Was EuroPC another Amiga wanna be....?

[Antiriad]

BTW

Does anyone remember the EuroPC back in 89'? A friend of mine used to have one. I remember reading that the people who marketed it where trying to get into the Small compact
market that Amiga was thriving...

BTW the machine didn't survive more than 3 years.

http://www.ntrautanen.fi/computers/other/images/schneider_europc_small.jpg

[Skyrunner]

I remember (and as a matter of fact still have) the Schneider ads. The one-piece EuroPC was trying to get a piece of the market when the IBM PC clones started making an inroad to the home market and after Schneider broke up with Amstrad and could no longer sell PC1512s and PC1640s. There also were a few more desktop models - typical PCs but the case styling I really liked!

[Speelgoedmannetje]

heh, this computer looks like a certain Commodore 128D version (with this front-side diskdrive)
pity I can't remember how that version was called.

-edit- maybe it was the C=65, I guess.

[that_punk_guy]

I'm pretty sure that's the C65. The one that looks like an egg carton. :-D

[itix]

My friend had EuroPC. He was wished he had a computer so his dad bought one - an IBM PC compatible. We thought it was weird because everyone other wanted absolutely an Amiga and had at least C64. But he was happy he had at least some computer. Better than nothing, eh? :-) Games were not that good but there were good ones too.

[CD32Freak]

If you want to see bigger pictures of the EuroPC: http://images.google.com/images?q=EuroPC :-D

[mrsad]

eh? what? comparing that to an amiga, have you gone bonkers?
that thing was horrible, it was an IBM clone, with CGA graphics and of course the infamous pc speaker for sound and a simpel 8086 cpu with, if i'm not mistaken, 512kb ram. it was even a crap pc at the time, and ofcourse way too expensive. no wonder it didn't catch on.

the only thing it has in common with an amiga is somewhat the case design, which was probably inspired by it (i remember other products with the same design).

it just amazes me somebody on earth still remembered it ever existed, i had forgotten about it until i saw the picture and almost had a heart attack...  :-P

[Speelgoedmannetje]

mrsad wrote:
 with CGA graphics and of course the infamous pc speaker for sound  

quit it quit it quit it. I grew up with that, right?!

[Jupp3]

EuroPC... I have one of those... Brand new, was in plastics when I opened it a few months ago. Tried it for a while, packed it back in its box and now I'm wondering what to do about it :-)

It COULD be used as a case for a small new motherboards...

One thing I like about it... It has Control key at the right place, the same place where it is on Amiga.

[Zac67]

AFAIR the EuroPC was a 'TurboXT':
8088 9,54 MHz
512 KB RAM (640 KB max)
720(?) KB Floppy
Hercules / CGA graphics :-P
1 ISA Slot 8 Bit (short)
HDD plug for an external XT-Bus(!) harddisc, just like the one in the A590 - that's about all similarity to the Amiga...

Now that you mention it, the case really was quite similar to the C65 (front loaded).

[that_punk_guy]

The old Spectrum +3 had a front-loading floppy, too. It used those odd 3" Amstrad cartridges. I suspect that was around '89 too... I don't recall exactly. (Wikis...) Oh, 1987.

[PMC]

Yeah I remember those speccys, released back in Sept '87 IIRC.

A mate had one, which as you say used those indestructable 3inch floppies from Amstrad that no-one else used.  

Despite a radical overhaul of the motherboard, we were still left with the awful Speccy graphics and tinny AY sound chip, a C64 beater it wasn't....

Around the same time, my mate bought a +2 and an expansion port which connected to a 3.5" floppy familiar to us today.  With 720Kb it was twice the capacity of the 3 inch drives and was quite a nice machine.

The EuroPC reminds me of the Sinclair PC200, which was basically a PC clone in an Amiga 500/Atari ST alike box.  Awful machine...

The other one which sprang to mind was the Miles Gordon Technology Sam Coupe, which was speccy compatible.  It too featured 3.5 inch drives, with space for two drives slotted in the front of the machine.  I never used one, but it was everything that the Speccy +3 should have been from what I've heard of it.

[Hyperspeed]

Wasn't this the ugly Spectrum based Sam Coupe?

There was also the Atari TT 030 and the Acorn range of computers.
funnily the Acorns reached RISC CPU levels and had a nice OS.

Atari didn't seem to go that far, not that I'm aware.

Amstrad did a Mega-PC too, a 386 with a built in Sega Megadrive
(Genesis) that was activated by sliding across a panel to reveal a
cartridge slot.

Amstrad always make nice looking products, but the hardware in them is
usually pretty crap.

:-D :-D

[bloodline]

There was also the Atari TT 030 and the Acorn range of computers.
funnily the Acorns reached RISC CPU levels and had a nice OS.
 

The Acorn's suffered from poor Gfx and Audio performance and the OS sucked... yes, the CPU was nice :-)

[PMC]

Yeah the SAM wasn't the prettiest, but I liked it.  It wasn't exactly Spectrum based either, as it featured a faster CPU but happened to have legacy compatability with 48k speccys.  Apparently there was a feature where you could edit the screen colours of speccy games when running them on a SAM, but seeing as I've never used one I can't confirm it.

The Archimedes was a lovely machine...  4096 colours, with 256 on screen at once, 8 channel sound...  How come the hardware sucked?  I saw a couple of Arch demos and was very impressed.

I too remember Silica selling those Mega PCs back in the day too...  You can get an Amstrad emailer machine today that's Spectrum compatible too.