The Amstrad CPC character set (alternatively known as the BASIC graphics character set) is the character set used in the

Amstrad CPC The Amstrad CPC (short for ''Colour Personal Computer'') is a series of 8-bit home computers produced by Amstrad between 1984 and 1990. It was designed to compete in the mid-1980s home computer market dominated by the Commodore 64 and the Si ...

series of 8-bit personal computers when running BASIC (the default mode, until it boots into CP/M). This character set existed in the built-in "lower" ROM chip. It is based on

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

-1967, with the exception of character 0x5E which is the up arrow instead of the circumflex, 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 Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

(excluding 0xEF, 0xFC, and 0xFD) as of the March 2020 release of Unicode 13.0, which added

symbols for legacy computing Symbols for Legacy Computing is a Unicode block containing graphic characters that were used for various home computers from the 1970s and 1980s and in Teletext broadcasting standards. It includes characters from the Amstrad CPC, MSX, Mattel Aqu ...

Character set

Control characters

Each of the characters in the C0 character range (0x00-0x1F) had a special function.

References

{{Character encodings Character sets