Sam Coupe
I know it's an extremely long shot but is anyone looking to part with their beloved Sam Coupe as I've got a loving home waiting for one....
Would prefer a boxed 512k example with at least one drive but will consider anything, in the unlikely event that there are actually any replies to this thread!
Cheers
Would prefer a boxed 512k example with at least one drive but will consider anything, in the unlikely event that there are actually any replies to this thread!
Cheers
Post edited by cmonkey on
Comments
It is unboxed and has just the one drive, and needs a few little spares - basically the rubber feet and a new ESC key and pillar as the current one is glued on!
Open to offers.
www.rwapsoftware.co.uk
www.sellmyretro.com
Thanks for the reply. Is it a 256 or 512k? Do you have any pics of it so I can asses things a little better? Does it come with the power supply? Which version ROM has it got?
Many thanks
Hi Rich, do you have a working ASIC for SAM?
Unfortunately I don't have any SAM Coupes available, but with regards to general upgrades to get the machine up to the standard spec (256K Upgrades, ROM3, Disk Drives etc) that isn't a problem as I build them, as well as all the fancier bits of hardware that I have designed over the years - all are still available and info is on my website.
Regards,
Hardware, Software, Magazines and more for the SAM Coupé
Website: www.samcoupe.com
Twitter: QuazarSamCoupe
Some photos can eb downloaded from:
http://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk/downloads/samcoupe.zip
I need to test it on Monday - I am not sure of the ROM version - will let you know when I test it.
www.rwapsoftware.co.uk
www.sellmyretro.com
Cheers
Rgds
I often purchase something from Hong Kong or China, and the postage is not very big.
In all conscience I cannot sell it to you as is - the disk drive has now stopped working (although that is probably the drive belt, they do not seem as easy to replace as on the +3).
That ESC key is also sticking - I will have to get something to dissolve the glue and try re-attaching it (oh for the sake of a bit of plastic!)
I may just offer my SAM for spares or repair if anyone is interested. The motherboard and power supply are fully working and the case is in good condition on the plus side !
www.rwapsoftware.co.uk
www.sellmyretro.com
I was planning on putting either an Atom-Lite CF interface or a Trinity Ethernet interface in for mass storage so the lack of a floppy isn't a deal breaker as far as I'm concerned. The keyboard may be a problem as I doubt it's possible to find a replacement anywhere but if some of the keys work then I may be able to do something with it.
Let me know if it boots to the rainbow screen and if it does I'd still like to buy it as a spares machine and continue looking for another one.
Cheers
I have the Trinity and I'm extremly happy with it, but even with boot dicsc installed as RECORD, you must start BDOS first from floppy. Knowing this, I also ordered a new internal disc drive from Quazar and made a better (smaller) PSU as the original one tends to making the screen dark & noisy if accessing a not-slim-line disc drive, and also the original PSU generates a loud noise after using it for longer time.
Here's a question though - I'm currently using Simon Owen's excellent Sim Coupe to cut my teeth until the real thing arrives. On that I've got an emulated Atom with BDOS installed and the rom patched for hard disk booting. That works well and I've currently got a few records set up on the emulated Atom storage with the Comet assembler/Spectrum emulator/Protracker/etc. Auto boot from the Atom is working fine. Would it not be possible to image that fully working, emulated, Atom disk onto a real CF card, thereby eliminating the need for a floppy to create the Atom disk in the first place?
I realise I'm still going to need a patched ROM for direct Atom booting and for that I'm going to have to either buy a EPROM blower (something that I've been promising myself for a while) or buy a pre-burned rom.
When you say "the original PSU tends to making the screen dark & noisy if accessing a not-slim-line disc drive" do you mean that the screen goes dark & noisy when accessing the Atom/Trinity also or is it just mechanical drives that cause this phenomenon?
I've ordered a SCART cable from Quazar as, from reading up about the Sam, it seems that the RF lead goes from the PSU to the TV and could pick up noise from the PSU in the process. Hopefully the SCART cable will eliminate this as it connects directly into the back of the Sam.
Cheers
... seems like the Roctec external slimline drives use the same Citizen slimline mechanism as Sam Coup? disk drives. There's one on eBay for ?2.50 (+?4) at the moment, almost certainly just needs a new belt.
I'm not certain it's the same but I've seen a few Sam drives now and the Roctec was identical.
Of course the Roctec drive does not have the controller interface board, but it could be a very handy source of drive mechanisms.
From reading this thread it does indeed seem that the Sam Coupe used the same drive mechanism as the Roctec floppies, namely the Citizen UODC-12A drive mechanism.
However it seems that there are two models (that I can find details about anyway) in the Roctec floppy range, the RF332C and the RF382C. I'm not sure what the exact differences are between the two but from looking at the pic of the one I've bought on eBay it looks like an RF382C. I'm not sure if the drive mech is the same as the RF332C. I've sent a question to the seller to find out for sure if it's an RF332C or an RF382C that I've bought.
Either way it's nice to know that it might not be quite so hard in future to find replacement drive mechanisms as the Roctec drives seem to come up quite often on the Amibay forums.
Thanks for the pointer!
Still no word from the seller yet.....
www.rwapsoftware.co.uk
www.sellmyretro.com
I did write a BOOT ROM for the SAM so it can load in B-DOS from the EEPROM on the Trinity, but I would have to say a floppy drive is still an essential bit of kit for the SAM! There's no way to read/write Trinity formatted SD cards on a PC yet to copy .dsk files across to RECORDs.
Colin.
Hardware, Software, Magazines and more for the SAM Coupé
Website: www.samcoupe.com
Twitter: QuazarSamCoupe
In the mid 2000s I bought up a fair few external Amiga drives as they did use the same Citizen drives. However, I decided to give up in the end - as the Citizen drives were discontinued in 1991 or thereabouts the number of dead drives I came across outweighed the benefits. Decided it was best not to rely on ~20 year old disks drives!
Colin.
Hardware, Software, Magazines and more for the SAM Coupé
Website: www.samcoupe.com
Twitter: QuazarSamCoupe
I hope it arrives because I've told my boss I'm working from home tomorrow in the hope that it does!! Tracking info shows that it's current sitting in the Cannock depot. Fingers crossed for tomorrow....
Sam arrived at about 3pm today and I figured I'd done enough work for the day so I downed tools to play (sorry boss!).
I was pleasantly surprised at how good external condition it was in, barring the fact that it only has one of it's feet and no ESC key it's in remarkable condition.
So I proceeded to connect it to my little 14 inch portable CRT and was even happier when it booted up first time. Unfortunately it appears to be one of the only black and white Sam Coupe's that MGT ever made :-( No colour. I was heartbroken. I don't know if it had colour when you tested it Rich but it certainly doesn't have any now. I've tried manually fine tuning my TV and even tried it on my 46 inch LCD but alas, still black and white. I dismantled the PSU to get at the modulator and tried tweaking the screws in there to see if that helped but still no colour.
Oh well, hopefully it's only black and white on the RF side of things. I've ordered an RGB scart cable from Quazar so fingers crossed the RGB output will be in glorious technicolor through scart. If it is then I won't be concerned about the black and white RF picture. If not then I'll need to start replacing components but I really wouldn't know where to start on the Sam.
As regards the ESC key, I'll probably re-deploy one of the function keys (probably F9) as the ESC key as F9 probably isn't used as much as the ESC key will be. I'll have a look at cleaning some of the super glue residue of the insides of the ESC pillar area at the weekend to see if I can free it up a little.
Upon sticking a floppy in the drive and typing BOOT I was happy to hear mechanical whirring coming from the drive area and the drive LED light up. This to me was a very good sign. I didn't expect it to boot the disk because it was a +3 formatted one with nothing on it but to hear noises coming from the disk area was definitely a good sign.
I PEEKed the ROM at address 15 to find out the version and was happy to see it had version 3 ROM.
Next I took it all to pieces (well what else do you do when get a new toy ;-) and had a good poke around inside. I was surprised to see the the memory chips were 4 piggybacked 81c4256a's (well, I presume the 2 lower chips are 81c4256a's but it's impossible to tell) with the CAS pins of the top 2 wired together, which then in turn was wired to pin 3 (counting pin 1 as bottom left as you look from the front of the machine) of the expansion connector on the front edge of the motherboard. I don't know whether that's how MGT sent them out of factory or whether this had been a 256k machine at one point and had been upgraded by someone. It certainly didn't look like a professional job but it works fine and that's the main thing!
The motherboard is version 1.1 dated 8950 so looks like it was built either very late '89 or early '90. How many different motherboard versions of the Sam were there?
Next, onto the floppy drive. I took it out of it's plastic casing and saw that it was a Citizen UODC-09A drive mechanism. A quick Google didn't reveal much. I took the upper metal casing off so that I'd be able to see if the disk was spinning or not and put it back in the Sam and tried to boot a floppy. I could tell that the disk wasn't spinning but putting my finger on the drive motor told me that the motor was churning away. This pointed to a knackered drive belt.
So I had to go on an intense three-hour Citizen floppy drive dismantling/repairing/reconditioning and reassembling course! The learning curve on the course was very steep! Who knew they could pack so many things into such a small amount of space! I really wish I'd taken photos of the whole dismantling process, it would have helped me considerably when it came to putting it all back together again!
After a good hour or so I'd managed to get the whole thing stripped down and removed the old belt. It was very worn and fragile and almost brittle to touch. It was also very highly polished, presumably with years of use, which probably explains why the drive motor was spinning but the disk wasn't, because the drive belt was slipping on the drive gear.
So I robbed the drive belt out of one of my +3's and was happy to see that it was almost identical in size, so I figured I'd give it a bash!
Another hour or two later and it was all back together (well, with the exception of one screw which I've got left, but I know where it goes so I just need to dismantle it all over again to put that one back but I think I could probably have one of these stripped in 5 mins now so it's no biggie!).
So the acid test, would it work? Well thanks to Simon Owen's excellent SamDisk I wrote the Comet assembler to disk, turned on the Sam, put the disk in, typed BOOT and ......... yes! It worked! :razz: I was one very happy Sam owner!
Since then I've tried the Mnemodemo and Manic Miner and both worked in beautiful techni-black-and-white!
Oh well, I'm chuffed to bits that I managed to bring the drive back to life but praying to the Gods that the black and white is only on the RF signal. A bit of a mixed bag at the moment but overall I'd say I'm very happy to belong to the exclusive Sam Coupe owners club.
The Chroma for the PAL signal for the modulator is governed by the far left hand side of the board. I think from memory there's a preset (dial) which you may be able to twiddle to get colour? Should be close to a 4.43MHz crystal.
If it helps any, look at http://mutantcaterpillar.Wordpress.com as I put a Sam repair on not long ago.
You may or may not know that F9 is a hard coded short-cut for BOOT. IT is a small thing but I find it incredibly convenient. I've used it way more than the ESC key :)
Fantastic work on repairing the drive. Well done :)
Welcome to the club. [plug] Be sure to download a copy of Dave Invaders from Black Jet to treat your SAM to a brand new game :) [/plug]
Colour used to work on my TV, but I was struggling to get either colour or a stable picture.
I did replace the TV lead from the PSU (as the original was extremely short!) so that may be worth looking at - although it only pushes into a socket on the PSU.
Presumably this should be fine with a SCART cable, unless something has happened in transit.
www.rwapsoftware.co.uk
www.sellmyretro.com