Maintainer of the Sam Coupé Pro-Dos [CP/M 2.2] Resource Pages dedicated to Pro-DOS as well as holding many high-quality scans of Sam manuals.

PD

Gavin Smith

The start of the SAM Software Archive idea proposed in November 2004 by Gavin Smith that unfortunatly did not get fully off the ground.

Lots of work was done by various members of the Sam Community including the scanning of manuals by Steve Parry-Thomas and the NVG Dskification by Dan Dooré, Frode Tennebø and Edwin Blink.

This has not gone to waste thanks to World of Sam

Here is the announcement:

I’ve been thinking a lot about this software archive idea we’ve been talking about, so thought I’d write up a little summary of what my thoughts are.

Proposal:
A World Of Spectrum style semi-official archive for SAM software, housed on the web and built by the members of sam-users.

Reasons:
(1) So that warez style GoodSAMC collections are not needed
(2) To prevent software getting lost as floppies continue to deteriorate over time
(3) To allow people who didn’t experience the SAM at its (erm) “peak” to enjoy it now
(4) To allow us to get more use out of our SAMs by providing more software to run

In practice:
A three month period has been decided upon as a reasonable length of time to track down as many authors/copyright holders as possible - between us all, we should be able to cover the majority of the SAM back catalogue. For those first three months we would get the site established and start filling it with PD plus all software that permission has already been granted to distribute.

The NVG Dskification (being “The Making of DSK images”) was a project initiated by Dan Dooré with the assistance of Frode Tennebø and Edwin Blink to tidy up the NVG Sam Coupé archive between December 2003 - January 2004.

Originally done as a pre-cursor to the samcoupe.org project all the disk images and programs uploaded to NVG were converted from TD0/SAD/SDF/PAK/BAS/LIB to standard DSK image files compressed using ZIP.

One of the aims of the conversion was to make everything more accessible for emulation as well as more convenient for dropping onto floppy disc.

With this in mind the DSK files all contain a DOS (where appropriate) and wherever possible an AUTO file.

Public Domain

Rumsoft

A collection of compression and archive utilities including LIB, PAK and most importantly the code Impoder.

Rumsoft

Utility coder from the Czech Repuplic.

Notable productions:

Rumsoft Zippers includeing the ‘imploder’ code compression utility widely used by the community.

Sam C - A Z80 Small C language compiler with complete IDE published by Fred Publishing, contained the Zeus Assembler for compilation.

EdiPro A full WYSIWYG text editor with proportional fonts and styles.

Fred Publishing

Rumsoft

A fully featured ‘Small C’ rather than ANSI C impementation for the Coupé with a WIMP based IDE and the Zeus Assembler for compilation.

Additional Libraries called ‘Sam VISION’ were released commercially to add the WIMP interface to Sam C programs.

SAM C PDF manual scan at http://www.samcoupe-pro-dos.co.uk

SAM Vision PDF manual scan at http://www.samcoupe-pro-dos.co.uk

MGT

Dr Andy Wright

SAM Basic was one of the prime selling points of the machine in it’s early days, written by Dr Andy Wright and with it’s roots in the highly successful BetaBASIC for the ZX Spectrum it offered a powerful interpreter with many advanced features such as sound and sprite handling.

Information from Frode Tennebø taken from the Sam Coupé Scrapbook

Programs may be up to 217K long on a standard 256K Coupe. (470K on a 512K). Line numbers up to 61439 are allowed, with each line containing up to 127 statements. Strings and arrays can have names up to 10 character long. The names of user-defined functions and numerical variables can have up to 32 characters. Strings can be up to 64K long; arrays can fill all available memory. SAM Basic is fully structured and includes procedures with local variables and parameter passing by value and reference. Long and short IF and ELSE are implemented, as are DO, LOOP, REPEAT, UNTIL, a CASE equivalent, ON, ON ERROR and GOTO label.

Graphics are well catered for, with vary fast DRAW, CIRCLE, PLOT and pattern FILL. RECORD and BLITZ allow complex graphics sequences to be stored and replayed at high speed. Any part of the screen can be moved in any direction with ROLL and SCROLL, and sections can be GRABed and PUT back elsewhere. PALETTE allows instant changes to the screen colours; all 128 colours can be displayed at once. The displayed screen can be instantly switch for another. The character set includes block graphics and a wide range of foreign characters. Character size can be altered to give 32, 64 or 85 columns. Double-hight characters can also be used. Text and graphics screen copies can be made to a suitable printer in a variety of sizes.

There is no comprehensive set of rules for participating in worldofsam.org. However I’d like people to stay sensible and keep a couple of things in mind:

Page body descriptions should aim to maintain a Neutral Point Of View, or be generally positive in tone. In the comments, is where you can be less inhibited about saying what you really feel.

There is no rule against writing your own biography!

Cookie

One of the most prolific coders for the Sam.

As well as a lot of output for Fred and SCPDU Simon was involved in many commercial productions most infamously Parallax.

Senior Engineer and Ubergeneralist in Microsoft’s Xbox Advanced Technology Group, where he works on games technology, game dev conferences, new consoles, Windows game technology and more.
Blog: http://www.accidentalscientist.com/
Twitter: @fleetingshadow https://twitter.com/fleetingshadow
Facebook: @simoncooke https://www.facebook.com/simoncooke

One of the original Sam games programmers, and responsible for most of Enigma Variations’s Sam output.

Later teamed up with Noesis to write Boing!.