Amstrad CPC (Disk)
The legacy of Super Mario spans decades and countless platforms. Today in my countdown to Mario’s 40th anniversary, it’s another unique format, the Amstrad CPC disk.
The Amstrad CPC (Colour Personal Computer) was a popular 8-bit home computer series produced from 1984 to 1990. Created by Amstrad, a British electronics company, the CPC was designed to compete in the mid-’80s home computer market, dominated by the C64 and the ZX Spectrum.
The Amstrad CPC was an attractive purchase due to its relatively low price point and business-focused features. But it was also pitched as a gaming machine, and it achieved success, especially in Europe and Canada, where it found a solid user base.
One of the standout features of the Amstrad CPC was its unusual 3-inch floppy disk format, developed by Hitachi. The company wanted a cheap and compact disk format that wouldn’t rely on costly licensing fees, and the 3-inch disk fit that bill perfectly.
These disks held about 173 KB per side, offering extra storage capacity when compared to cassette tapes, but they had their limitations too. Users had to manually flip these to access the other side for certain games, adding a bit of extra effort during play.
In comparison to the later 3.5-inch disks, which became the standard in the 90s, the 3-inch format didn’t have the same long-term staying power, but it was a novel solution for the time. The format was also briefly adopted in Japan by other systems like the MSX.
Mario Bros. (1987) and Donkey Kong (1986)
Both Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong were ported to the Amstrad CPC for both cassette and disk versions. Disks had the advantage of much faster load times – typically just seconds, compared to the minutes it took for cassettes to load.
The disk format was considered generally more reliable too, less prone to errors, with the added bonus of a larger storage capacity, and better sound quality potential due to improved memory management.
Amstrad’s Mario ports were far from perfect though. Often criticised for missing features and polish compared to arcade or console versions, the disks were also more expensive to produce. While acceptable at the time, they weren’t near the quality seen on Nintendo consoles.
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