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System Information: Amstrad CPC472

Development, History, Games, Internals, Additional Information, Photos

Specifications Table

Manufacturer: Amstrad

Year Released: 1984
Year Discontinued: 0000

Size & Weight: Unknown At This Time

Storage: Cassette (optional 3" disk drive / ROM card)

CPU: Zilog Z80A
Speed: 4Mhz

Additional Processors: Motorola 6845 (used for video signal)

System Memory: 72 Kilobytes RAM (8kb Not Connected!) / 32 Kilobytes ROM

Graphics Modes: 640x200, 320x200, 160x200

Max Colours: 27 (16 on screen at once)

Sound: General Instruments AY38910 Chip (3 Channels Stereo)

Ports: Joystick, RGB Monitor, Centronics Printer, expansion edge connector, audio out.

Power Rating: Powered by monitor (mains)

Original Cost

8 out of 10

Retro-Zone.Org - Retrospective Review:

This is basically a CPC464 with an added (although not used) 8K of RAM. I still give it a high score because I think it's cheeky ;)

Do I have one in my Collection?

Very hard to come by in boxed condition (as they were only available in Spain) I want one just to have a complete collection.

Additional Links:

Development:

During the 1980's Amstrad (Alan Sugar Trading) was the king of budget electronics, producing cheap and cheerful TV's and stereos for the masses. It was also famous for it's "all in one" approach which saw products like Radio Cassette players, TV and VCR combo's and double deck Video recorders flying off the shelves due to the cheap price and the appeal of having multiple home appliances in one box.
Seeing the amounts of money the likes of Sinclair and Commodore were making in the home computer market spurred Amstrad to again try it's "all in one" approach to this sector as well - noting that both the Commodore and Sinclair machine required both a TV or separate monitor and a cassette player to function Amstrad designed the CPC 464. It was billed as the "Complete Home Computer System" and shipped with both a built in cassette drive and a monitor (which also provided the power for everything - meaning you only needed one free power outlet to run everything.)
The CPC 464 was initially launched as a direct competitor to the Commodore 64 - which was the reason the CPC 464 was equipped with 64 Kilobytes of RAM.

The Amstrad CPC 472 came into being to avoid a law passed by the Spanish government that all computers with 64K or less RAM would have to have a localized Spanish keyboard. To get around this Indescomp (the Spanish distributor for Amstrad) decided it would be cheaper to install a daughter board in the CPC case with an 8K RAM chip and additional controller on it. Rather than redesigning the keyboard and possibly having to alter the chassis too.
While this worked for a while the Spanish government soon passed another law stating that all computers sold in Spain should have localized keyboards. Indescomp manufactured only enough localized keyboards to rid themselves of the Amstrad CPC's they had in stock. No further effort was put into the 464 / 472 range in Spain.

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History:

After it's initial launch the Amstrad CPC464 went on to sell very well. It's price at the time made it a very competitive system - and it had the added bonus that it came complete with a monitor (green screen or colour - depending on how much you wanted to spend). The CPC464 was most successful in Europe where the CPC range went on the sell over 3 million units - and it has an active programming community to this day. Although officially discontinued in 1990 (to make way for a new range of Plus Computers) the CPC464 was still seeing commercial software released for it well into the mid 1990's. Amstrad's initial competing target for the CPC464 was the Commodore 64 - however the commodore had been around since 1982 and was the most successful home computer of all time in the end. Instead Amstrad found it was waging it's biggest war against the ZX spectrum machines. Both the Amstrad and later Sinclair machines used the same processor and sound chips and had similar amounts of memory so many games were produced for both systems at the same time - however lazy programmers did not make use of the CPC's advanced graphical features meaning there was not a lot to choose between the games on each machine, leading to many school playground arguments about which machine was better.

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Games:

The CPC range of computers had almost a staggering 500 games released during their lives. Many software companies now famous programmed for the machine including Activision and Codemasters. Amstrad also had it's own software house called Amsoft which produced many of the first games for the system - some of which were pretty good. Amstrad was desperate for a company mascot which could appears in it's games - so Amsoft went about programming (or purchasing) different styles of games and re-labelling them with the name "Roland". Several games were released featuring the character including Roland on the Ropes and Roland in the Caves.
An active programming community still exists for the CPC computers and a game was released in 2009 called Star Sabre by the retro computer software house Cronosoft.

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Internals:

Apart from the additional 8K of RAM installed on the daughter board the internals are identical to the CPC464.
The CPC464 had a Zilog Z80A processor at it's heart (the same chip used by the MSX and Spectrum machines) which provided software houses with a familiar instruction set with which to program games and applications. The sound chip used was a General Instruments AY38910 chip - considered very good at the time compared to other systems, which provided 3 channels of sound and each channel providing a programmable envelope. The video was controlled by the Motorola 6845 chip which was linked directly to the Z80 CPU. However a cost cutting measure meant the way the chips were connected only allowed for the screen to be updated every 4 compute cycles - effectively reducing the speed of the machine (something which programmers were very unhappy about when making spectrum conversions to the Amstrad). The built in cassette drive was reliable and sturdy, and expansion port at the rear allowed for the connection of a DD1 Disc Drive interface and 3" Hitachi disk drive. The Z80 was capable of addressing up to 512K RAM (using bank switching) so memory expansions soon became available.

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Additional Information:

All localised text on the start-up screen is included in all Amstrad CPC ROM Memory. It is possible to make your Amstrad boot up with a different language by soldering on an additional jumper.
A number of expansions are still being produced for CPC range of computers, the most famous being the Symbiface Card. Retro-Zone.org actually has a Symbiface 2 card in our collection you can read more about it in Retro-Zone.Org News.

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Photos

Gallery (click on a thumbnail to enlarge)

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References:

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