Amstrad CPC
Sign in to saveAlso known as Colour Personal Computer, CPC
series of home computers produced by Amstrad
Key facts
- Developer
- Amstrad
- Type
- Personal computer
- Generation
- Third
- Released
- 1984 ; 42 years ago ( 1984 )
- Introductory price
- £359 (equivalent to £1,170 in 2025) with colour monitor
- Discontinued
- 1990 ; 36 years ago ( 1990 )
- Units sold
- 3 million
- Media
- Compact Cassette , 3-inch floppy disks
- Operating system
- AMSDOS with Locomotive BASIC 1.0 or 1.1; CP/M 2.2 or 3.0
- Cpu
- Zilog Z80 A @ 4 MHz
- Memory
- 64 or 128 KB , expandable to 576 KB
- Display
- 160×200 pixels with 16 colours, 320×200 pixels with 4 colours, 640×200 pixels with 2 colours
- Graphics
- Motorola 6845 or compatible, custom gate array
- Sound
- AY-3-8912 , 3-voices, 8-octaves
- Input
- Keyboard
via Wikipedia infobox
~30 min read
Encyclopedic overview
The Amstrad CPC (short for "Colour Personal Computer") is a series of 8-bit home computers produced by Amstrad between 1984 and 1990. It was designed to compete in the mid-1980s home computer market dominated by the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum; it successfully established itself primarily in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, the German-speaking parts of Europe, and also Canada.
The series spawned a total of six distinct models: The CPC 464, CPC 664, and CPC 6128 were highly successful competitors in the European home computer market. The later 464 plus and 6128 plus, intended to prolong the system's lifecycle with hardware updates, were considerably less successful, as was the attempt to repackage the plus hardware into a game console as the GX4000.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Amstrad CPC” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.