there. Fewer microcomputers, consoles were more prevalent, and, of course, the video game crash they seem to think was global was a large shaping force. If I recall, The 8BitGuy has been working for some time on a video series on the Timex Sinclair machines.
@@NoobixCube There was definitely a different computer/videogame culture in the US than in the UK and Europe. There wasn't a nationwide push to teach all children programming like what you had with the BBC Micro and the Computer Programme. There were computers in schools, but they were expensive Apple IIs and IBM PCs, and there were hardly enough to go around, so during our limited computer time we worked a lot more with learning office applications and running educational software like the Oregon Trail than learning BASIC. There was also a stigma against kids who could program, because Americans, then and now, are anti-intellectual bullies.
We also didn't have cheap entry-level computers like the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad. Timex tried selling the ZX81 over here as the Timex Sinclair 1000 and it was a colossal flop. The Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit computers were here, of course, but most people just used those for games and then promptly abandoned them when the NES rolled around. Software was also more likely to come on disk or cartridge instead of tape so that brought the price of computer games up. We didn't have any £1.99 special budget releases like the ones that I hear Kim Justice going on about all the time, except for all of the Atari 2600 games they were liquidating after the crash.
And if your family had a computer, most likely your parents bought it for work and it was undoubtedly an IBM PC or Macintosh, neither of which had games anywhere near the quality that you saw on the NES or Master System. That and the huge advertising push Nintendo had in the US (along with illegal monopolistic tactics designed to keep Sega and Atari from putting their consoles in the same stores that sold Nintendo's) meant that if you gamed in the mid-to-late 80s and early 90s, it was most likely on a NES. So yeah, it was a completely different world over here. But certainly UK and US TH-camrs could find some common ground...?
The amount of work that has to go into these episodes, it's honestly just amazing. My new favorite channel by far.
A tip: watch series on InstaFlixxer. Been using them for watching a lot of movies during the lockdown.
@Vivaan Albert Yea, been watching on InstaFlixxer for since november myself =)
got my 6128 xmas day, spent hours and hours playing Ghostbusters, it was set up in our hallway, at the same time our Lab was given a xmas squeaky toy, my dad lost the plot, all he could here was was the Ghostbusters theme from the 6128, and our Labrador running around squeaking his new toy, so so happy times.
I like how my favourite British TH-camrs all seem to get along well and appear in each others videos
We're a friendly bunch, and always happy to work around time zones further afield.
It's like a Marvel Universe movie with all the retro TH-camrs doing cameos. Great to see the gorgeous OcataviusKitten as well!
Some of may favoutire Amstrad games not mentioned
Dynamite Dan (1, not 2)
Renegade
Get Dexter, my absolute favourite.
Keep up the good work!
Nice to see your brother here. I think I learned a lot about the Amstrad CPC in this video more than any article I read about it
Love seeing this beauty used as it was meant to be, and this episode really does show it in it's historical context.
It's nice to see kids of today enjoying old games/computers. I've familiarized my four year-old nephew with my DOS-machine and my C64, and he seems to enjoy that stuff a lot too.
Thank you for watching, and a very special thank you to the guests in this video who you can find using the links below. How do our memories of the CPC compare to yours? Did we miss your favourite game? Do you agree with Novabug's top 5? Are YOU the real Roland? Neil - RMC
● Guest Links
● Oliver Twins: th-cam.com/channels/rgVGc3hfr_b16zXDu9tqUg.html
● Octav1us Kitten: th-cam.com/channels/z5Kx6dP6rHRf9yLY1tnelw.html
● NovaBug: th-cam.com/users/novabug
● EVOpinion: th-cam.com/channels/6ePGHwMBH-Ow4gHuIKJ9oA.html
● Support The Cave
● Patreon: www.patreon.com/RetroManCave
● MonsterJoysticks: monsterjoysticks.com/RMC
● 1ClickPrint: www.1clickprint.com#retromancave
And here is the link to Octav1us's extended Roland Video: th-cam.com/video/1TGW0eUCDHU/w-d-xo.html
What an awesome episode, sharing your memories of the machine you used to share with your brother makes this doubly retro viewing. Would love to see a similar video of your Amiga memories again with your brother & friends. Also nice to see the Oliver twins especially as their games played a large part in my spectrum/Amiga years & it`s great to see they are still programming. Thank you all for sharing your memories with us. Take care.
It was great to see Thomas and Max playing at the end. Thanks for inviting them to play (although you've turn turned Max into a Tekken addict at the ripe old age of 6 ) 😁
Great video as always
This was brilliant, thank you. Loved the Oliver Twins interview. Two extremely creative guys.
We never had the money in our house to buy a home computer when I was at school but the Amstrad CPC models were what I lusted after. I loved the size of them. It just looked like a supercomputer to my schoolboy mind.
What a beautifully constructed episode. Thank you for all the work.
You're welcome and thank you for watching
we need to get this channel more views .. great work
very kind thank you sir!
welcome mate .. keep at it i know you'll crack 100k soon
As a retro computer fan and an electric car driver I was most pleased to see Ryan/EvOpinion appear. I had no idea you were related!
Ross Atkin I don’t usually get the chance to appear on Neil’s channel as I normally act a chauffeur for Thomas. It was great to have a trip down memory lane.
I love it when the Venn diagram of non mainstream interests overlap in this way much like the 8-bit Guy i3/Volt videos. I will figure out one day how to interface my Sam Coupe to my i3......
The Oliver Twins' story of their dev environment back in '85 blew me away! What a great way to make the most of both the Amstrad and the Speccy!
It was actually quite a common trick. I think Ultimate were using a SAGE machine to do the same thing, and Bell and Braben did something similar similar with the Acorn Atom and the BBC for Elite.
Probably a safe bet that any developers who were knocking out games at the rate the Oliver Twins were was probably doing something similar.
GREAT Episode! I loved the old days of the 8-bit computers. Of course being a Yank, my first computer was an Atari 800xl. :) But I had the 410 datasette for a while and saved all my BASIC programs, including magazine type-ins, to those "high-tech" Tandy "computer cassettes. :)
Ahhhh the good ol' days. :)
You guys have done a great job at taking me back to my childhood. Thank you!
Retromancave Some great memories here. As a kid my grandad had a series of Amstrads in his shop, my favourite games were Dynamite Dan and all of the Dizzy games. Even more special about that time was a certain pair of twins who rented the office space above our shop and developed some of the most enjoyable games I've ever played. 😁
Amazing choice of guests! as someone who grew up in NA i love these systems and can't say a big enough thank you for sharing with us all!
I typed in the listing @ 6:03 with an online cpc emulator, worked a treat :)
Ghoul's at 12:57, I remember me selling my Texas Instruments TI99/4a configuration (over 2500 Euro) and getting with that money the first CPC with green monitor together with external 3inch disk drive and brother matrix printer, ready to go! Ghoul's was the first received from our Schneider computer club in Belgium
The C16 was my first computer, but the Amstrad dominates my memories of early computing because I had it for a long, long time. My next system after the Amstrad was a SNES.
Top games
- Renegade
- Exolon
- SAS Combat Simulator
- Feud
- Olli and Lissa
- Who Dares Wins II
- ATV Simulator
ATV Simulator was strangely addictive. A bit like a spiritual succesor to Kickstart 2.
Indeed, I remember it being super hard though, makes Dark Souls look like a Kirby game! Oh to be young and have tonnes of time to pour into a mega hard game
its good to see Old computers like the Amstrad inspire a new generation.
Paperboy was the best game on the Amstrad and Indiana Jones and the temple of Doom was brill and dripzone these were my favourite 3 games. I had the 464 with the external dd and the EPROM programmer and the colour screen. I loved it but n came the Amiga and I sold the Amstrad to fund the Amiga. It's nice to see the old games n action and your 6128 like great. Excellent vid Neil 😋 Kim 😋😋😋😋
I never experienced the Amstrad but thanks for the videos. I was proper entertained with all the Trash to Treasure parts. Well made as usual!
Roland worked at this company producing sound equipment back in those days
My childhood PC. While all my friends had a C64, Amiga, Atari ST or even the Amstrad CPC 464, I was the sole one with the disk based Amstrad. Still, a great machine and did some very early coding on it too. Wish I still had mine! Brings back memories of Operation Wolf, Bad Dudes vs Dragon Ninja, Ghostbusters 2, Ninja Gaiden and Robocop to name a few. Not forgetting some bundled software like Arknoid, Freddy Hardest, Game Over and Head Over Heels. Ah, memories!
The original Roland reminds me of Roland Rat, maybe the differences and back story about being named after Roland Perry was just to avoid accusations of copyright infringement.
The cavemen bros are looking surprisingly ripped - must be from hauling all the retro hardware and e-car batteries...
Such a nostalgia trip for me, I have a very soft spot for the Cpc464 spent many happy hours on it then 25+ years in it damn you Amstrad!
Very capable little computers. In the final year of my Eng degree in 1990 we were using them as z80 assemblers and then to burn an EEPROM to go into an embedded temperature monitor running a Z80.
amazingly well produced video, thanks for the memories :)
Thanks for watching it was an extra nostalgic episode for me
Epic video. Easily the best of the series, while the others really enhanced the experience by a lot. Thanks! Please make more like this! Would love a few videos like this on the Genesis and the 32X.
Thanks! I should get around to more consoles some day, I tend to favour things which have been covered less but I do love a Megadrive/Gensis
RetroManCave i think you have an unique recipe here and would love to see your take - it seeks you talk about these things in a way different to most people who do, on the surface similar, videos
Great being a part of this, Thanks again dude. Of course, by choices are entirely subjective because there is a myriad of excellent games on the CPC. An extended version of my top CPC games can be found here. th-cam.com/video/k4cGSRyXyDw/w-d-xo.html
Chase HQ was my fav game on the 6128 when I was a kid 8)
subbed
Many thanks
I used to work in a shop in South Australia that sold Amstrad's in the late 80's.
Excellent documentary. I loved Sorcery + although I could never get it to complete despite finishing the final room. I've still got my 6128 in the garage somewhere for nostalgic reasons....
26:51 - that gives this retro-dad a bit of misty eyes 😭
My CPC6128 had a ton of stuff hanging off the back - a Romantic Robot Multiface for stopping and analyzing games, a home made ROM box with Protext, Maxam amd Utopia ROMs, and a pair of external disk drives. One was a 3 inch and the other a 3&a half inch 720K. I put a switch on the drive cable to select between them, and another switch on the 3 1/2" drive to switch between sides, since the CPC's FDC did not have the SIDE output attached. I wrote a suite of programs for patching the CPM+ system to use all the tracks on the big disk, formatting them and copying files from one system to the other. These programs were copied on to Track 0 on the disk, so that to use a 720k disk , you just typed |B followed by RUN"Disk.
Nostalgia overload. I was like 7 or 8 when these games were out and Santa delivered a CPC 464 for Christmas :)
Great video and subsequently more people for me to watch. Good Monday!
i so have to find my amstrad action mags. awesome dude. i too had a cpc464 as my first computer.....and only just got my cpc6128 for xmas in 2017. i made my own cable to my 1084P commodore monitor and just use a PC power supply for 12 and 5, with the poles reversed where necessary.
Kind regards from like number 1000! Greetings from Vienna, Austria!
Oh my lord - I remember typing out BOMB, but I think on a C64. Talk about deja vu!
I’m starting to really look forward to your videos and go “OOOH!” when I see they have been released.
If I can make "Elmo Sexwhistle" go "OOOH!" I'm doing something right!
You forgot to mention the business side of cpc 6128.. I had protext on Rom with spelling. I had cpm on disc. A 5.25 inch drive and driver to use 410 kb a side. I used dBase and supercalc. And did mail merge from sql. In many ways a very very capable machine.
What an amazing passion and what a nice and interesting man, you just earned a new sub!
Hey thank you I appreciate it
yr brothers a cool dude. its great to see the two of u doin a review 2gether. cheers
Great video once again! Really makes me want to import one of these classic machines!
What a great video guys. .. going from strength to strength 😎
So many great UK exclusive units the country had that I wish were widely available here in America Neil. Too bad that I had to buy them at import stores or from UK sellers...But in truth, it's well worth it to see why you great men and women had these splendid consoles to play on.
Well done as usual Neil, you know how to outdo yourself. 8^)
Anthony..
I used to sit for hours typing those bloody games in! One of my favorite games was Macrocosmica, a space trading game.
Yay! i'm early to a restoration! It's looking good mate. glad to see someone looking after an Amstrad. You don't see too many working these days.
Plenty of love for the ammy in retro circles. :)
My best friend at elementary school had a Schneider 464 while I had an 130XE. I was jealous of the graphics and that all the games the magazines talked about were available for it, but I do remember how much faster and smoother many common to both games, were on mine. I couldn't really understand the framerate etc concepts but it was obvious to me that they played better on the Atari. Still I would have loved better graphics.
@RetroManCave DARN YOU! I've finally turned to the Dark Side after 35 years of Commodore only and made a deal for an Amstrad 6128!
Welcome to the future Conrad
@@RMCRetro Almost. Now i need to get the cables for my PAL LCD, and i've run out of disposable income lol. Should be fun learning about it!
Can't ever forget what was the first ever game I played on my CPC 6128 - It was Bravestarr :)
Massive CPC fan here who used to run CPC Zone (a few years back) and I've not seen the artwork for that AMSOFT pack for *YEARS*. That brings back some serious memories! Such good memories with the 464 back then. Actually the first computer ever owned.
Chris playing WEC Le Mans in the corner....
I'm kidding, I know it's Crazy Cars.
Yes I know, Chase HQ.
Of course, it was Lotus Turbo actually, Or Power Drift. :)
You absolutely certain it wasn't Continental Circus?
Maybe, could have been Roadblasters or Fire and Forget... or maybe not
I arrived here following Octav1us Kitten. I decided to stay.
Very good video. Now I am going to check what you have about the Spectrum.
I'm watching these with great interest, as I got an incomplete one for free a few weeks ago and would like to get it going with the help of your video :)
Nice video. I got lucky and my younger brothers had no use for computers so C64 was pretty much between myself and rarely my father.
Still got my CPC6128 - Still works (changed the floppy drive belt 5 years ago) - Learnt C and Z80 Assembler on it in the late 80's - The external floppy drive interface was great - still got a 5.25 Inch drive attached. And out the I/O Romantic Robot Multiface II, Siren Softwares Hack-IT, Rombo Vidi (very neat hardware video capture box), and light pen. Did you know you can change the region (copyright language and keyboard) by changing a link on main board. Gauntlet I and II great games. The Amstrad Firmware made really good use of the Z80 alternative (shadow) CPU registers.
Spent many an hour loading games, freezing using the Hack-IT and searching for Z80 op-codes to load number of lives and/or decrement lives. Then using the Multiface to try them out. Magazines paid a few quid per "poke"/"cheat" code.
Great videos, keep up the good work.
Wow, two brothers with completely different accents, that's funny.
Fifteen minutes to load Infiltrator on the cpc 464, oh the nightmare !
The Amstrad Programming Manual which you showed around 27:35 looks VERY like the BBC one. I wonder..... :-)
My first 3 games for the 6128 were Sorcery +, Cyrus 2 Chess and Amsoft Grand Prix. I acquired a new psu for my machine just a couple of weeks back and happy to say that all 3 game disks still worked. In fact I found only 1 or 2 disks that had a read error. I have that book you were typing from too. Such a great machine and it’s good to see that it is still having amazing things done with it. Have you seen the demos Logons Run or Eerie Forest? I have really enjoyed this series of videos, well done.
Oh Mummy was the only game in that pack I ever played more than once, apart from Animal Vegetable Mineral when I wanted to show off to aunts, uncles and other older family members who couldn't believe the witchcraft displayed by a computer reading their mind. As for the best game on the system, I had a pack called something like 50 great games...In it was a semi text based trading game called Truckin' where you run a haulage company. Either that or Emlyn Hughes International Soccer.
Just remembered, I paid £15 for a TAPE version of Strider from WH Smith or maybe Boots when they used to sell games. That was amazing but partly that might be me wanting it to be as I'd paid my entire birthday money stash for it.
Some of my favourite games... Sentinel, Space Harrier, Gauntlet, Spindizzy, Cholo, Driller, Sacred Armour of AntiRad and Stormbringer.
Spindizzy yes! That was a really fun one and any of those Domark Freescape games like Driller, castle master and total eclipse. A little slow to play these days but astounding at the time
Top 5 games? Difficult choice, but being an actual CPC owner in '88-'89 i got few to tell:
-- Into The Eagle's Nest
-- Barbarian
-- Saboteur II
-- Death Wish III
-- Target Renegade (i hope i'm allowed to post this? I mean all the SJW's nowadays...)
5 worth mentioning:
-- Ikari Warriors
-- Great Escape
-- Rampage
-- Strike Force Cobra
-- Turbo Esprit (one of the first 3D games you could drive in a city... mind blowing back then)
oh Rampage! That one slipped my mind, I had a lot of fun plucking people out of windows with that one
The never ending Rampage. ha
I had barbarian too. I can vividly remember being able to cut your opponents head off and blood coming out. My parents used to make me show all of the visitors who came over. They thought it was hilarious.
Wow a lot of effort went into this collaborative video, well done to all. I would say for a machine released in August 1985, which the CPC6128 was, 128k is the bare minimum you would expect. The Sinclair QL from Jan 1984 wasn't noteworthy for having 128k either. The C64 was really the first machine that came with a huge amount of RAM for the time. The next would have been the June 1985 Atari 520ST (Mono Macintosh/Amiga 1000 minimum spec was 256k at the time) however not too long ago I acquired a retail Boxed PAL Atari 260ST so they were obviously manufactured in quite large quantities, either way 256k was kind of the minimum for a machine with small business applications like the CPC/ST/Amiga 1000.
Someone was saying they had to dig out their old copies of Amstrad Action. Sadly, I didn't keep any of mine, but I found this web archive of them
archive.org/details/amstrad-action-magazine?sort=titleSorter
I found my name/letter printed in one of the hints sections, from 35 years ago!
Novabug is the man!
is it bad that i remember the name of the Amsoft title hidden on the bottom right of your screen shot, Time-Man One :D
Great video and nice to listen to former CPC-users. I've never had one, but an Amiga 500.
Amstrad Action! :)
Death Wish 3 and Cobra were the games i played the most on the 464.
My main memory of Amstrad machines is having an epileptic fit after a long session of Ikari Warriors on my mates 464. Remember the way your character flashed when you respawned? apparently my brain didn't like that... :)
ryan has the shiniest head in the world
He works very hard to maintain that shine
How did he get it to shine so much? My dome is not as shiny 😭
Knuckles the Echidna I polish it for hours! I wonder if retro-brighting would help?
EV Opinion I dunno I think the UV darkened look is the best!
Knuckles the Echidna I think you’re right and the old blemish does give an air of distinction!
Wish I had the floppy attachment for my 464 or even a cassette player for my 6128. Only had 1 floppy disk for the 6128 though.
I was a Spectrum kid back in the day and I don’t recall any of my peers having an Amstrad either (mostly C64). I eventually picked one up at a carboot sale with over 100 games for around £5 in the mid 90’s (you could throw a stone at a carboot sale and guarantee to hit an 8 bit computer for a fiver back then). I still enjoy that same system today. The only downside for me is the abundance of games that I would consider to be “lazy ZX Spectrum ports” that made no effort to take advantage of the Amstrad’s superior colour palette. A great system but it’s still the Speccy that holds that special place in my heart.
Agreed, the MSX also suffers from lazy speccy ports but there are some gems when it's done right
Great video, It's always cool to see retro gaming youtubers working together on stuff.
SBC Retro Gaming Community: www.reddit.com/r/SBCGaming
"Brother of The Cave" sounds like some sort of cult, just saying.
One of us one of us one of us
Amstrad Action was the $#!% back then.
The 464 with FD-1 beside it: because computing should be at least 3 Spectrums wide.
Exactly... about 2 double decker buses.
RetroManCave By the way, the format you’ve got going here is excellent. I could easily see this running on TV.
Thank you! Who knows.... maybe one day :D
Even though paperboy was good on the amstrad the one thing i hated was the lack of any sound at all, i seem to remember reading an article at the time where the programmers did say that the game used every byte of available memory which left no space for any kind of music or sound effects.
The rtype remake is also amazing!
Isn't it just? :)
Wow, I completely forgot about finders Keepers
Where can I buy a t-shirt like the one Novabug is wearing? :)
I found it trawling Ebay a few years back.
Ah, I’ll have to keep a look out for one. Thanks! :)
I'd like to know how the Spectrum/Amstrad link worked or maybe how to make one? Anyone know?
I always felt almost fortunate that my ZX +3 failed on the Boxing Day of '89 because in a weird twist of fate I ended up with the CPC6128 as a replacement and until the callings of an A500 became too strong in 1991, it was such an amazing little machine that provided me wth hours and hours of gameplay....
If only I was a tad older, I might of enjoyed all the BASIC coding that seemed so bloody popular ..yet so bloody boring and pointless at the time (10yr old me) :D
I remember playing a game called oh mummy for hours on my cpc464 now I cant remember if it came with the cpc464 or if i bought it seperatly 🤔
It came in the Amstrad Pack 12 bundle, with the likes of Fruit Machine and Galactic Plague. :)It was also in the spectrum and even later down the years, the Mega Drive.
Novabug ahh fruit machine that was another favorate the space bar got pressed many times because of that game thanx for reminding me ☺
Your brother is very comfortable on camera. I'm guessing it's not his first time?
He has a channel about electric cars over here th-cam.com/channels/6ePGHwMBH-Ow4gHuIKJ9oA.html
Hyper Sports was my favourite on my green screened 464.
I bet that saw you go through a few broken joysticks!
An Arcade port title surely isn't an AMSTRAD game though.
"run disk"
Will that back to black actually work on a cd32?
10 cls
20 bordel 0 :ink 0,0
30 sound 1,100,40 : return
40 goto to ..
.....
C'était il y a bien longtemps
Guntlet barbarian sorcery Rick dangerous ....
@Tom & Max: enjoy your hair whilst you are young and go for some outre styles, genetically it's not looking favourable you'll enjoy it long!