Thank you so much for the section on the RM Nimbus. We had them in high school, and I remember them being a cross between a BBC Micro and an IBM PC, and therefore always wondered how they fitted in with everything else. Your video explains this very well.
The Sam Coupe is the one I know, mainly because I went to one of the MGT promotional roadshows for it, at a hotel in Thornbury. And I did speak to Alan Miles and Bruce Gordon. But by the time it did ship, I'd already bought a Commodore Amiga. I already knew MGT because of their Disciple disk drives I used by my Speccy.
Hey thanks for the video :) Very nice to see the SAM get some love! Never owned one, and I ended up transitioning to the IBM PC on the early 90s (emulating the Speccy there whenever possible), but the famed "super spectrum" always sparked my curiosity. I wish it had a longer and more successful run. Interestingly, maybe the true "super spectrums" came from Russia some years later, in the famed Pentagon and Scorpion ZS-256 clones. Those are machines that I always wished I could have played with, and it's amazing to see what folks are doing with them here on TH-cam. Cheers, and thanks for the trip down memory lane!
When Radio Shack discontinued the Color Computer line, two successor computers were released by other companies to continue the line: The Tomcat TC-9 and the IMS/Blackhawk MM/1. Sales were quite lackluster, with the latter selling a grand total of eight units.
Thanks for the interesting finds! The TI 99/4a was my first computer, so please forgive me for correcting a small detail. Regardless of the Tomy Tutor's legal status, it technically couldn't have been a successor to a "popular 8-bit computer" since both the TI "original" and the "clone" were based on a TMS99xx series 16 bit CPU. For lack of an available TI 99/4a successor, I actually changed back to an 8 bit machine. The Spectravideo SV-328 was great for programming and DIY hardware expansion.
The RM machines bring back a lot of memories! I arrived in high school in 1991, and the school was very proud of its "Nimbus Network" which linked the computers in the two computer rooms and a couple of machines in the school library. I recall we had a computer room that was still using that 380Z hardware as well, surely that was pretty obsolete even in '91!
We had the RM Nimbus at the last year of middle school and at secondary school for 'Business studies'. We had win 3.11 networked on BNC. We mostly used them for swapping BMPs and JPEGs of bikini models on 1.44mb floppies :)
A friend of mine had a SAM, and it fascinated me, although in practice it was generally just used as a Spectrum that, as I recall wasn't fully compatible and the graphics/colours always seemed a bit off. He offered to sell it to me for a tenner in 1992, but I was heading off to Uni that year and turned down the offer as it would have just ended up in a loft somewhere. I suspect it got binned, which is such a shame. When I see the prices they go for now...
@@jasejj I suspect like a lot of supposedly compatible machines, it would only do what the Speccy was *supposed* to do, and would fall over when faced with the sort of programming tricks a lot of games writers used to squeeze out better performance. I remember a school friend (with rich parents!) who was given an Archimedes not long after they were released. It could supposedly run BBC Micro software, but wouldn't run Elite, presumably because it relies on displaying two graphics modes at once, something supposedly impossible.
@@leeosborne3793 Yeah I think that was exactly it. I recall that MGT actually released a Spectrum emulator for it which improved compatibility to some degree, but it definitely wasn't just a Speccy with added bells and whistles. Indeed I think this was the first time I'd ever come across emulator software, and it clearly left a mark on me as my masters project was, in part a (partially successful) attempt to emulate an ethernet network in software, long before VMware and the like made this an inherent part of every datacentre (although of course vurtualisation is a far larger topic!) . A Z80 platform really doesn't have the grunt to do the subject justice. I'm not sure if the Arch actually has BBC hardware in it or if it's emulation.
While it was in competition with the 8 bit computers, the TI 99/4A was actually a 16 bit, which is probably the cause of it's steep price. My 8-bit computers were a Tandy PC-1 Pocket Computer (a relabel made by Sharp), an Atari 400, and an Atari 800. I actually ran a dial up BBS on the Atari 800 for a while. I needed a PC compatible for college though, so ended up with a PC XT Clone machine, 640K RAM, twin Teac 360K floppies, a CGA compatible video card, and an amber composite monitor. Sold my Atari machines to a friend, so she could start learning computers.
The SAM Coupé was awesome. Sold mine a while back. It went for a fair sum, but had I known only 12,000 were ever sold, I definitely would've held onto it longer!
For the sake of all our ears, the way it turned out was mostly fine.😅 C64 sid was just fabulous and the Amiga juat smashed it from there. My first pc was pc speaker so that felt like a step back until sound blaster became a real norm
Excellent video. I must admire your dedication to research so much of the 80's computer scene and for digging up info on some pretty obscure failures. i worked in the business at the time and thought I knew what was available - wrong! :>)
I think the most fun part is that the math used on these is not even remotely complicated when you have modern internet. There were so few of us that learned BASIC. 10 Print. Select 8. How did hobbyist coding die on the vine?
I paused at the Greek advert for 6128 plus. This was literally a machine that was too good too late. Despite the ad, I've only seen it been sold at a single computer shop here at the time.
The world of 8-bit computers was as varied and as bizarre as the software that ran on them. At the time they were too expensive for an individual to encounter many different models and as they were all unique in operation they were always going to be doomed to obsolescence. It's nice that they've not all been lost to time and there are still people interested in figuring out how to master them
The problem is that they're so rare, there's not much point. I'm still pissed for not getting one when I was a kid, now they're rare / completely unaffordable when they do pop up. Maybe one day...
While not exactly a successor, in Australia, Dick Smith of Dick Smith Electronics released the "System 80" which was BASIC-compatible with the TRS-80. You couldn't count on the hardware working exactly the same way, but programs which used TRS-80 BASIC without any PEEKs or POKEs or USR type calls only required minimal changes to be compatible with the System 80. The System 80 also featured more reliable cassette saving and loading than the TRS-80. The TRS-80 originally had a bug in the cassette routines which meant that it was "looking for" a pulse from the tape right at the edge of that pulse instead of right in the middle of the pulse, while reading from tape. This mistiming meant that even slight faults on the tape could make your programs and data unreadable, and it wasn't corrected until relatively late in the life of the TRS-80. In my opinion, this contributed greatly to the TRS-80's nickname of the "Trash-80".
My brother and I had a rubber keyed 48k Speccy, then later our folks agreed to buy us an upgraded system. We were keen on the idea of a Sam Coupe, but on learning of it's limitations, opted for a Speccy +2. I think we made the right choice!
Agreed, given that a lot of great 128K software appeared late in the Speccy's life, and it was supported by a lot of manufacturers and software houses well into the 90s.
The true successor to the BBC micro is the £25 Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi has an Acorn Risc Machines processor and runs the BBC Archimedes operating system RiscOS. The Raspberry Pi runs the latest version of BBC Basic for the ARM natively. The latest BBC basic manual is dated 2017 and so development is ongoing. The best distribution of RiscOS for the Raspberry Pi is RiscOS Direct which includes the largest number of utility programs including BBC Basic as standard.
Educators using the BBC micro:bit might take issue with that, it even has BBC in the name! And, let's be realistic, hardly anyone uses RISC OS. Some form of Linux or Android(which has a linux kernel) are used. If your logic about ARM held, we could also say XBox360 is the successor to Apple PowerPC computers. It is possible to run PowerPC Linux(Free60) on X-boxes with that CPU, although the project never saw as much development as linux on Intel Xboxes. It has no practical value anyways, just like RISC OS is mostly tried as a novelty on RPi's. I suppose you could call RPi's a "spiritual successor", but then again BBC Micro had no traction in the North American nor foreign markets, and certainly not in the industrial and "Maker" markets. And easily a dozen other different microcomputers can run "BBC Basic," probably most often now in emulations on ordinary PCs. You can't just will a lineage into existence, basically the only connection is the heritage of the ARM design, and on RPi's its an ARM System on a Chip, rather than a pure CPU like the BBC Micro.
Just a slight bit of pendantry - the RM 380Z was not a home computer, it was designed for schools & industry but mostly schools had it I believe, I remember when my school got one and it was hosted by the maths department. Got banned by them as I ended up knowing more about it than the teachers! LOL!
Having started with a MSX 1, and later a Sam Coupe, I think my favourite system was the MSX, If Amstrad had only made a MSX themselves instead of reinventing the wheel with the CPC. A Spectrum emulator cartridge would have done away with the need for Amstrad branded Spectrums, and a MSX 2+ would have had as good graphics and sound as the Sam coupe, even if the Panasonics CPU was a fraction slower and came with less RAM as standard.
Remember RM Nimbus machines very well you had to use a floppy disk to initiate the os for it to work as a stand alone machine but as a network can run without it graphics were not too bad either was first introduced to windows 3.1 as well.
Alan Alda, Sarah Purcell, Roger Moore, (and William Shatner of course). It’s interesting to see which computer companies got which celebrities to endorse them🤔
I had and still have: ZX Spectrum 48K * ZX Spectrum 128 +3 * Sam Coupe 512K + Sam Expansive Card (EuroConector: 4 slot (max 4,5 MB RAM for Sam Coupe) + real time clock) + 1 MB RAM module + Centronics slot. I have programmed my own OS on Sam Coupé: Explosion - which still outperforms Windows in some parameters. A game: Pax (in: SCADS - game designer) - and a game in ZX Spectra mode: Lode Runner X - it's a game mode: Lode Runner - adapted to a maze using secret passages and traps. I currently only use emulators for convenience. OS Explosion + game Pax + game Lode Runner X = free (emulator Sam Coupe: Sim Coupe).
To add to the fondness surrounding the SAM Coupé in the comments, I almost bought one in 1992 and spoke to both Bruce Gordon and Alan Miles on the phone - could you imagine that personal level of communication today? The price and Spectrum compatibility were a big pull and it's a shame that the machine failed but many areas of the spec were poor - even for 1989. It didn't even have hardware sprites and scrolling! What were they thinking?
The only one of these I have from this lot is a Tomy Tutor. I got it off of ebay a few years back for a fair price. Don't have any peripherals for it other than a set of the disc style controllers and a handful of games. While it is very similar to the TI99/4A I really can't make a deep comparison due to only having so little for it versus the veritable mountain of stuff I have for the TI.
I had lots of fun with the Tomy Tutor. It had two different BASICs built in. Unfortunately in the good BASIC there was no real support for sprites. They should 'a' given the BASIC a VPEEK and VPOKE, and a PEEK and POKE while we're at it. There seemed to be joystick keywords in the BASIC that did not work. The music command in BASIC was different from the TI's. Very puzzling that this BASIC sucked when it didn't need to. As I recall, $95+tax at The Federated Group, and it came bundled with the joystick, joypad controllers, cassette player, and five games. My favorite game was Hyperspace.
I suspect the SAM Coupe would have been a lot more successful if it had appeared a year or two earlier. I didn't own a Spectrum until 1987, when I got a +2 for my birthday, and it was pretty obvious by then that people were starting to abandon the platform for 16 bit machines. If the SAM was available back then, I think it would have been much more popular as people could have kept their existing software. That said, it also seems like a missed opportunity that Amstrad didn't beef up the Spectrum's capabilities when the +3 came out. It was significantly re-engineered and very different from earlier models hardware-wise, and it's a shame a better graphics mode wasn't included.
The lack of 128K compatibility on the Sam was also a massive miss. Anyone who'd already upgraded to a 128K Speccy would lose access to much of their software anyway, making the 16-bit machines even more tempting. Had they retained the ability to play all 128K games, it might of been a more tempting prospect.
@@TheLairdsLair yeah, they were really the two big differences. Not having compatible RAM banking modes was plain daft, as that should have been an easy win. Leaving out the AY and having RAM banking would've left games silent, but functional, although I can't imagine the AY was so expensive a chip as to make it impossible to include too. But then rumour at the time was that hardware scrolling was left out of the machine because it would've increased cost price by about £2, so maybe the margins were just too thin (though sales probably would've been so much better with slightly more capable hardware)
But the Amstrad Spectrums sold quite well, and the CPC range did very well. They made Amstrad a lot of money. When you make an MSX, you're sharing the market with many other machines which, by design, have the same basic hardware and software specifications. The only way to stand out is to choose an extra gimmick to add, which you hope will be popular and unique. Then it's just pot luck whether a consumer picks your model over any of the others. MSX was a good idea, implemented badly.
@@another3997 Sinclair fanboys can be a bit scathing about it, but the Amstrad takeover gave the Speccy about an extra five years of commercial life, and the build quality of Amstrad machines was WAY better.
Nice video, but maybe start by selecting the correct images? The computer you show on 0:30 is not an IBM PC, it's the 'IBM PC Junior'. It was IBMs FAILED attempt to capture the homecomputer market. The computer that build on the same architecture was the Tandy 1000. With extra graphics and 3-voice-sound build-in, it was better than the IBM PC/XT. Check out old games that support 'Tandy standard'. It was only surpassed with the coming of the EGA cards and sound-cards for the PC & its compatibles. It's the cheap PC- & AT-clones that became game- & homecomputers. But 'till the late 80s, the Tandy 1000 was the best game computer out there.
Yep, they released lots of different computers. I was only explaining where they started as a background to the Nimbus, I wasn't covering all their machines.
Sam coupe lemmings the music is corrupted there's loads more software now pacman tetris x3 bubble ghostsprint rik dangerous battle zone also using external 1mb ram we can run zx spectrum software at 2.4 times faster that's faster than a next at 7mhz! Who knew?!
Enterprise? Timex 2068 both had speccy rom cartridges for 48k compatibility thwres even a youtube video of an enterprise at 8mhz just think! Speccy software at 8mhz ! Wow!
So you showed MUSHROOMMAN on the Lambda and NEVER mention that this is the first game on the Lambda to have improved graphics? Never shown possible before 2024.
My first computer was the rubber key 48k Spectrum, then I got a Spectrum+ and later I got the Spectrum+2. I was thinking of getting the Sam Coupe due to some weird brand loyalty but when it came down to it I thought it was time to change and got an Amiga A500. I never regretted that decision, but it would have been nice to experience that system back in the day.
@@xenorac I think you made the right choice. The SAM was left with absolutely minimal support and very little native software, and the Speccy emulation was far from perfect.
![[MV] A leap of faith...ความเชื่อใจครั้งสุดท้าย (From "Petrichor the series")](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/U1piZH2CNXA/mqdefault.jpg)
Thank you so much for the section on the RM Nimbus. We had them in high school, and I remember them being a cross between a BBC Micro and an IBM PC, and therefore always wondered how they fitted in with everything else. Your video explains this very well.
The Sam Coupe is the one I know, mainly because I went to one of the MGT promotional roadshows for it, at a hotel in Thornbury. And I did speak to Alan Miles and Bruce Gordon. But by the time it did ship, I'd already bought a Commodore Amiga. I already knew MGT because of their Disciple disk drives I used by my Speccy.
Great story! Is that Thornbury near Bristol?
Hey thanks for the video :) Very nice to see the SAM get some love! Never owned one, and I ended up transitioning to the IBM PC on the early 90s (emulating the Speccy there whenever possible), but the famed "super spectrum" always sparked my curiosity. I wish it had a longer and more successful run. Interestingly, maybe the true "super spectrums" came from Russia some years later, in the famed Pentagon and Scorpion ZS-256 clones. Those are machines that I always wished I could have played with, and it's amazing to see what folks are doing with them here on TH-cam. Cheers, and thanks for the trip down memory lane!
I have the SVI-728 in my collection :) The Sam Coupe is a beauty and it's a shame that it didn't came to the market around '85 :(
I actually worked for a SAM Coupe distributor! and the manual was a work of genius
Mel Croucher did it, and yes, he's an absolute genius!
When Radio Shack discontinued the Color Computer line, two successor computers were released by other companies to continue the line: The Tomcat TC-9 and the IMS/Blackhawk MM/1. Sales were quite lackluster, with the latter selling a grand total of eight units.
Interesting, I will look those up!
Thanks for the interesting finds! The TI 99/4a was my first computer, so please forgive me for correcting a small detail. Regardless of the Tomy Tutor's legal status, it technically couldn't have been a successor to a "popular 8-bit computer" since both the TI "original" and the "clone" were based on a TMS99xx series 16 bit CPU. For lack of an available TI 99/4a successor, I actually changed back to an 8 bit machine. The Spectravideo SV-328 was great for programming and DIY hardware expansion.
I knew somebody would point that out!
The RM machines bring back a lot of memories! I arrived in high school in 1991, and the school was very proud of its "Nimbus Network" which linked the computers in the two computer rooms and a couple of machines in the school library. I recall we had a computer room that was still using that 380Z hardware as well, surely that was pretty obsolete even in '91!
We had the RM Nimbus at the last year of middle school and at secondary school for 'Business studies'. We had win 3.11 networked on BNC. We mostly used them for swapping BMPs and JPEGs of bikini models on 1.44mb floppies :)
Yeah I saw this and had a flashback to secondary school. They upgraded our computer lab to RM Nimbuses in second year.
A friend of mine had a SAM, and it fascinated me, although in practice it was generally just used as a Spectrum that, as I recall wasn't fully compatible and the graphics/colours always seemed a bit off.
He offered to sell it to me for a tenner in 1992, but I was heading off to Uni that year and turned down the offer as it would have just ended up in a loft somewhere. I suspect it got binned, which is such a shame.
When I see the prices they go for now...
@@jasejj I suspect like a lot of supposedly compatible machines, it would only do what the Speccy was *supposed* to do, and would fall over when faced with the sort of programming tricks a lot of games writers used to squeeze out better performance.
I remember a school friend (with rich parents!) who was given an Archimedes not long after they were released. It could supposedly run BBC Micro software, but wouldn't run Elite, presumably because it relies on displaying two graphics modes at once, something supposedly impossible.
@@leeosborne3793 Yeah I think that was exactly it. I recall that MGT actually released a Spectrum emulator for it which improved compatibility to some degree, but it definitely wasn't just a Speccy with added bells and whistles. Indeed I think this was the first time I'd ever come across emulator software, and it clearly left a mark on me as my masters project was, in part a (partially successful) attempt to emulate an ethernet network in software, long before VMware and the like made this an inherent part of every datacentre (although of course vurtualisation is a far larger topic!) .
A Z80 platform really doesn't have the grunt to do the subject justice. I'm not sure if the Arch actually has BBC hardware in it or if it's emulation.
While it was in competition with the 8 bit computers, the TI 99/4A was actually a 16 bit, which is probably the cause of it's steep price. My 8-bit computers were a Tandy PC-1 Pocket Computer (a relabel made by Sharp), an Atari 400, and an Atari 800. I actually ran a dial up BBS on the Atari 800 for a while. I needed a PC compatible for college though, so ended up with a PC XT Clone machine, 640K RAM, twin Teac 360K floppies, a CGA compatible video card, and an amber composite monitor. Sold my Atari machines to a friend, so she could start learning computers.
The SAM Coupé was awesome. Sold mine a while back. It went for a fair sum, but had I known only 12,000 were ever sold, I definitely would've held onto it longer!
Still got mine with all the bits and pieces, seemed to be going for a few hundred last I looked.
Excellent video brought back a lot of memories for 74 year old me. The Tomy Tutor reminded me of the Aquarius computer
For the sake of all our ears, the way it turned out was mostly fine.😅 C64 sid was just fabulous and the Amiga juat smashed it from there. My first pc was pc speaker so that felt like a step back until sound blaster became a real norm
Excellent video.
I must admire your dedication to research so much of the 80's computer scene and for digging up info on some pretty obscure failures.
i worked in the business at the time and thought I knew what was available - wrong! :>)
I think the most fun part is that the math used on these is not even remotely complicated when you have modern internet. There were so few of us that learned BASIC. 10 Print. Select 8. How did hobbyist coding die on the vine?
Hey, and you didn't have to enter binary codes via paddle switches to boot them up! I learned BASIC on an IMSAI and a Poly88. 47 years ago now.
I paused at the Greek advert for 6128 plus. This was literally a machine that was too good too late. Despite the ad, I've only seen it been sold at a single computer shop here at the time.
Escape from the planet of the robot monsters in SAM Coupe was great!
The world of 8-bit computers was as varied and as bizarre as the software that ran on them. At the time they were too expensive for an individual to encounter many different models and as they were all unique in operation they were always going to be doomed to obsolescence. It's nice that they've not all been lost to time and there are still people interested in figuring out how to master them
Never owned a Sinclair machine but when the Sam Coupe came out I so wanted it to succeed! Was disappointed when MGT imploded.
@@terminalterminus People who forked out for them must have felt a bit hard done by. It never lived up to its full potential.
I own a SAM Coupe and I love it. I just wished more modern day developers would find the platform :-)
The problem is that they're so rare, there's not much point. I'm still pissed for not getting one when I was a kid, now they're rare / completely unaffordable when they do pop up. Maybe one day...
That was fascinating, I had only heard about the SAM coupé before, all the others were unknown to me :o great video!
but MAN your intro was loud xD
Most interesting and bringing back some reminders almost forgotten in my brain. Oh for the good old days of teletext.
the RM 380z was the first ever computer i used which got me hooked on my long love of computing.
While not exactly a successor, in Australia, Dick Smith of Dick Smith Electronics released the "System 80" which was BASIC-compatible with the TRS-80. You couldn't count on the hardware working exactly the same way, but programs which used TRS-80 BASIC without any PEEKs or POKEs or USR type calls only required minimal changes to be compatible with the System 80.
The System 80 also featured more reliable cassette saving and loading than the TRS-80. The TRS-80 originally had a bug in the cassette routines which meant that it was "looking for" a pulse from the tape right at the edge of that pulse instead of right in the middle of the pulse, while reading from tape. This mistiming meant that even slight faults on the tape could make your programs and data unreadable, and it wasn't corrected until relatively late in the life of the TRS-80. In my opinion, this contributed greatly to the TRS-80's nickname of the "Trash-80".
Very interesting, thanks for sharing!
I absolutely loved the RM-Nimbus computers (networked) at my school.
Loved my Sam and even appeared on a news disk and Fred. Amazing community.
My brother and I had a rubber keyed 48k Speccy, then later our folks agreed to buy us an upgraded system. We were keen on the idea of a Sam Coupe, but on learning of it's limitations, opted for a Speccy +2. I think we made the right choice!
Agreed, given that a lot of great 128K software appeared late in the Speccy's life, and it was supported by a lot of manufacturers and software houses well into the 90s.
The true successor to the BBC micro is the £25 Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi has an Acorn Risc Machines processor and runs the BBC Archimedes operating system RiscOS. The Raspberry Pi runs the latest version of BBC Basic for the ARM natively. The latest BBC basic manual is dated 2017 and so development is ongoing. The best distribution of RiscOS for the Raspberry Pi is RiscOS Direct which includes the largest number of utility programs including BBC Basic as standard.
Educators using the BBC micro:bit might take issue with that, it even has BBC in the name! And, let's be realistic, hardly anyone uses RISC OS. Some form of Linux or Android(which has a linux kernel) are used. If your logic about ARM held, we could also say XBox360 is the successor to Apple PowerPC computers. It is possible to run PowerPC Linux(Free60) on X-boxes with that CPU, although the project never saw as much development as linux on Intel Xboxes. It has no practical value anyways, just like RISC OS is mostly tried as a novelty on RPi's. I suppose you could call RPi's a "spiritual successor", but then again BBC Micro had no traction in the North American nor foreign markets, and certainly not in the industrial and "Maker" markets. And easily a dozen other different microcomputers can run "BBC Basic," probably most often now in emulations on ordinary PCs. You can't just will a lineage into existence, basically the only connection is the heritage of the ARM design, and on RPi's its an ARM System on a Chip, rather than a pure CPU like the BBC Micro.
The Raspberry Pi models A and B are named that way in honour of the BBC A and B
I'd like to own a SAM back in the day, but for then the jump to 16 bits was unavoidable. It would have had to come in 1985-87 at most lately.
Just a slight bit of pendantry - the RM 380Z was not a home computer, it was designed for schools & industry but mostly schools had it I believe, I remember when my school got one and it was hosted by the maths department. Got banned by them as I ended up knowing more about it than the teachers! LOL!
Love the Sam Coupé. Beautiful machine.
Having started with a MSX 1, and later a Sam Coupe, I think my favourite system was the MSX, If Amstrad had only made a MSX themselves instead of reinventing the wheel with the CPC. A Spectrum emulator cartridge would have done away with the need for Amstrad branded Spectrums, and a MSX 2+ would have had as good graphics and sound as the Sam coupe, even if the Panasonics CPU was a fraction slower and came with less RAM as standard.
Remember RM Nimbus machines very well you had to use a floppy disk to initiate the os for it to work as a stand alone machine but as a network can run without it graphics were not too bad either was first introduced to windows 3.1 as well.
That's right! I used one for Business Studies at secondary school.
Alan Alda, Sarah Purcell, Roger Moore, (and William Shatner of course). It’s interesting to see which computer companies got which celebrities to endorse them🤔
Yeah I was thinking there might be a video in that!
I had and still have: ZX Spectrum 48K * ZX Spectrum 128 +3 * Sam Coupe 512K + Sam Expansive Card (EuroConector: 4 slot (max 4,5 MB RAM for Sam Coupe) + real time clock) + 1 MB RAM module + Centronics slot.
I have programmed my own OS on Sam Coupé: Explosion - which still outperforms Windows in some parameters. A game: Pax (in: SCADS - game designer) - and a game in ZX Spectra mode: Lode Runner X - it's a game mode: Lode Runner - adapted to a maze using secret passages and traps.
I currently only use emulators for convenience. OS Explosion + game Pax + game Lode Runner X = free (emulator Sam Coupe: Sim Coupe).
To add to the fondness surrounding the SAM Coupé in the comments, I almost bought one in 1992 and spoke to both Bruce Gordon and Alan Miles on the phone - could you imagine that personal level of communication today? The price and Spectrum compatibility were a big pull and it's a shame that the machine failed but many areas of the spec were poor - even for 1989. It didn't even have hardware sprites and scrolling! What were they thinking?
That's a really cool story!
The only one of these I have from this lot is a Tomy Tutor. I got it off of ebay a few years back for a fair price. Don't have any peripherals for it other than a set of the disc style controllers and a handful of games. While it is very similar to the TI99/4A I really can't make a deep comparison due to only having so little for it versus the veritable mountain of stuff I have for the TI.
A mate of mine had the Sprectravideo 328 and was looking to get the 728 but ended up getting the Amiga 1000 instead.
When listening in earphones the tones between segments are deafening compared to the rest of the program material.
I had to look twice at the hand held game Puck man.😂
I had lots of fun with the Tomy Tutor. It had two different BASICs built in. Unfortunately in the good BASIC there was no real support for sprites. They should 'a' given the BASIC a VPEEK and VPOKE, and a PEEK and POKE while we're at it. There seemed to be joystick keywords in the BASIC that did not work. The music command in BASIC was different from the TI's. Very puzzling that this BASIC sucked when it didn't need to.
As I recall, $95+tax at The Federated Group, and it came bundled with the joystick, joypad controllers, cassette player, and five games. My favorite game was Hyperspace.
Great insight - thanks!
Still got my Sam coupe ❤❤
I suspect the SAM Coupe would have been a lot more successful if it had appeared a year or two earlier. I didn't own a Spectrum until 1987, when I got a +2 for my birthday, and it was pretty obvious by then that people were starting to abandon the platform for 16 bit machines. If the SAM was available back then, I think it would have been much more popular as people could have kept their existing software.
That said, it also seems like a missed opportunity that Amstrad didn't beef up the Spectrum's capabilities when the +3 came out. It was significantly re-engineered and very different from earlier models hardware-wise, and it's a shame a better graphics mode wasn't included.
Agreed!
The lack of 128K compatibility on the Sam was also a massive miss. Anyone who'd already upgraded to a 128K Speccy would lose access to much of their software anyway, making the 16-bit machines even more tempting.
Had they retained the ability to play all 128K games, it might of been a more tempting prospect.
@@andyc8257 Does anyone know why it couldn't run 128K software? Was it unable to emulate memory bank switching or something?
I believe it was down to the different sound chip as well as a different bank switching set-up.
@@TheLairdsLair yeah, they were really the two big differences. Not having compatible RAM banking modes was plain daft, as that should have been an easy win. Leaving out the AY and having RAM banking would've left games silent, but functional, although I can't imagine the AY was so expensive a chip as to make it impossible to include too.
But then rumour at the time was that hardware scrolling was left out of the machine because it would've increased cost price by about £2, so maybe the margins were just too thin (though sales probably would've been so much better with slightly more capable hardware)
Idea: "Successors to the successors"?
In my school, if people did not have a C64, they had a 728 (or 738)
Where did you go to school out of interest?
@@TheLairdsLair Finland
The TI99/4a could have had a powerfull successor with 64kB direct memory. Unfortunately, TI executives were too cheap and Commodore got the lead
What does the lady at the start of every one of your videos say? Sounds like "welcome stun runners".
Exactly that!
@@TheLairdsLair Really?? I always heard "welcome down...mumble..." luvers? loaders?
I've wondered this for a while!
But the Amstrad Spectrums sold quite well, and the CPC range did very well. They made Amstrad a lot of money. When you make an MSX, you're sharing the market with many other machines which, by design, have the same basic hardware and software specifications. The only way to stand out is to choose an extra gimmick to add, which you hope will be popular and unique. Then it's just pot luck whether a consumer picks your model over any of the others. MSX was a good idea, implemented badly.
@@another3997 Sinclair fanboys can be a bit scathing about it, but the Amstrad takeover gave the Speccy about an extra five years of commercial life, and the build quality of Amstrad machines was WAY better.
Nice video, but maybe start by selecting the correct images? The computer you show on 0:30 is not an IBM PC, it's the 'IBM PC Junior'. It was IBMs FAILED attempt to capture the homecomputer market. The computer that build on the same architecture was the Tandy 1000. With extra graphics and 3-voice-sound build-in, it was better than the IBM PC/XT. Check out old games that support 'Tandy standard'. It was only surpassed with the coming of the EGA cards and sound-cards for the PC & its compatibles. It's the cheap PC- & AT-clones that became game- & homecomputers. But 'till the late 80s, the Tandy 1000 was the best game computer out there.
It's still a PC compatible, I don't say a specific model in the audio, it's a just representative image and it's not even the subject of that segment!
The 128k was a big upgrade over the 48k?!
Just having proper sound was a huge upgrade in itself without the better BASIC, screen paging and extra memory!
@@arostwocents I'd say it was. It resulted in some much more advanced software.
Research Machines released the 480z in-between the 380z & the nimbus
Yep, they released lots of different computers. I was only explaining where they started as a background to the Nimbus, I wasn't covering all their machines.
Sam coupe lemmings the music is corrupted there's loads more software now pacman tetris x3 bubble ghostsprint rik dangerous battle zone also using external 1mb ram we can run zx spectrum software at 2.4 times faster that's faster than a next at 7mhz! Who knew?!
Enterprise? Timex 2068 both had speccy rom cartridges for 48k compatibility thwres even a youtube video of an enterprise at 8mhz just think! Speccy software at 8mhz ! Wow!
Interesting video, but the sound effects during the transitions are too loud and really distracting.
You have the same voice than Ringway Manchester TH-camr lol
Who? Never heard of them, but I definitely don't have a Manchester accent.
@@TheLairdsLair The guy's TH-cam channel is just called like that "Ringway Manchester" hehehe. By the way good channel keep up the good work! ^^
So you showed MUSHROOMMAN on the Lambda and NEVER mention that this is the first game on the Lambda to have improved graphics? Never shown possible before 2024.
Which game is on 5:30?
Konami's Jungler
What about Laser 128 ?
What about it LOL
@@TheLairdsLair It is a clone of Apple II, better than Apple II.
That will be one for my unofficial clones video 😉
It was fun to watch... although you left out Commodore 65.
The Commodore 65 wasn't an unofficial successor and it wasn't released either, so doesn't remotely qualify.
@@TheLairdsLair Yes, it wasn't.
Fairly confident you're pronouncing
"Pyuter" wrong. It's not "Pie Yoo ter."
Fairly confident you only ever turn up on my channel when you want to criticise.
I'm Here ❤😂
First lol
My first computer was the rubber key 48k Spectrum, then I got a Spectrum+ and later I got the Spectrum+2. I was thinking of getting the Sam Coupe due to some weird brand loyalty but when it came down to it I thought it was time to change and got an Amiga A500. I never regretted that decision, but it would have been nice to experience that system back in the day.
@@xenorac I think you made the right choice. The SAM was left with absolutely minimal support and very little native software, and the Speccy emulation was far from perfect.