In Video games, the HUD (Head Up Display) is the part of the screen where games informations are displayed.
Most often, we can see the score, number of lives availlableremaining Lives, ammunitions, and many game's related usefull informations...Hi-Score too.
In Amstrad CPC games, the HUD is often quite large and covers a large part of the screen, yet some games preferred minimalist HUD, as a large and graphical HUD is also a waste of CPU and graphic ressource.
A Logo of the game is Sometimes displayed too (often in poor production).
Also the real Games Game's window (where the action is) can be displayed inside a Frame (Shadow of the Beast).
Heavy graphical HUD are often a mean to "hide" the fact that the game is poorly developped, Slowslow, and directly ported from a Speccy. The Big HUD then complete the small and tiny games wiindows game's windows to make illusion the screen is big and finely developped.
Ironically, Games in Full Screen (sometimes mis-dubbed as "Overscan mode") often display very minimalist HUD...while extremly reduced screens (Speccy standards, even less) display an almost huge 1/3 of the screen massive HUD.
==The many HUDs==
Also, a HUD can be Vertical, Horizontal or Diagonal, or include some kind of [[GUI]].
The HUD is sometimes an excuse to display more colours than theorically possible in Native Mode, by mean of [[Rasters]].
This technic theorically cannot be used with a vertical HUD...yet if your game's window is monocolour, you can cheat on this (PacMania...)
Notable [[Speccy Port|Speccy Ports]] do this. Ironically, in those (often) scrappy Speccy Ports the screen then display 5 or even more colours in Mode1... Yet the game's windows may remains monocolour (PacMania and Black Tiger...)