Amstrad CPC-464

• 64Kb RAM
• Built-in tape deck

After getting used to a slightly different syntax of BASIC, this was one of the machines I programmed on the most. By now my "applications" were getting more advanced, and I created such programs as a paint package accessed by a copy of my school's RM Nimbus machines' menu system.

I also started dabbling in assembly language after getting an assembler for free with a magazine. However, this didn't get all that far as I had no books on the subject, making it all seem a bit confusing.

I once sat down and typed in a huge database program from a magazine, only to find that my many and varied typos caused it to bail out all the time. In the end the (almost) working database wasn't even much cop either. There was however a cool Pontoon game in the BASIC manual.

One of the cool features of this machine was that you could replace the bitmaps of the standard character set with your own using the SYMBOL command in BASIC. This meant you could do some quite effective animation if you had the patience to translate what you'd drawn on squared paper into binary. I later wrote a character editor program to automate this rather tedious process.

The CPC-464 had some great games, my favourites being Harrier Attack, Saboteur and the Dizzy series. My cousin had an identical machine and accidentally bought a truely awful pirate/swordfighting game, the name of which for the moment escapes me.

Arnold