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The C64 was obviously a much more powerful machine and also more capable.
Not necessarily. The speccy's got a much better processor (think I read somewhere that a 1Mhz Z80 is roughly twice as fast as a 1Mhz 6502, and it's 3.5 Mhz). It's also arguably a better design - very easy to write machine code for as it's simple. It also meant that it was wayyyy cheaper than the C64 in the beginning.
On the other hand, the C64 has the most amazing sound chip in history and proper (but stupidly designed) keyboard, hardware sprites and (I think) hardware scrolling, which meant is wasn't completely crippled by the slow CPU so long as you wanted to play the right games. The 16/48k speccy didn't even
have a sound chip- the CPU actually drove the speaker directly iirc.
I had a speccy originally, or at least my brother did, then I got a C64 but we used to take the piss out of the c64 all the time. Loading from tape was hilariously unreliable, despite the bespoke tape recorder. You'd hold your breath when the tape stopped moving only for it to start again. Then you'd get the dreaded
READY
RUN
READY
Then I got the MASSIVE disk drive which sounded like there was a man trying to get out when things were loading, and normal loading speed took almost as long as tape. The speccy did have a proper 3.5 inch drive interface (made by none other than MGT - later to make the SAM), but unfortunately when Amstrad took over they use their rubbish 3 inch thing and that became the medium for speccy disk games.
Having played on both for years there isn't really a clear answer which is better games wise. 3D was almost universally better on the speccy, whereas stuff like The Last Ninja needed the c64s presentation. For simple shoot em ups, the c64 was awesome so long as you didn't want to do anything else. Big sprites were pretty much out of the question, although it was impressive what they could get out of it towards the end. The speccy could do anything so long as you had the programming skills, but was limited by it's one graphics mode, which was really a text mode with redefinable characters. Only 2 colours per character space...
Both the c64 and the speccy had unreleased next gen versions of their machines - the c65 and the loki, although I'd be surprised if the loki reached even the design stage given how absurdly high spec it was going to be. Interestingly, one of the design mock-ups looks a bit like a PS2.
I'm not sure the CPC is comparable as it came couple of years later and was much more expensive. It was a shame that they tended to do speccy ports of games, sometimes identical but with only 4 colours- even less than the spec. Much better in low res mode, though.
I.. have now talked about old computers enough. Anyone know where I could get s RISC PC? ebay seems to be all out.