The Amstrad CPC was a UK Platform, introduced in 1984, but it has been more influential in France than in its native country, where it was one of many. The only (relevant) native French platform was the Thomson, which saw about a dozen different models between 1984 and 1986 and then seems to have vanished from the market. The Oric-1, another UK machine buit very popular in France, vanished about the same time. This left the 8-bit market completely to the CPC.
It was also important in Spain, where it was rarely a primary platform, but most games of the 80s were ported to it. In Germany it was sold as Schneider CPC and had its fans, but except for a few homebrew text adventures, very few German games were released for this platform.
These are the CPC games I currently offer for download, sorted by the number of downloads.
The CPC had three graphic modes, all of which allowed adressing individual pixels, unlike the character-based graphics of the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the CPC's main competitors:
It was possible to combine two of these modes on one screen, for example to have gameplay in Mode 0 and the HUD in Mode 1, as seen in Gabrielle, for example. It was also possible to have two different palettes in a similar fashion. I found no documentation for this, but I suppose that only a single change of mode or palette was possible.
The colors could be chosen out of a 27 color palette. This may seem an odd number, but results from red, green, and blue being set either to full brightness, half brightness, or completely off:
A disadvantage, though less grave than on the ZX, was the lack of hardware sprites. This was remedied with the introduction of the Plus models in 1990, which also increased the palette to 4096 colors. But it was too late, the 8-bit era was over.
