The Amstrad CPC character set (alternatively known as the
BASIC
BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...
graphics character set) is the character set used in the
Amstrad CPC series of 8-bit personal computers when running BASIC (the default mode, until it boots into
CP/M
CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initial ...
). This character set existed in the built-in "lower" ROM chip. It is based on
ASCII-1967, with the exception of character 0x5E which is the
up arrow instead of the
circumflex
The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a ...
, as it is in ASCII-1963, a feature shared with other character sets of the time. Apart from the standard printable ASCII range (0x20-0x7e), it is completely different from the
Amstrad CP/M Plus character set. The BASIC character set had symbols of particular use in games and home computing, while the CP/M Plus character reflected the International and Business flavor of the CP/M Plus environment. This character set is represented in
Unicode (excluding 0xEF, 0xFC, and 0xFD)
as of the March 2020 release of Unicode 13.0, which added
symbols for legacy computing.
Character set
Control characters
Each of the characters in the C0 character range (0x00-0x1F) had a special function.
References
{{Character encodings
Character sets