The Speccy was great, but yes the Amstrad graphics were better. Not because they were anything spectacular, but because the Spectrum suffered from colour clash.
In summary, the foreground and background colour (known as the attributes) could only be set at a resolution of an 8x8 block of pixels - so every pixel in each 8x8 block had to share the same colours.
This meant for example that as a yellow sprite entered the same 8x8 block as a green thing, then when the code set the colour attributes to yellow (for the sprite) the green thing turned yellow too.
The opening seconds of this video [1] show it pretty clearly.
Disclaimer (which I feel appropriate given the old school playground wars about which was the best platform): I had a CPC464 which I loved and still run emulated, but also often went round to mate's houses for Speccy gaming too.
> Disclaimer (which I feel appropriate given the old school playground wars about which was the best platform): I had a CPC464 which I loved and still run emulated, but also often went round to mate's houses for Speccy gaming too.
Ahhhh. I had a friend with weird a BBC setup and an EEPROM programmer. I had a friend with a Commodore 64 (which, graphically, was on another level from anything else I'd seen with a keyboard).
And, yes, I had a friend with an Amstrad CPC (and one with their weird hybrid PC / Megadrive).
Only a few years later my school was burgled and the BBC Micros were stolen. They got Acorns as replacements but, if anything, we were probably allowed less time on them than the Beebs shrug
In summary, the foreground and background colour (known as the attributes) could only be set at a resolution of an 8x8 block of pixels - so every pixel in each 8x8 block had to share the same colours.
This meant for example that as a yellow sprite entered the same 8x8 block as a green thing, then when the code set the colour attributes to yellow (for the sprite) the green thing turned yellow too.
The opening seconds of this video [1] show it pretty clearly.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PI6GwKVAeY
Disclaimer (which I feel appropriate given the old school playground wars about which was the best platform): I had a CPC464 which I loved and still run emulated, but also often went round to mate's houses for Speccy gaming too.