Christmas day December 1984, that’s when my lifelong love of the Amstrad CPC 464 started. The family had joined together and purchased me the Amstrad CPC 464 with colour monitor, and it included the free pack in 12 games.
Hi, my name is Simon, one of the founding members of UKAG.
We are getting the band back together, the Amstrad CPC Band. Yes the CPC may not have been as popular as the ZX Spectrum or the Commodore 64 in the school playgrounds across the UK, but there was a reasonably sized user base in the United Kingdom and across Europe, particularly France and Spain.
During my college years the CPC was my workhorse for courses, and for some weird reason I got hooked on writing database systems in basic. Then in the early 1990s the CPC scene was at it’s height: public domain libraries were the thing and I ended up running Penguin Software following the passing of its creator Davis Carter.
I was also getting into assembly language writing demo programs under my pseudo of DOC, and produced The Television Demo by Conspiracy. I had a few guest parts in other British coders demos, especially Wulf Demo III.
Fast forward to now, I still have my original 464, and over the last 10 years I have repaired and refurbished many Amstrad CPCs whilst completing the trilogy of CPC machines for my collection (464, 664 and the 6128). The 472 still eludes me, but one day…
More recently Chris Green brought back The Kickstart Amiga Group which met at a venue local to me. Slowly but surely at each of their events I have been spreading the word about the Amstrad CPC. This is where I met two of our other UKAG founders, Adam and Mac. Rob has always been around since the old school days. I met Nick (TechNick) through the Novabug YouTube channel and the lovely Jo is my life partner. We also go back to the WACCI fanzine days.
After a year or so of meeting a couple of times in my kitchen to scratch the CPC itch we decided as a collective to put on an event, and with the amazing support of Chris Green and the Kickstart team, this is now happening on 21st June 2026.
This will be the first user group meet in the UK since the last WACCI convention somewhen in the 1990’s and the team can’t wait to see you all with your CPC’s for this amazing event.
Written by:
Simon – DOC