The Amstrad CPC 664 was sold for only one year. Successor to the Amstrad CPC 464, it was quickly replaced by the Amstrad CPC 6128. It was sold with a monochrome green or colour monitor and a built-in floppy disk drive. The floppy disk format was the Hitachi 3 inch, an uncommon format already used on the Tatung Einstein and the Oric Atmos.
Like the CPC 464, its price was very low, which explains why about 10,000 units were sold in less than a year.
The Locomotive Basic interpreter was the same as the CPC-464, but had some extra commands like FILL to fill a graphics area, FRAME to produce smoother graphics, and MASK to draw a series of dots. The editor was also slightly improved.
The 664 was delivered with the AMSDOS and CP/M 2.2 operating systems. The LOGO language was supplied with the CP/M disc.
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yeah, it came a bit late for me as i had already got my hands on what was the best ca 1983, the mighty c64. Probably would have gotten the amstrad if it had come out earlier. Very very popular machine, it became.
I have two of these; one has been converted to a 6128 with a chip swap and memory pack. The membrane keyboards were immensely troublesome - I got fed up of dismantling and cleaning them. Box-loads of games and apps. Have an original copy of the complete op code. Also have a refurbished 464 and a modulator. The graphics gives one a pounding headache! Would like to upgrade. Amstrad was destroyed by the Yanks, WD & co., who were extremely worried about cheap Asian imports under-cutting their home market - now look where we are!!
Thursday 5th April 2007
David (Earth)
This was the first ‘serious’ computer I owned – serious because it could run CP/M and therefore I could write useful software in Turbo Pascal and dBase II, and It also ran Wordstar. I don’t think it fair to call the monitor ‘mediocre’ – remember everyone else, with Spectrums, C64’s and so on, plugged their machine into the TV, and the Amstrad monitor was certainly better than that. I had the 12” green screen which was perfectly good enough for working at. I was also rather glad I bought it before it was replaced with the 6128, which had a pretty horrid keyboard - the 664 had a really nice keyboard! One problem though was that because the screen was bitmapped it ate 16K out of the 64K memory, leaving an unusually small TPA for CP/M, of around 45K (I can’t remember exactly, but the 42K cited on the 6128 page doesn’t sound right – but perhaps my memory is faulty). Most CP/M machines had character mapped displays which only used about 2K. Eventually I bought a 64 Ram expansion and got a copy of CP/M3 (aka CP/M +) (as used on the 6128). This expanded the TPA to 61K – and I added an external 5.25” drive which held something around 880K – a vast amount I never thought I’d fill…
Friday 7th March 2003
Andrew Bolton (London)
NAME
CPC 664
MANUFACTURER
Amstrad
TYPE
Home Computer
ORIGIN
United Kingdom
YEAR
Spring 1985
END OF PRODUCTION
End of 85 !
BUILT IN LANGUAGE
Locomotive Basic v1.1
KEYBOARD
QWERTY mechanical keyboard Numeric keypad and edit block with arrow keys
CPU
Zilog Z80
SPEED
4 MHz
RAM
64 kb - 42 kb left for the user
VRAM
16 kb
ROM
48 kb (32 kb for the CPC 664 ROM + 16 kb for the AMSDOS ROM)
TEXT MODES
20 x 25 with 16 colors 40 x 25 with 4 colors 80 x 25 with 2 colors
GRAPHIC MODES
160 x 200 with 16 colors 320 x 200 with 4 colors 640 x 200 with 2 colors
COLOrsc
27
SOUND
3 channels, 7 octaves +1 noise channel
I/O PORTS
Printer port Bus port 1 Joystick plug (Atari standard) Floppy Disc Port DIN plug for Amstrad monitor Headphone / Sound stereo jack output DIN plug for external tape recorder
BUILT IN MEDIA
3
OS
AMSDOS or CP/M
POWER SUPPLY
5v DC (powered by an Amstrad monitor)
PRICE
Monochrome - 684 (august 85) Color - 913 (august 85)
ShareThis
(august 85)
