3 ms·

My parents bought one to do their accounting but never used it. I was a bit frustrated because all my friends had CPC 6168 and were constantly trading games.

• tialaramex 6y ago
  I'm guessing you meant a CPC 6128 ? There are some really fun games for that machine but it's just at the edge of useful for a bunch more things, it has a real disk drive, but the disks are expensive and capacity is low. It's technically just about capable of using a hard disk, but that's crazy expensive. It can run a real operating system (CP/M) but not very well because it needs a hard disk you don't have or constant disk swapping. Or like many 8-bit home computers it boots into a BASIC environment that has a bunch of clever tricks but ultimately dead ends. The 128kbytes of RAM are bank switched, so it's better than a 64kbyte machine but not as much better as you'd hope. On the family VIC-20 I basically reached the limits of what was practical to do with it. I ran out of RAM, my programs became too slow and unwieldy to use. I never got there with the CPC 6128 but I could certainly feel where the limits were, closer than you'd like, and it often caused me not to set off in a particular direction knowing I'd soon run into a wall anyway. I wrote some simple assembly language but never tried to run a real high level language (other than the built-in BASIC). Whereas on my 486sx25 and subsequent machines it was only ever a matter of time and money, so that was always on me.