CPC Scene Radio streams chiptune music pulled exclusively from the Amstrad CPC, the 8-bit home computer that dominated French bedrooms in the 1980s, playing tracks recorded straight off real vintage hardware. You can stream it live and free right now on Radio Shuffle, wherever you are in the world.
No Emulation, No Effects, Just the Real Chip
What separates CPC Scene Radio from most retro game music streams is a strict rule about how its library gets made. Every track on the station has been recorded directly from real Amstrad CPC hardware, with no emulation and no added effects like EQ or compression, according to the station's own project page. That commitment means every square wave and every burst of white noise listeners hear came out of an actual AY-3-8912 sound chip, the three-channel chip Amstrad built into the machine back in the 1980s, rather than a software approximation of one.
Three Days of Music Pulled From Games and Demos
The station's library runs deep for a machine that stopped being manufactured decades ago. CPC Scene Radio holds more than 2,500 tracks and jingles, adding up to roughly three days of continuous music, sourced from commercial games, demoscene productions, and music disks built specifically for the CPC. Targhan/Arkos, who built and still maintains the station, recorded the bulk of that library personally, with Grim/Arkos contributing dozens more tracks and Megachur and Tom&Jerry supplying music hacks along the way, per the same project page.
A Machine That Never Really Left France
The Amstrad CPC launched in 1984 and sold roughly 3 million units across six models before Amstrad discontinued the line in 1990, according to Wikipedia's history of the machine. France was one of its strongest markets anywhere, supporting dedicated magazines like Amstrad Cent Pour Cent and Amstar that kept the platform's community engaged long after launch. That community never really disbanded. Long after commercial support ended, programmers kept building for the CPC, eventually producing full graphical operating systems like SymbOS for a computer originally sold with a tape deck.
A Friendly Alternative to Ranking and Ads
CPC Scene Radio deliberately skips the trappings that usually come with internet radio. There are no advertisements, no excessive jingle rotations, and no ranking system pitting tracks or artists against each other. The station bills itself instead as simply a friendly place for both classic CPC scene productions and the new music the community keeps making decades after the hardware itself went out of production.
Tune In
Four decades after the Amstrad CPC first landed in French living rooms, its three-channel sound chip is still getting a dedicated, ad-free radio station built entirely around its real, unprocessed sound. Stream CPC Scene Radio free on Radio Shuffle to hear it live.