The SAM Coupé - Learn about the 8bit micro that you may not know
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ส.ค. 2024
- In this video Tim takes you through the SAM Coupé micro, some of the hardware addons like the Trinity Interface from QUAZAR and games like Lemmings, Tetris and Prince of Persia. Tim also upgrades his SAM with a new 3.5" Disk drive.
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Was one of my favorite times in my life as the Sam had an amazing community. Many a fond memory meeting MGT. Andy wright and others
Thanks for watching and commenting. Did you own one back in the day then? What kit did you have with it. Any fave game or utility?
@@pixelgaiden take a look at mgt news disk 5 as I did a simple animation in basic. I owned a 512 and tinkered with it. Meet many in the Sam world. Sadly we never finished manic mansion which was an unofficial sequel to manic miner. I did have a game on Fred 29 I think too :) was fun.
Fave thing was game master. Great fun game engine. I never got into scuds which was the other one. Sam basic was great too
The Sam Coupe really is one of the best looking wedge-shaped computers. Too bad we didn't get them over here in the US. I wasn't even aware of them until about a year ago!
Nice to see your Sam getting an outing Tim! I've bought myself some NOS DD floppies so I can write out disk images for a good play session 👍
Thanks Matt. I enjoyed making this one. It was the first time I started to stretch the legs of the SAM. Hope you are having fun with yours. Do you have plans to get a Trinity?
@@Sanxion01 Maybe in the future - it's a big outlay that I don't have spare at the moment. I'm quite happy with floppies for the moment 😃
@@geezerdiamond It's certainly worth getting. And the recent Trinity edition of Prince Of Persia is rather nice :)
That's a very nice clean looking Coupé you have. They're prone to yellow a lot, mine looks like I've smoked 20 a day next to it for years!
Yes, you are so right about them. I've only seen a couple in recent times in the flesh so to speak and they were suffering so bad from yellowing. I think this one has been lucky to have been stored in the box at a good temprature.
I had one come in for repair where it (or the owner!) had smoked at least 20 a day... it had a thick coating of smelly, sticky ciggy tar all over it. How on earth would somebody send it like that... 😒
What a great introduction to a machine I had really only heard of in passing. Top stuff!
Very cool we didnt even know that the 1mb ram interface doubles the z80b speed to full 6mhz!
The UK and Euro home computer scene had quite a bit more diversity in early options. From a North American perspective, the SAM was quite unheard of.
Wonder if fellow Canucks and Yanks knew anything about it back then?
I hadn't heard of it and I live in the UK. I suspect it might have been talked about in ZX Spectrum magazines only. We had an Amstrad CPC.
I had one of these when they were first released (I was a Spectrum 48k+ owner at the time, and it was advertised in the UK speccy magazines). Sadly it was always a bit of a let down due to the lack of support. If I recall correctly there was a bug in the original ROMs, as I got a replacement part at some point and had to swap it out.
The machine itself looked great, but it was too late to the market (Amiga and Atari ST already available) so there was never much in the way of released software.
In the end (to me) it became a somewhat tarted up Spectrum, and I later sold it (essentially as a Spectrum clone). In hindsight it would have been nice to keep it, but I never regretted moving over to an Amiga A500.
Great video!!
Glad you enjoyed it
Just to add a correction for the video, the SAM Coupe was in production until 1999, not 1992. For a history of the SAM Coupe (and the start of my SAM journey!) please see this article I wrote back in 2006... eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=1045138&postcount=6
(15:46 - My Twitter is @QuazarSamCoupe for those who want to see all I do to keep the SAM alive - hardware, software, magazines, repairs... )
Thanks Colin for your correction. I’ve enjoyed using the Trinity and the floppy drive. You are doing excellent work 😃
Who would have thought Rockstar North had some involvement in creating Lemmings, right?
The screaming running peoples of Los Santos !?
@@joefish6091 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
That was the fantastic informative great video thank you, I have acquired a real Sam coupe myself but I have loads of blank discs wondering if you knew how to write images to blank discs with modern technology is it possible two player on the sam Coupe,
Hi there. Thanks for watching the video and glad you enjoyed it. Yes you can use the Greasewezel device. You can plug in a 3.5" Disk drive using this interface and read and write in all different format floppy disk images. I'd also recommend going to samcoupe.com/ and check out their website. It might be easier for you to get a Trinity as shown in the video. Disk is ok, but the Trinity is awesome. Not sure on the two player, maybe on on Stick and one on Keyboard?
Joystik splitter required Sam's joystiks are mapped to zx interface 2 1-5 6-9 keys for each joystik
What about the 2 full screen animations and all 100 fred records? What about the 33k of 48k speccy software?
I remember the SAM Coupe well, it was a 256 colour 8/8bit computer when everybody else was selling 16 or 32 colour 16/32bit computers. The only real riva to the SAM Coupe would have been the 256/4096 colour, 6 channel sound, blitter equipped 200-250 quid Commodore 65 1991 cancelled project (so they could sell the useless A600/A500plus passed their sell by date technological turds instead for double the price of C65 doh!!). Never really got to see the games for it beyond the ubiquitous special feature in magazines like ACE or TGM etc.
Yep, they MGT were late to market with it because of the delays, even a year earlier could have been a different story. It was a shame about the C65 but I dont think it would have done much then anyways. Amiga was too strong and console domination was not far off.
@@pixelgaiden People don't realise the 250 pounds C65 had 800% (256/4096 colours in 640x400) more colours on screen, more powerful sprites than Amiga, 50% more sound channels (100% if you include virtual sample channels of dual SIDs) 4mhz CPU half way between SNES and 6809 CPU and a blitter onboard. It was more than a shame, combined with the cancelation of the 1991 C64 motherboard reduced to the size of a Gameboy it caused the final death in the coffin for Commodore in my opinion. The Amiga 500 in 1987 was not even cutting edge or cheap (the 100-150 quid more than A500 1987 Acorn Archimedes ARM based 256 colour 8 stereo channel was the top dog after A1000 era). Not that I would buy that Mega65 emulator based thing mind.
You make the SAM Coupe sound like a superior computer to the A500/A600, but looking for any evidence of this based on what games were made for the SAM is fruitless from what I can see. The small library of games for the machine do admittedly have great graphics for an 8-bit, but most looked old fashioned and limited by the standards of the day (with the exception of Prince of Persia, which looks superb), thoroughly 8-bit, not to mention sounding awful. At best one could say that they look like decent semi-professional late 80s Amiga games of the simpler varieties. You speak of 256 colours but Wikipedia states it could display a maximum of 16 colours at the lower resolution and 4 in high (512 x 192) - from a palette of 128 colours! Fantastic for an 8-bit, but not the tale that you tell is it. Even if I was to accept your suggestion that the low end Amigas were 'useless' and out of date at the start of the 1990s and technically inferior to the SAM, how are we to reconcile that with the fact that Amigas were so popular in the UK and Europe and the SAM, like the other few late 80s/early 90s 8-bit releases, wasn't? The answer is that a souped up 8-bit is something that nobody was looking for the late 80s, and it would have had to be very nearly as cheap as the preceding popular 8-bits even if it came out in 85/86, say. People buying 8-bits in the late 80s or early 90s were doing so because they wanted one of the established popular models that they could get loads of cheap games for and the machine itself at a far lower price than any 16-bit You suggest that the C65 would have been tempting for consumers at the start of the 90s at £200+, when people could buy a 1MB Amiga for £350 or even less; I'm afraid that's pie in the sky, even before one gets into the multiple flaws with the C65.
@@danyoutube7491 I said the graphic display of the SAM vs colour resolution of ST Amiga displays was far superior technically to the 16-32 colour main 16bit home computers being sold to us in the High St. I didn't ever attempt to suggest the SAM coupe could shift graphics around as fast as something like an ST with a 68000. But the fact remains it could display VGA style static screens for something like a Magnetic Scrolls graphic adventure if never ever having the ability to match Sword of Sodan, for that you'd need the Apple II GS, as the demo proved. The SAM Coupe is more like CDi, lots of colours but it's no Uridium candidate.
@@madcommodoreeh? Not true
I love Escape From the Planet of the Robot Monsters, never tried the SAM version I'll check that out =)
It looks great on the SAM. I was so frustrated with the control method, never got on with the directional controls, but it does look a solid game if you can get past that.
i managed to buy a copy a year or so ago. It's great actually having a real game to play on my SAM but the slow down really is quite bad. I think it has unique music though which is a nice touch!
Would u like a neoGS?
3mhz more like 4.5mb ram 128 colour palette joystik port can handle 2 joystiks with a splitterwhat bulletin boards can trinity access? Zx spectrum next had gopher support? Why doesnt trinity have 16kb ram in rom area? Wouldve doubled the performance of cpm and who knows maybe one day bbc basic too!
original disc drives - you didnt need to open the machine to put the drives in, they just slotted in the front and clicked in.
Yes, I would love one of the original drives but anything Sam related goes for silly money these days. This was the cheapest but not the most elegant solution for sure.
The original drives were slimline Citizen drives, which were discontinued in 1992. Slimline NEC drives were also used briefly until they too were discontinued. For SAMs made from 1993-1999 (the rest of it's life when available commercially) standard PC drives, like with my disk drive systems, were used.
Love this system, big shame it was released too late in the system's timeline.
I got very upset when i found out my mom had thrown out my old boxed one :D
Oh nooo.. I would have been the same. Wow, to throw it out without asking!
Evenement mix computer model for more interesting program's.
odd case
Thats not prince of persia you got a demo only
edge connector? lol
get a mouse!