CPC Home Computers
464, 664, 6128, CPC+

I get a lot of mail asking if Amstrad still have software for CPC computers. The answer is no, we stopped selling the machine and software about 8 years ago. However you may be interested to know that these days there is quite a band of people running CPC emulator programs on PCs, Amigas and the like. For these there are large libraries of downloadable software. One way to get to them is to follow the CPC links below but perhaps better still is to access the comp.sys.amstrad.8bit newsgroup because that's where all those current CPC enthusiasts can be found.

(It's possible that you may be able to just type news:comp.sys.amstrad.8bit as the destination in your web browser - note that it's news:, not the normal http:)

A word about CPC emulators

If you follow some of the links below you will find that a number of people have written programs that emulate the CPC on other machines. Not only on PC's but also Amiga and Unix systems. Nothing quite like Roland in Time on your PC!

If you are the authour of such an emulator then you don't need to write and ask me for Amstrad's permission to distribute copies of the CPC ROMs. Amstrad's stance on this is that we are happy for you to redistribute copies of our copyrighted code as long as a) copyright messages are not changed and b) either in the program or the documentation you acknowledge that "Amstrad has kindly given it's permission for it's copyrighted material to be redistributed but Amstrad retains it's copyright."

Note: Some of the CPC ROM code is copyright Locomotive Software so you should also seek their permission as well - I think you'll find the answer's very similar but you must check.

The Amstrad stance also applies to those writing Sinclair Spectrum emulators and who want to redistribute code for which Amstrad holds the copyright.

There is a comprehensive firmware manual for the CPC range of computers (Soft 968) and it is currently being transcribed to be made available as HTML text. This will be available on Kevin Thacker's excellent site. Just follow the link below.

The one thing not covered in Soft 968 is documentation of the additional "special" features that were added to the Plus range (464Plus, 6128Plus and GX4000 Console) so the information about their additional features is available in this RTF file (which should be readable by most decent word processing programs). The document was OCRd from a scanned copy so apologies for any typos and thanks to Rob Scott and Paul Fairman for doing the job and making it available to me.

Update: Kevin Thacker, who runs one of the best CPC sites on the web, recently sent me an HTMLd, updated version of the CPC Plus spec. so you can read that directly here.

Links to other web sites

Kevin Thacker's unofficial Amstrad pages...

WACCI: Worlwide CPC User club

Schneider/Amstrad CPC site USA

United Amstrad User Group

French ftp site

French ftp site

Systeme D

SD Microsystems

I'd also highly recommend a look at comp.sys.amstrad.8bit if you have software that allows you to access news groups. That group is dedicated to our older computers such as the CPC, PCWs and Notepad.

This page is now a member of the "Ring of CPC's" which is a bunch of pages dedicated to the CPC that you can navigate using the control shown below. Each page in the ring has a similar control so you can easily skip from one to the next and back.

This Ring of CPC's site is owned by Cliff Lawson. [ Prev | Skip It | Next 5 | Random | Next ] Want to join the ring? Get the info.

More details will appear here as I build these pages.

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