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The Amstrad CPC home computer, while, internationally, definitely not as successful as the Commodore 64 or the Sinclair ZX Spectrum , the two most important, competing home computer platforms, may still be worth emulating. At least, to bring up memories if you was a CPC user back into the eighties.

To emulate the platform under Windows Mobile (as opposed to the desktop operating systems, where there are a plethora of emulators), your only choice is PocketCaprice, port of caprice32, a (comparatively) incapable newcomer to the CPC emulation scene.

(another screenshot showing the DOS screen on a VGA device, after listing the directory of a mounted disk)

Is it worth bothering?

If you’re looking for a generic gaming platform, I’d say no.

The CPC could only gain the market leading position in France, and, apart for the superior screen resolution & modes, was technically definitely inferior than the C64. This also means games written (or, in most cases, ported from the Sinclair Spectrum) are, in most cases, far inferior to their C64 (or, when it does exist, say, Sega’s Genesis / Mega Drive or NEC’s TurboGrafx-16 / PC Engine) counterparts, particularly animation speed and sound / music-wise. A perfect example of the difference between the graphics scrolling / speed and sound/music capabilities of the C64 and the CPC is, say, the two Turrican versions running on the two devices. The C64 has excellent music and scrolling without problems; the CPC doesn’t even have in-game music and much blockier scrolling.

There are very few exceptions to this rule; for example, text-based adventure games taking advantage of the 640-pixel wide screen (as opposed to the 256 / 320 pixels of the competing 8-bit platforms). These games, however, aren’t really worth playing in the emulator either because the emulator doesn’t emulate high-resolution modes correctly on a VGA Pocket PC’s - it downscales images to 320 pixels wide. This means you’ll want to stick to emulators of other platforms (or, with Magnetic Scrolls titles, game interpreters) to play games relying on the 640-column video mode.

Some other, remarkable games for the platform are Hewson's (all 8-bit fans know who they are and what they are famous for!) Cybernoid II (linked from HERE; also see THIS; it’s one of the, unfortunately, very few CPC games with excellent in-game music), Switchblade (linked from HERE; also see THIS on the vastly inferior ZX Spectrum version) and Get Dexter (linked from HERE).

Getting, installing, using

Get either the setup or the binary package from HERE. If you get the latter, just unzip its contents to anywhere (including storage cards) and start PocketCaprice.exe; with the former, install it via ActiveSync.

After loading (if it doesn't load or you put the memory card into another Pocket PC, make sure you delete cap32.cfg from the home directory of the emulator), click the Disk icon (note that you can return from this tape / disk menu to the main menu by clicking the Back icon) and, then, the Folder icon. Now, click the Disk icon to load. In the next screen, select a program without an (or, with the .BAS) extension; for example, in this example directory listing, I’ve selected the file CYBERII because it has no file extension, meaning it’s an executable file. Click the RUN button.

Should you provide text entry, bring up the on-screen keyboard with THIS icon (result HERE). Note that built-in / external keyboards do NOT work with the emulator.

Use the screen orientation change icon to switch between the Portrait and the two Landscape orientations. Using Landscape mode is particularly recommended on QVGA devices (to maximize the screen estate used) and NOT recommended on VGA ones (because, then, it'l only use a postage stamp-sized screen area and you just can't make it bigger).

In the Settings menu (bring it up with this icon), you can set the video, the sound and generic parameters.

In the video parameter dialog, you will most probably need the CPC zoom adjust drop-down list if you have a QVGA device used in Portrait mode (then, set it to 75% instead of the default 100%) OR (still with QVGA devices) when you would like to see scene demos / cracker intros that also draw on the border (an example screenshot of the Turrican cracker intro, heavily using the borders to scroll / animate).

In the generic parameter dialog, you will want to click “Map joy to pad” if a game can’t be controlled with the joystick (the fire buttons are all the traditional Pocket PC app buttons).

Finally, still in the main menu, with the Reset icon, you can reset the emulator and, with the Power icon, you can exit it completely.

(Note that the official documentation, UserGuide.html in the doc folder, is far more terse and harder-to-understand for a newbie than my tutorial above.)

Downloading games

Most games are available at CPC Game Reviews. Some publishers, for example, CinemaWare (see Defender of the Crown), have also made available their CPC games. Just copy these files (without decompressing them - you don't need this) to anywhere on your Pocket PC (assuming you've installed Mad Programmer's File Dialog Changer; if you haven't, then, to either \My Documents in the main storage or into either the root of your storage card or an immediate subdirectory in there.)

You can also find some scene demos HERE. Note that, on QVGA devices, you’ll want to set the zoom factor to 50% in Portrait or 75% in Landscape mode so that you can see what’s happening on the borders (if any). In VGA, this isn’t necessary: the default 100% mode allows for displaying everything happening on the borders:

Compatibility

In addition to the three recommended games linked in the first section, I’ve tested the emulator with Turrican I and II, Ghostbusters II (linked from HERE), Xenon (link from HERE) and Magnetic Scrolls’ The Pawn. I haven’t encountered problems or hiccups running these titles on my test Pocket PC’s, QVGA and VGA alike, ranging from WM2003 to WM6.