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Forgotten hardware

spoodiespoodie
edited July 2004 in Sinclair Miscellaneous
During the mid-eighties I became aware of a new hardware platform which I believe was released by Sinclair, it was obviously unsuccessful as I?ve not heard of it since, although I saw it displayed in a shop window at the time. it had dual internal 3.5? disk drives side-by-side in the front, below the keyboard, it was white or thereabouts and it was capable of displaying up to 256 colours on screen. That?s about all I can remember of it and I?ve been trying to remember what it was called for years. Assuming I didn?t dream all the above, and it was a Spectrum related hardware platform, can anybody help?

I believe it also had backwards compatibility with previous Spectrum software releases.

Thanks
Post edited by spoodie on

Comments

  • woodcock88woodcock88
    edited July 2003
    Sounds to me like you mean the Sam Coupe. Only it wasn't released by Sinclair - it was produced by MGT (Miles Gordon Technology).


    Colin
  • spoodiespoodie
    edited July 2003
    That's it exactly, thank you so much.
  • woodcock88woodcock88
    edited July 2003
    welcome :)
  • Dr BEEPDr BEEP
    edited August 2003
    This could be the Sinlair PC 200.

    The dutch HCC has one in store (for sale).



  • stupidgetstupidget
    edited August 2003
    I could have been one of the Russian Sprinter machines. Have a look at this site

    http://www.petersplus.com/sprinter/spectrum.htm

    They manufacture a Hardware based Speccy that sits in a PC case!!!When I have a bit of spare cash I think I may get one.

    Has anybody ever used/owned one and if so what are they like to setup, configure and run?

    Sausages is more important
  • b00mzi11ab00mzi11a
    edited August 2003
    Yerz has one - And I will have one in 2 weeks :D Yerz hasn't had any problems AFAIK but recommends you have some PC building skills if yer just buying the mobo, or mobo+vga card.
  • stupidgetstupidget
    edited August 2003
    Before setting up my own IT company I used to work as a PC Engineer in a high street shop in Wolverhampton, so I should'nt have any problem building one of these unless I have lost rather more brain cells than I thought ;)

    Are these Sprint machines basically a dedicated Hardware emulator? and if so why are they better than just having several emulators on my XP machine.
    Sausages is more important
  • Dr BEEPDr BEEP
    edited July 2004
    You still could ask the dutch HCC Sinclair Group. They still might have it in stock ???


  • SadakoSadako
    edited July 2004
    On 2003-07-22 15:20, spoodie wrote:
    During the mid-eighties I became aware of a new hardware platform which I believe was released by Sinclair, it was obviously unsuccessful as I?ve not heard of it since, although I saw it displayed in a shop window at the time. it had dual internal 3.5? disk drives side-by-side in the front, below the keyboard, it was white or thereabouts and it was capable of displaying up to 256 colours on screen. That?s about all I can remember of it and I?ve been trying to remember what it was called for years. Assuming I didn?t dream all the above, and it was a Spectrum related hardware platform, can anybody help?

    I believe it also had backwards compatibility with previous Spectrum software releases.

    Thanks

    On 2003-07-22 17:20, woodcock88 wrote:
    Sounds to me like you mean the Sam Coupe. Only it wasn't released by Sinclair - it was produced by MGT (Miles Gordon Technology).


    Colin


    SAM didn't come out mid eighties. it was 1990, or practically 1990 - december 1989 i believe. i remember when they became available because i knew one person who got one then. and it still needs an emulator to run spectrum games, i think spectrum gmes are relatively easy to port. there are a bunch of spectrum games converted to sam, many with improved sound. although it's basic seems tobe very similar to spectrum basic, and probably better. spectrum basic can be easily adapted for sam, and is easy for spectrum basic programmers to use. if you write a line with INK in it, for example, it will accept it and automatically change INK to PEN without giving and error. very nice. and it has a 'spectrum-like' video mode. but i think in every cell you can have any colours, and even different intensities in the same cell. just that the colours available were the same. i think colours also go from 1 to 15 or someting like that. one half of that is bright 0 and another half bright 1, so you can avoid using BRIGHT all the time, although you could use the command Bright if you wanted it to. it gave a run for many 16bit machine's money. i thought it was 16 or 32bit when i first saw it and a friend said 'no, it's an 8 bit', i was shocked. we never got that 'SUPER SPECTRUM' but the SAM is almost what that was supposed to be. designed by a couple guys who were working on the Super Spectrum, 'i think' and some of the Super Spectrum technology made its way into the SAM. i think it could only have done poorly because it came out too late. because all things considered the thing is a monster. it's the most capable all-round 8-bit and the best there is in my opinion.


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