The paper describes the development of an adaptive regulator which is suitable for low-cost consumer control applications where single-chip microcomputer implementation is necessary. The regulator, which is derived by simplification of the well known generalised minimum-variance self-tuning controller, uses a variable forgetting-factor stochastic approximation variant of the recursive least-squares parameter estimator. Results obtained by digital simulation are used to compare the performance of the adaptive regulator to that of the full UD-filter implementation of the self-tuning controller and to that of a limited precision integer arithmetic version of the simplified self tuner. Practical results are also presented to illustrate the behaviour of the regulator when implemented on a commercially available single-chip microcomputer and controlling a real system.