Alan Sugar's Amstrad came late to home computers and sold the CPC 464 as a complete system: a keyboard with a cassette deck built in, and its own green-screen or colour monitor, which powered the computer too. Nothing to fight the family for the television over.
It was a big success in the UK, France, Spain and Germany. Later models replaced the tape deck with a 3-inch disk drive.
A palette of 27 colours, every mix of red, green and blue at off, half and full. Three screen modes traded detail for colour: 160x200 in 16 colours with wide pixels, 320x200 in 4, or 640x200 in 2. There were no hardware sprites, so everything moving was drawn by the processor.
The AY-3-8912 had three square-wave channels and a noise generator that any of them could mix in, with a shared hardware envelope for buzzing bass sounds. The CPC sent its channels out in stereo through the headphone socket.