How to play Amstrad CPC games

According to CPC Game Reviews, at least 1864 games have been released on the Amstrad CPC. Over 1600 of those games are available on My Abandonware!

Amstrad CPC emulators

Lots of emulators are available to play CPC games on your modern computer. You can pick one of those:

• WinAPE: the recommended pure Amstrad emulator on Windows, emulate the full CPC range with a version good precision.
• WinCPC: an alternative for playing CPC games on Windows, project is on standby since 2007 though.
• Arnold: a Mac OS X CPC emulator, supports a the full CPC range, last release goes back in 2008. Working well though.

You can find lots of emulators on the list over CPC Wiki, including generic emulators like MAME, a solid software updated on a regular basis.

Running CPC games in WinAPE

For this tutorial, we'll only cover WinAPE, steps required in other emulators are similar most of the time.

• the game archive may contain several versions of the game, unzip files until the file is a not a zip archive ;
• clic on File > Drive A: > Insert Disk Image, then select the disk image ;
• try to run the game by typing run "disc", run "disk" or |cpm. Type the double quote " with SHIFT + 2, and the vertical bar or pipe | with SHIFT + [ ;
• if this doesn't work, type "cat" and press enter to have the list of files on the disk image ;
• try to guess the right file to use to run the game. Most of the time it's easy ;
• type run "filename" with filename replaced by file name listed with the cat command. Check the video for a clear explanation.

Additional help is provided on the official website.