HOMEBREW The Amstrad Revolution

You may have a preconception about the Amstrad CPC – the computer often scorned as the grey-cased black sheep of the 8-bit family. But so too did some members of BG Games, the developer of the CPC’s jaw-dropping version of Pinball Dreams.

It was 2009, and the team – whose origins go back to the Amiga demo scene in 1991 as the Batman Group – had rediscovered its motivation to develop for old platforms, having become inactive some 14 years earlier. The crew began a debate over which 8-bit machine was the most powerful.

“There was a great consensus that the C64 was the winner, but I started coding on an Amstrad CPC which was the computer I’d learn to program when I was a child,” recalls team member Alejandro Del Campo Gomez. Two years and three months later, and a dramatic 11-minute demo called Batman Forever emerged. It proved to be a watershed moment for the CPC.

Kicking off with a bold claim that commercial software had not taken advantage of more than 6% of the computer’s real capacity, the demo boasted a cracking soundtrack which continued to play while sections loaded, as well as 50Hz