The
Amstrad CPC home computer, while, internationally, definitely not as successful as the
Commodore 64 or the
Sinclair ZX Spectrum , the two most important, competing home computer platforms, may still be worth emulating. At least, to bring up memories if you was a CPC user back into the eighties.
To emulate the platform under Windows Mobile (as opposed to the desktop operating systems, where there are a plethora of emulators), your only choice is
PocketCaprice, port of
caprice32, a (comparatively) incapable newcomer to the CPC emulation scene.
(
another screenshot showing the DOS screen on a VGA device, after listing the directory of a mounted disk)
Is it worth bothering?
If you’re looking for a
generic gaming platform, I’d say no.
The CPC could only gain the market leading position in France, and, apart for the superior screen resolution & modes, was technically definitely inferior than the C64. This also means games written (or, in most cases, ported from the
Sinclair Spectrum) are, in most cases, far inferior to their C64 (or, when it does exist, say,
Sega’s
Genesis / Mega Drive or
NEC’s
TurboGrafx-16 / PC Engine) counterparts, particularly animation speed and sound / music-wise. A perfect example of the difference between the graphics scrolling / speed and sound/music capabilities of the C64 and the CPC is, say, the two Turrican versions running on the two devices. The C64 has excellent music and scrolling without problems; the CPC doesn’t even have in-game music and much blockier scrolling.
There are very few exceptions to this rule; for example, text-based adventure games taking advantage of the 640-pixel wide screen (as opposed to the 256 / 320 pixels of the competing 8-bit platforms). These games, however, aren’t really worth playing in the emulator either because the emulator doesn’t emulate high-resolution modes correctly on a VGA Pocket PC’s - it downscales images to 320 pixels wide. This means you’ll want to stick to emulators of other platforms (or, with
Magnetic Scrolls titles,
game interpreters) to play games relying on the 640-column video mode.
Some other, remarkable games for the platform are
Hewson's (all 8-bit fans know who they are and what they are famous for!)
Cybernoid II (linked from
HERE; also see
THIS; it’s one of the, unfortunately, very few CPC games with
excellent in-game music),
Switchblade (linked from
HERE; also see
THIS on the vastly inferior
ZX Spectrum version) and
Get Dexter (linked from
HERE).
Getting, installing, using
Get either the setup or the binary package from
HERE. If you get the latter, just unzip its contents to anywhere (including storage cards) and start
PocketCaprice.exe; with the former, install it via ActiveSync.
After loading (if it doesn't load or you put the memory card into another Pocket PC, make sure you delete
cap32.cfg from the home directory of the emulator),
click the Disk icon (note that you can return from this tape / disk menu to the main menu by clicking the
Back icon) and, then, the
Folder icon. Now, click the
Disk icon to load. In the next screen, select a program without an (or, with the
.BAS) extension; for example, in
this example directory listing, I’ve selected the file
CYBERII because it has no file extension, meaning it’s an executable file. Click the
RUN button.
Should you provide text entry, bring up the on-screen keyboard with
THIS icon (result
HERE). Note that built-in / external keyboards do NOT work with the emulator.
Use the
screen orientation change icon to switch between the Portrait and the two Landscape orientations. Using Landscape mode is particularly recommended on QVGA devices (to maximize the screen estate used) and NOT recommended on VGA ones (because, then, it'l only use a postage stamp-sized screen area and you just can't make it bigger).
In the Settings menu (bring it up with
this icon), you can set the
video, the
sound and
generic parameters.
In the video parameter dialog, you will most probably need the
CPC zoom adjust drop-down list if you have a QVGA device used in Portrait mode (then, set it to 75% instead of the default 100%) OR (still with QVGA devices) when you would like to see scene demos / cracker intros that also draw on the border (an
example screenshot of the
Turrican cracker intro, heavily using the borders to scroll / animate).
In the generic parameter dialog, you will want to click
“Map joy to pad” if a game can’t be controlled with the joystick (the fire buttons are all the traditional Pocket PC app buttons).
Finally, still in the main menu, with
the Reset icon, you can reset the emulator and, with the
Power icon, you can exit it completely.
(Note that the official documentation,
UserGuide.html in the
doc folder, is far more terse and harder-to-understand for a newbie than my tutorial above.)
Downloading games
Most games are available at
CPC Game Reviews. Some publishers, for example,
CinemaWare (see
Defender of the Crown), have also made available their CPC games. Just copy these files (without decompressing them - you don't need this) to anywhere on your Pocket PC (assuming you've installed
Mad Programmer's
File Dialog Changer; if you haven't, then, to either
\My Documents in the main storage or into either the root of your storage card or an immediate subdirectory in there.)
You can also find some scene demos
HERE. Note that, on QVGA devices, you’ll want to set the zoom factor to 50% in Portrait or 75% in Landscape mode so that you can see what’s happening on the borders (if any). In VGA, this isn’t necessary: the default 100% mode allows for displaying everything happening on the borders:
Compatibility
In addition to the three recommended games linked in the first section, I’ve tested the emulator with
Turrican I and II,
Ghostbusters II (linked from
HERE),
Xenon (link from
HERE) and
Magnetic Scrolls’
The Pawn. I haven’t encountered problems or hiccups running these titles on my test Pocket PC’s, QVGA and VGA alike, ranging from WM2003 to WM6.
Interestingly, the emulator can’t read the directory of the other two Magnetic Scrolls titles,
The Guild of Thieves (linked from
HERE) and
Jinxter (linked from
HERE).
For example, with the latter, the PPC-based emulator reports
THIS directory structure (and, naturally, refuses to run anything). With the
desktop-based WinCPC emulator (as of 0.9.26 / build 4102 (february 1, 2007) on the desktop,
it’s working great (check out this screenshot to see the correct directory list!)
Smartphone compliance: none
The emulator starts on new(er) QVGA MS Smartphones (WM6 Standard), but it’s fully useless: attempts to bring up the Program Load (via SPHelper) result in a black screen & crash. The built-in keyboard in models like the HTC Vox / s710 can’t be used either. (Needless to say, the emulator doesn’t support the Landscape mode on Smartphones).
(Tested on the
HTC Vox / s710.)
VGA vs QVGA
One of the best features of the CPC was the 640-column mode, which – as opposed to, for example, the CGA card on the IBM PC - could be combined with 16-bit color modes in split-screen mode. This was the main reason of the many adventures for the device.
This mode is, unfortunately, NOT emulated. While on a VGA device, the screen area is smaller (qurater of the original), it doesn’t try to emulate the original resolution. This means you are unlikely to want to play games making use of the high resolution (mode 2), not even if you have a VGA device.
Some screenshots to illustrate this issue (these screenshots also show how the zooming modes work in different orientation modes):
QVGA: Portrait
75% mode (so that the entire screen is visible),
100% mode (the left and right side of the screen is chopped off); Landscape
100% mode (everything visible but still at low-resolution). Note that Landscape support is internal; that is, it also works on pre-WM2003SE devices.
VGA: Landscape
100% mode;
the same in Portrait. As can be seen, you may want to stick to the latter so that you have a bigger screen estate used. (But, I'd still prefer using a QVGA device for emulation so that the utilized screen estate is maximized.)
