Amstrad CPC464 Hoodie

Introduced in 1984 and selling over 3 million units, the Amstrad CPC range proved a worthy competitor to the existing Commodore and Sinclair systems.
With a built in tape-deck, (and later a 3" disk drive), and shipping with a 14" monitor, the Amstrad CPC was a complete system eliminating the multitude of cables and peripherals required for competing systems.

The Amstrad CPC had an excellent version of BASIC, some nifty graphics and sound hardware, and hundreds of top quality games titles. The CPC also benefited from a huge number of hardcore enthusiasts, who hacked the poor machine to pieces; adding banks of extra memory, 3.5" floppy drives, hard disks and even peer to peer networking!

The CPC was revived briefly in the early 90's with the CPC 'Plus' models. Intended to rival the newer home console systems on the market, the CPC Plus had a built in cartridge port and a massive palette of 4096 colours (That's more than a Sega MegaDrive!); unfortunately there were very few games produced that took advantage of this new hardware, and so the Amstrad CPC revival was fairly short lived.