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The Amstrad CPC 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, where it successfully established itself primarily in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and the German-speaking parts of Europe.
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The ZX Spectrum is an 8-bit home computer that was developed by Sinclair Research. It was released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, and became Britain's best-selling microcomputer.
Amstrad was a British electronics company, founded in 1968 by Alan Sugar at the age of 21. The name is a contraction of Alan Michael Sugar Trading. It was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in April 1980. During the late 1980s, Amstrad had a substantial share of the PC market in the UK. Amstrad was once a FTSE 100 Index constituent, but since 2007 has been wholly owned by Sky UK. As of 2006, Amstrad's main business was manufacturing Sky UK interactive boxes. In 2010, Sky integrated Amstrad's satellite division as part of Sky so they could make their own set-top boxes in-house.
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The Amstrad CPC character set is the character set used in the Amstrad CPC series of 8-bit personal computers when running BASIC. This character set existed in the built-in "lower" ROM chip. It is based on ASCII-1967, with the exception of character 0x5E which is the up arrow instead of the circumflex, as it is in ASCII-1963, a feature shared with other character sets of the time. Apart from the standard printable ASCII range (0x20-0x7e), it is completely different from the Amstrad CP/M Plus character set. The BASIC character set had symbols of particular use in games and home computing, while the CP/M Plus character reflected the International and Business flavor of the CP/M Plus environment. This character set is represented in Unicode as of the March 2020 release of Unicode 13.0, which added symbols for legacy computing.
References
- 1 2 3 "Appendix II: CP/M Plus character sets / II.1 The complete character set (Language 0)". Spectrum +3 CP/M Plus manual (User Manual). Archived from the original on 2009-10-15. Retrieved 2017-07-10.
- ↑ Elliott, John C. (2015-04-04). "Amstrad Extended BIOS Internals". Seasip.info. Archived from the original on 2017-07-15. Retrieved 2017-07-15.
- 1 2 "Amstrad CP/M Plus character set". Archived from the original on 2017-07-15. Retrieved 2017-07-15.
- 1 2 "Chapter 4.5 Selecting the appropriate national language". Spectrum +3 CP/M Plus manual (User Manual). Archived from the original on 2017-07-11. Retrieved 2017-07-10.
[...] The selection of characters made available on computers sold in different countries are subject to national variations. As a result, CP/M has different national language versions of the screen characters. [...] Immediately after [...] load [...] it is set up to use the US character set [...] The codes CP/M uses are [...] in the range 0...255 [...] A handful of these codes represent different characters, depending on which national language is selected. [...] All the different national language versions of CP/M are supported on the Spectrum +3 and a special utility has been incorporated into the CP/M system to allow the user to swap from one national language to another. This is the LANGUAGE utility. [...] The 'standard' set of codes and characters represented by these codes is the US character set. What happens in the other language versions is that certain codes in the first half of the character set (0...127) are associated with characters that are in the second half of the US character set and vice versa. In fact a straight swap is made between the code used for the special language character, and the character it substitutes. For example, in the US character set, the code for £ is #A3: when English is selected, £ replaces # as the character with code #23 - and # replaces £ as the character with code #A3. [...]
- ↑ Elliott, John C. (2016-04-16). "LocoScript 1 file format". Seasip.info. Archived from the original on 2017-07-15. Retrieved 2017-07-15.
[...] In the text, characters 0x00-0x7F and 0xA0-0xFF are printable, using the PCW character set. This is the same character set used by CP/M on the Spectrum +3. Characters 0x80-0x9F are markup codes: [...]
- ↑ "LogoScript". Archived from the original on 2017-03-17. Retrieved 2017-07-15.
[...] At least in the PCW versions, the Amstrad CP/M Plus character set was used for the text portions, except that the C1 controls range was used for control codes (different ones from the C1 control standard, which probably didn't exist yet) instead of the graphical characters of the CPM/PLUS set. [...]
