Should I buy a Sam Coupe?

Hercules · August 2009

Hi folks

I been interested with the Sam Coupe since Miles Gordon Technology released the SAM as the successor to the Spectrum.

Are their any SAM users on the forum? What are your views on the machine, and is it worthwhile buying one off e-bay? I heard the SAM has problems loading turboloading spectrum cassettes and requires a device called 'the messenger' plugged into the machine is this correct?.

Is their any ATA interfaces for the SAM Coupe available?

mel the bell · August 2009

you tried an emu?
http://www.simcoupe.org/

mel the bell · August 2009

try contacting Quazar
and read the magazine sam revival
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/showthread.php?t=23394&highlight=sam+coupe

i believe its still going?

Hercules · August 2009

Haven't tried an emulator yet, but I noticed a port of Sim Coupe is available for my gp2x handheld so am going to give it a go :-)

dm_boozefreek · August 2009

Why should you buy a Sam Coupe?

...because you can :D

Quazar · August 2009

Hercules wrote: »

Hi folks

I been interested with the Sam Coupe since Miles Gordon Technology released the SAM as the successor to the Spectrum.

Are their any SAM users on the forum? What are your views on the machine, and is it worthwhile buying one off e-bay? I heard the SAM has problems loading turboloading spectrum cassettes and requires a device called 'the messenger' plugged into the machine is this correct?.

Is their any ATA interfaces for the SAM Coupe available?

In a nutshell - it's a fantastic machine - I've now been developing for over 15 years for it! Unfortunately the idea of it being the successor to the spectrum, or called the 'super spectrum' is a curse that still plights the machine to this day, nearly 20 years since it was released! The SAM is capable of so much more - and the native SAM software and hardware really shows what it can do!

With regards to emulation - why bother with loading in from cassette tapes - just use snapshots with emulators :) Early 'problems' with emulators were that the original Spectrum ROM couldn't be used for copyright reasons in the commercial emulators - but that didn't last long - PD emulators using the real ROM appeared within months, and the best emulators are now PD and offer a lot of snapshot features (.sna/.z80/.tap). There are also emulators now covering a variety of other platforms -such as the ZX81, Jupiter Ace, Galeksija, Oreo, Apple 1, Pac-Man Arcade machine (Think MAME on the SAM!) and the latest is the VIC-20! There's a few others in development too including the GameBoy and other arcade machines.

ATA interfaces - that's old technology :) Flash cards is where it is at now - see the Trinity Ethernet Interface - my latest piece of hardware which gives you an SD/MMC card socket for mass storage and Ethernet! (http://www.samcoupe.com/hardtrin.htm). I've got several things in the pipeline to make use of the Ethernet side of things - my first completed application for this is called "SAMonline" which will connect to the internet to get all the latest news for the SAM, as well as offering free software downloads of new software as well as classic games and old disk magazines with the authors permission. (The coverdisks with SAM Revival also features a lot of older commercial software which I have obtained permission to use, as well as lots of new software too!)

All the info on what i do is on my website at www.samcoupe.com. I'm happy to answer any SAM questions!

Colin.

Quazar · August 2009

mel the bell wrote: »

try contacting Quazar
and read the magazine sam revival
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/showthread.php?t=23394&highlight=sam+coupe

i believe its still going?

Yeap, I am still producing SAM Revival magazine, which has been going since 2002! The late running issue 23 is due out later this month. For info on what is coming and all the back issues please see my website.

Colin.

Quazar · August 2009

Hercules wrote: »

I heard the SAM has problems loading turboloading spectrum cassettes and requires a device called 'the messenger' plugged into the machine is this correct?

Oops! Forgot to answer this part. The Messenger was an interface to link a ZX Spectrum to the SAM so you could make snapshots of whatever was running on the Spectrum and send it to the SAM to save to disk and use with a speccy emu on the SAM. Quite pointless with the advent of emulators that would use normal snapshots, such as from WOS.

Colin.

Dr BEEP · August 2009

Quazar wrote: »

..... There are also emulators now covering a variety of other platforms -such as the ZX81, Jupiter Ace, Galeksija, Oreo, Apple 1, Pac-Man Arcade machine (Think MAME on the SAM!) and the latest is the VIC-20! There's a few others in development too including the GameBoy and other arcade machines.

.....

Colin.

The ZX81 is emulated since 1996 (SAM81) and got a new version in 2006 (SAM2ZX81) capable of Hi-Res games too as a tribute to 25 years of ZX81.

The gameboy emulator (SAM2GB) is a sleeping project. Mainproblem:
The graphics don't appear coorectly and I have no-one who can tell me what is going wrong.

chev · August 2009

My understanding is that the SAM's ability to use all its new hardware and graphics modes was somewhat limited by the slow speed of the CPU, which was really stuck operating at around 4Mhz rather than its full clock speed for most of the time. I also seem to recall that this issue has now been addressed and you can get a much more respectable 20Mhz out of the machine using an add-on board. I'm sure someone can correct me or expand on this.

Do any of the 'new' emulators support 128K snapshots, or do you still need to use the special SAM conversions?

Dr BEEP · August 2009

cheveron wrote: »

My understanding is that the SAM's ability to use all its new hardware and graphics modes was somewhat limited by the slow speed of the CPU, which was really stuck operating at around 4Mhz rather than its full clock speed for most of the time. I also seem to recall that this issue has now been addressed and you can get a much more respectable 20Mhz out of the machine using an add-on board. I'm sure someone can correct me or expand on this.

Do any of the 'new' emulators support 128K snapshots, or do you still need to use the special SAM conversions?

The problem with 128K is the bankswitching on the SAM and the ZX Spectrum which makes the 128K emulation a problem (32K banks and not 16K banks).

Spector · August 2009

I'm kind of confused by this even now - the Sam Coupe plays Spectrum games via an "Emulator". How close then is it to the feel of playing an original Spectrum? Does it emulate the BEEPer well?

Quazar · August 2009

Dr BEEP wrote: »

The gameboy emulator (SAM2GB) is a sleeping project. Mainproblem:
The graphics don't appear coorectly and I have no-one who can tell me what is going wrong.

Adrian, who looked at your code, had rewritten the entire graphics and had it working correctly with a game. I featured a developer diary from him in issue 19 of SAM Revival along with screenshots of it in action. Unfortunately since then he has not really had time to work further on it.

Colin.

Quazar · August 2009

cheveron wrote: »

My understanding is that the SAM's ability to use all its new hardware and graphics modes was somewhat limited by the slow speed of the CPU, which was really stuck operating at around 4Mhz rather than its full clock speed for most of the time. I also seem to recall that this issue has now been addressed and you can get a much more respectable 20Mhz out of the machine using an add-on board. I'm sure someone can correct me or expand on this.

Do any of the 'new' emulators support 128K snapshots, or do you still need to use the special SAM conversions?

Due to memory contention while the video is being drawn, the 'effective' clock speed of the SAM is 4.8MHz.

With my prototype Mayhem Accelerator the fastest I have now pushed the SAM is up to 28MHz with uncontended memory reading - making the SAM about 670% faster!

Although for stuff programmed well you can get a lot out of the SAM at it's normal clock speed - some games and demos are truly jaw dropping at what can be squeezed out of the Z80! The speed is not really that limiting at all.

The new emulators do not support 128K snapshots, but 128K games can be hacked to run - both to address the memory paging and patching AY sound routines to work via the SAA1099 soundchip.

Colin.

Quazar · August 2009

Spector wrote: »

I'm kind of confused by this even now - the Sam Coupe plays Spectrum games via an "Emulator". How close then is it to the feel of playing an original Spectrum? Does it emulate the BEEPer well?

It runs 48K stuff perfectly, and 128K if hacked as mentioned earlier. The SAM has a 1-bit beeper channel just like the ZX Spectrum so no problems there!

Colin.

Spector · August 2009

Quazar wrote: »

It runs 48K stuff perfectly, and 128K if hacked as mentioned earlier. The SAM has a 1-bit beeper channel just like the ZX Spectrum so no problems there!

Colin.

So then theoretically, you could put hundreds of 48K games on an IDE drive connected to the Sam and play them with instant loading from there?

Quazar · August 2009

Spector wrote: »

So then theoretically, you could put hundreds of 48K games on an IDE drive connected to the Sam and play them with instant loading from there?

Easy enough to do - fill the mass storage device with snapshots, pop the emulator on there too and then load away!

I still think IDE drives are old tech though these days, and no IDE interface is available anymore for the SAM as flash cards have really taken over - far less fuss! A 1GB SD card is only a couple of quid.

Also with the Trinity Ethernet Interface (which gives you the SD card slot too!) - I have just released an Autoboot ROM chip so the SAM will automatically load in a DOS on startup from the extra EEPROM on the Trinity to save you having to BOOT the DOS from a floppy disk each time you turn on / reset the machine....

Colin.

chev · August 2009

Quazar wrote: »

Due to memory contention while the video is being drawn, the 'effective' clock speed of the SAM is 4.8MHz.

With my prototype Mayhem Accelerator the fastest I have now pushed the SAM is up to 28MHz with uncontended memory reading - making the SAM about 670% faster!

Although for stuff programmed well you can get a lot out of the SAM at it's normal clock speed - some games and demos are truly jaw dropping at what can be squeezed out of the Z80! The speed is not really that limiting at all.

The new emulators do not support 128K snapshots, but 128K games can be hacked to run - both to address the memory paging and patching AY sound routines to work via the SAA1099 soundchip.

Colin.

I find 3.5Mhz is right at the edge of acceptable when handling a 12K screen area and buffering is out of the question. Of course it depends what you're doing in the screen area. All I have to worry about is an animated tile map and a few text windows.

Dr BEEP · August 2009

Quazar wrote: »

It runs 48K stuff ALMOST perfectly, and 128K if hacked as mentioned earlier. The SAM has a 1-bit beeper channel just like the ZX Spectrum so no problems there!

Colin.

The keyboard in-ports are read as 95 when no key is pressed. So some game which doesn't make an AND 31 won't work. This is offcourse very almost none. Some BASIC games use the IN command. On the SAM we made a patch for this command in the ZX Spectrom ROM to return 191 instead of 95 when no key is pressed.

Dr BEEP · August 2009

Spector wrote: »

So then theoretically, you could put hundreds of 48K games on an IDE drive connected to the Sam and play them with instant loading from there?

Even better,

I once made an interface that made the SAM-connector a ZX Spectrum connector and we tried various interfaces like Kempston-joystick and the handscanner and the worked.

The ZX-PC interface works too, but without the EPROM (which you don't need since you load the ZX ROM in the emulator).

Quazar · August 2009

Dr BEEP wrote: »

It runs 48K stuff ALMOST perfectly

Okay, ALMOST perfectly .... ;)

I think with my time with the SAM I've only come across one old 48K game that didn't work - Jetpac, if I remember correctly it froze when you died - doesn't respawn you. I never did bother to look at the code to see what it was waiting for at that point.

Colin.

mel the bell · August 2009

Quazar wrote: »

Okay, ALMOST perfectly .... ;)

I think with my time with the SAM I've only come across one old 48K game that didn't work - Jetpac, if I remember correctly it froze when you died - doesn't respawn you. I never did bother to look at the code to see what it was waiting for at that point.

Colin.

thats a 16k game :)

Quazar · August 2009

mel the bell wrote: »

thats a 16k game :)

So it is! I should have known as it was one for the first few Speccy games I had bought as a kid and still have it packed away somewhere.

But as far as emulation is concerned, 16k/48k... same system :) And there's far more to the SAM than emulation, although there are a few other old platforms that should be possible to emulate on the SAM.

Colin.

Should I buy a Sam Coupe?

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