Amstrad CPC464 – The ‘Biggest’ Retro Computer of the 1980s

The Amstrad CPC464 was a great computer, if a little late to the party.

Even though it probably didn’t reach attention across the ocean, in Europe it was a relatively big deal, especially in France.

It was also massive compared to microcomputers of the time or even close after.

Compare the size to other hefty guys:

Just like the Speccy and the MSX computers, plus the Sega Mastersystem, it featured a Z80 microprocessor as the brains of the operation.

While there was a version with an internal floppy drive, most folks in the UK were more than comfortable with tape at this stage, plus the disks were a non-standard type.

Now people with the disk drive tend to swap them out for a Gotek that emulates disks via removable USB storage.

Given that I had the tape driven version I went with an M4 card which adds wifi and SD card reader, plus the ability to switch out ROMs from 32 slots.

That last feature is essential to give you the basic commands to fully benefit from disk access.

Much like the Fujinet on the Atari, and recently many more computers, the internet access goes beyond just file transfer to the ability to do things the original Amstrad geeks never dreamed of.

I mostly use the web UI to drag and drop files to the SD card, though!

While it only sold around 2 million units (around the same number as the Commodore 128, which some consider a failure), it did well in terms of game library getting plenty of conversions from the Speccy and C64.