Enigma Variations

Rob Holman

Ken Jarvis

Sean Conran

One of the few (maybe only?) games to use Mode 2. A classic Space-Invaders inspired game which, at times, offered a significant challenge with the large colourful structures that your white, monochrome ship could get lost under while fighting the attacking foe.

In true arcade style, there was also a selection of giant guardians to fight at the end of the level.

Crash review, courtesy of worldofspectrum.org

Review by Graham Goring from the Sam Coupé Scrapbook

Sphera was one of the first games to come out on the SAM. Long before it’s release we were treated to beautiful mode 4 graphics depicting the Mega-Enemies and some technical stuff all about how it had lots of layers of parallax and lovely sound. So we all had bated breath (from reading YS instead of cleaning our teeth - tsk!) by the time the game arrived. And it turned out to be an utter turkey.

The game was a basic vertically scrolling shoot ‘em up. With pretty good mode 2 graphics during the normal levels, and great mode 4 graphics upon meeting the Boss Creatures. Now, the problem with mode 2 is that you’re only allowed 2 colours per 8 pixel long line (horizontally) so the enemies and your craft were all white and boring, making them stand out from the nice background like a sore thumb.

Another feature making it difficult was that virtually (if not completely) all the ‘background’ passed OVER you and the enemies, making it impossible to see them and their bullets (which were disproportionatley massive) as they streaked towards you intent on draining your shields, or killing you.

And since both you and the enemies go pretty fast you spend most of your time dying and re-starting the level, ack!

But if you are after a shoot ‘em up with PLENTY of challenge, then you could do worse, seeing as it’s ever so cheap now. But you could do better (not sure how, but at a guess it’d probably involve writing something in BASIC).

Revelation

Balor Knight

(Cover art: Darrren Blackburn)

A fiendishly addictive, yet simple concept.

You control a bouncing ball, set in space. The object is to collect the coins and power-ups by bouncing from platform to platform. If you fall to the bottom of the map you die, if you hit a spike or other nasty, you also lose.

Once all the coins have been collected, the exit will be enabled which was generally at the top of the map. By adjusting your bounce and direction, you carefully work your way to the exit.

Originally written for the Spectrum, but was never released.

Temporarily, the freeware demo of Astroball is attached

Your Sinclair review, courtesy of The YS Rock ‘n’ Roll Years.

Review by Graham Goring from the Sam Coupé Scrapbook

Balor Knight seems very good at writing simple but immensely playable games. You only have to look at Dyzonium (formerly the artist known as Plasmoid) to see this.

In Astroball you have the simple task of bouncing around a scrolling world from platform to platform, collecting the required number of coins, and then getting to the exit (normally near the top of the level). The bottom of the map is deadly to the touch (unless you have the invincible bonus) and so are the spikes that litter some levels.

Also, some platforms have the unhealthy habit of flicking in and out of existance, quite often leaving you to plummet to a messy death below. So timing is of the essence in this game, especially since the bonuses flick between 4 states quite rapidly, and some levels may become impossible (impassible) if you collect the bonus in the wrong state.

So, the game is simple, but it is also deceptively hard, and some levels will require tens of tries before you can pass them, and it’s here that Balor has made his fatal mistake. Instead of giving you, say, 3 continues, he opted for infinite. This means that with a bit of patience you will complete the game first time you load it up (I did), and this means you probably won’t come back to it.

Revelation

Chris White

A port of the ground-breaking game of the same name. The original on other platforms was released by Brøderbund and designed by Jordan Mechner. Prince of Persia was released on a wide range of platforms, including the Amiga, Apple II, Apple Macintosh, DOS, NES, Game Boy, SNES and Sega Genesis.

The game was played in real time. You played the intrepid adventurer and had an hour to save the Princess from the evil Sultan before she was forced to marry him or die.

The animation was one of the first of it’s kind as Jordan had animated the movement of the characters as close to real life as was possible at that time.

Included temporarily, is the freeware demo that was released to promote the game.

Your Sinclair review, courtesy of The YS Rock ‘n’ Roll Years.

Crash review, courtesy of worldofspectrum.org

Review by Graham Goring from the Sam Coupé Scrapbook

Well, Prince Of Persia was the surprise all formats hit of 1990 or so. So, unsurprisingly it only arrived on the SAM in about 1992. But this is typical and we SAM owners have come to expect things to be late.

It revolves round the plot of an evil Arabian bloke called Jaffar kidnapping a princess, and saying that he’ll kill her in an hours time or something, this, as with the plots of many games, is completely irrelevent and the game boils down to jumping over pits, dodging visciously sharp blades and stabbing various people to death. And as platformers go, it’s pretty playable. The thing that made it popular in the first place though was the animation.

It is SUPERB, the graphics for all versions where drawn from Arabian type films to give a really human fluidity to all the movements of the main character.

He skids, runs, jumps, and is impaled on spikes in a really humanoid manner. The game must have loads on animation, in fact it has twice as many frames as the Atari ST version.

In fact, rumour is, the graphics where converted from the PC version by copying them down, pixel by pixel, onto graph paper, then reassembling them on the SAM.

Coded several, major titles for the Sam.

These included Prince of Persia (widely regarded as one of the best versions available), Lemmings and Oh No! More Lemmings.

Available from his website to download are the code and graphics used in the creation of the above titles.

Also developed for all consoles from Gameboy - to Playstation

Is still in periodic contact with the SAM Community.

I currently work for a mobile phone company called HandsOn Mobile http://www.handson.com

What is Internet explorer complaining about a DNS problem for?

I saw it too, note that both computers are on AOL and probably I.E. - wonder if Firefox might fix it but why is that related to DNS?

I can at least submit a story. Can I update it?

Apparently so. What is different about the FDOS library page?

Is it because of the length of the submitted text? (One would hope that ~2000 characters shouldn’t be taxing the server…)

When FDOS public domain was operating it sent out an “introduction leaflet” about the FDOS disks. It told you how to use the disks and what was on them, here is that information.

Public Domain

<< INTRODUCTION >>

It has been a long while since the first FDOS list of Public Domain & Shareware programs. I am sorry to say that I have been rather badly let down by some of my sources in the USA, but have (Hopefully) found more reliable ones, which I hope will enable me to get the next list out much quicker than this one.

As before some disks are not complete, but will still be made available to you at the full price, with a very favourable update policy. Pricing is very simple, being 2 pounds per disk (Unless stated otherwise) inclusive of postage and packaging. Updates to disks whose status is described as NOT COMPLETE are FREE if submitted with an order, otherwise return postage should be sent with the original disk.

If you are unsure of the Status of your own disks, please take a look at the file ‘-FDOSnnn.DIR’ (Where nnn is the disk number). This file is always the first file on the disk. The contents of the file consists of the descriptions of the programs as in the FDOS lists. but may be more up to date. Comparing these files with the contents of the latest printed lists should give you a good idea on how up to date your own collection is.

Wrote Specmaker, PCSUITE, AMRAD and Multilog a long time ago plus a few utilities like HDUTIL, HDUI and SCPRINT.

Had my first home computer back in the early 1970’s before micro’s really got going. There are some pictures and info about it on my web site including a PDF of the very first British Amateur Computer Club newsletter for anyone interested in the good old days when our only nightmares were about driving our ferrite core memory stacks and not about Windows.

It’s a great life, semi retired with a part time job as a System Administrator and translating the German Spectrum SUC magazine into English.

Wayne Weedon

When FDOS public domain was operating it sent out an “introduction leaflet” about the FDOS disks. It told you how to use the disks and what was on them, here is that information.

Public Domain

INTRODUCTION

It has been a long while since the first FDOS list of Public Domain & Shareware programs. I am sorry to say that I have been rather badly let down by some of my sources in the USA, but have (Hopefully) found more reliable ones, which I hope will enable me to get the next list out much quicker than this one.

As before some disks are not complete, but will still be made available to you at the full price, with a very favourable update policy. Pricing is very simple, being 2 pounds per disk (Unless stated otherwise) inclusive of postage and packaging. Updates to disks whose status is described as NOT COMPLETE are FREE if submitted with an order, otherwise return postage should be sent with the original disk.

If you are unsure of the Status of your own disks, please take a look at the file ‘-FDOSnnn.DIR’ (Where nnn is the disk number). This file is always the first file on the disk. The contents of the file consists of the descriptions of the programs as in the FDOS lists. but may be more up to date. Comparing these files with the contents of the latest printed lists should give you a good idea on how up to date your own collection is.

As before the CP/M LiBRary (Extension is LBR) format is used to store each software package into a single file on disk. It would have been easier to store each file on the disk as it was, but this can lead to some confusion over what program each file belongs to, which in a lot of cases is not very obvious.

Banzai

I started programming back in 1984 when I got a ZX Spectrum 48K which I had the pleasure of until 1989 when I decided to purchase a Sam. It was a sad day when I had to sell my Speccy for UKP80 to an unsuspecting punter just so that I could afford the UKP200 for the Sam.

Still, 80 smackers for a worn out Speccy - not bad going;-)

I never got into Z80 Machine Code when I had my Speccy so I kept with BASIC and this stayed with me when I got my Sam since Sam Basic allowed me to do everything I’d dreamt about doing on the Speccy e.g. sprites and sound.

When I first got my Sam I hadn’t the money for a disc drive so I didn’t do much with it except use it to play my old speccy games and do a teeny bit of BASIC programming, but as soon as I go my disc drive (along with the most unstable DOS in the known universe) I got into programming a bit more

I wrote a couple of programs (Fruit Machine & Hypno 2) and sent them on a disc to a PD Disczine called Fred run by Colin MacDonald and to my eternal surprise they were included in Fred 9 and Fred 10.

After another few things were sent to Fred I decided to give myself a name (so to speak) since it is pretty traditional. I decided to write under the banner of Banzai Productions since I had just written a couple of Banzai Demos and the name seemed to stick.

Still an ‘Advanced Network Monkey’ but now looking after different shiznit.

Occasionally vocal, if that is the right term, on the Sam Users Mailing List as well as tinkering with Sim Coupe, all where I can and where the munchkins allow.

Facebook and MSN as email address below - give us a shout.

Brian Gaff - BG Services

Chris Pile (one half of Digital Reality)

Pro-Dos could be thought of as a Disk Operating System (DOS), However, it is more than this , it is a full Operating System that Provides compatibility with CP/M 2.2.

In simple terms this means that a whole world of software that was designed to run under CP/M 2.2. will now run on the SAM Coupe. Pro-Dos uses the same Disk format as the Amstrad PCW 8256 and, as A result, can read disks from this machine direct, this also Means that there is a vast range of software already available from sources such as Public Domain libraries.

When buying software from a Public Domain library you must check That it was designed to run under CP/M 2.2 or one of the lower versions, 1.4 for example. Some software will only run under the later versions of CP/M, commonly known as CP/M 3 or CP/M Plus. However, the majority of available software is 2.2 compatible and You should have no trouble running it under Pro-Dos. Some software may need “installing” for the particular machine You intent to run it on, this normally involves terminal (or Screen) configuration and sometimes disk data information, most Software includes full configuration instructions and it is Usually a simple task.

Pro-Dos runs totally independent of the SAM ROM and DOS and, as a Result , makes no ROM or SAMDOS calls. Therefore, Pro-Dos will Run on any SAM with any version of SAM or MasterDos. Indeed, to Boot Pro-Dos from its boot disk you do not need to have Pre-loaded SAM or Master Dos at all. Pro-Dos automatically adjusts itself to your particular machine, be it a 256k single drive, or a 512k twin drive system, system ensures that it makes the best use of the RAM and drives available.

PDF Manual Scan at www.samcoupe-pro-dos.co.uk

Pro-Dos review from INDUGS Format Vol 5, No 9 by John Wase.

Solar Flare

A long long long time ago: learnt basic on the Atari 2600 (63 bytes of memory)
A long long time ago: learnt basic / basic machine code on the Sinclair Spectrum (woah 48k)
A long time ago: sharpened Z80 machine code skills on the SAM Coupe (a wopping 512k) resulting in various demos, the SAM MOD player and even one commercial title (Sophistry).

Also somehow part of Entropy, the coding group that kicked MNEMOtech butt (well it would have, had Statues of Ice been released… ;-))

Doing functional design / software architecture for financial and project accounting software developed in Progress 4GL, supporting Progress, Oracle, MS SQL Server and DB2/400 databases. Occassionaly dabbling in the sources to make sure ‘can’t be done’ can never be used as an answer…