Entropy, Rooksoft

Simon Cooke, Maria Rookyard, Martin Rookyard

Simon Cooke

For me, this magazine sums up everything which was great and unique about the Sam Coupé. No other computer could possibly have inspired a magazine like this one: a very polished, professional-looking, well-written A5 paper magazine, filled from cover to cover with the deepest, most hardcore technical articles you could ever imagine.

As well as the editors, contributors included Stefan Drissen and David Zambonini

Sadly only two issues were ever produced.

Review by Andrew Collier in Zodiac magazine:

The first thing that hits you when skimming through the issue is the quality of the presentation. Simon works as a professional journalist, and it shows: If there’s one Sam magazine you’d show off to all your scornful neighbours, this has got to be it. It beats anything else I’ve seen, certainly including the copy of Crashed! which their editor was shoving up my nose last April. I mean wow, it’s superb.

And then you notice the other outstanding feature - the outstanding features! What more would you expect from these people? An explanation of Sample routines from Stefan Drissen, the man who wrote the most famous MOD player in existance. The lowdown on the Z380 (a high speed, 16-bit processor compatible with SAM’s programs) from Martin Rookyard, the man building the accelerator. An introduction to Dalmation, the Sam’s very own bulletin board, from the person who operates it. A guide to Sam on the internet, from someone who writes for Net User. And even more articles, from well-informed people who really do know what they’re talking about.

Admittedly this wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea - these articles get down into some really technical details, hugely more involved than anything you’ll ever find anywhere else. Not for beginners; if this magazine had a column called “Machine Code for Wimps” it would not be a five-easy-lessons beginners’ guide so much as an in-depth analysis of Windows systems, mouse control and graphical user interfaces. Nobody else has ever tried this approach, but it works an absolute treat, filling as it admirably does a gaping hole in the market. It has been said on numerous occasions that the Sam is a wonderful machine to work with, ideal for the somewhat unfashionable “hobbyist” view of a computer user. Based on an idea is the perfect compliment to that sort of computer use.

KAPSA club

Štěpán Vávra

A disk magazine from the Czech Republic.

In 1994, they released a compilation “The Best Of Kapsa” specifically for the Engish market, which was distributed by Sam PD.

Shane Smith

Disk magazine, containing technical articles about digital electronics and low-level assembly programming.

SAMCo, Tim Humphries, Persona

Tim Humphries

MIDI sequencer software to use the SAMs MIDI / Lightpen port.

Is it possible to add the type e.g. game/utility to the listing on the ‘Products’ list?

Reason being is that for items that are created just as ‘Software’ (the default) it’s hard to check if they have been correctly allocted to a catagory.

Steve Nutting

Software house run by Steve Nutting.

I’m Steve Nutting the Sam Coupe Utility programmer with thanks to Simon Owens new Sim Coupe and renewed interest in the Sam will upload my vast catalogue of software.

This will take time as I don`t for example have a PC that will accept an internal floppy drive, only USB which will not except Floppy Disc loading on Simcoupe.

I started off with SCASSEMBLER in May 1990 5 months after the Sam coupe was first released most of the work was done on the Spectrum months before the Sam came onto the market.

The last program was SCWORD Pro one of the longest and complex programs I had written.

I also hope to upload all the source for all the utility software as well as the pdf manuals, so you can see for yourself just how hard I had to work as I created my own routines rather than use the Sam Rom.

This will also quickly verify and prove that I have indeed programmed and allowed my software to be shared with all those interested.

Software List:

SamCo

The Kaleidoscope was the standalone version of the Hardware Development Kit with just the components soldered on the board for the Kaleioscope function, and housed in the usual white interface box.

Retailed for £34.99

For more information see the Hardware Development Kit

SamCo

Adrian Parker

The Hardware Development Kit was a ‘hobbyists hardware kit’ for the Coupé. Half the circuitry provided the user with parallel I/O ports, and the other half was the Kaleidoscope which enabled manipulation of the RGB video signals to give a palette of theoretically 32,768 colours with 2,048 per screen with line interrupts.

The Hardware Development Kit was released by SamCo as a kit to solder up for £29.99.

It was also sold built up with just the Kaleidoscope circuitry (no I/O components) and marketed seperately as the Kaleidoscope which retailed for £34.99 and housed in the usual white interface box.

The colour changing circuitry was just 1 extra chip on top of the address decoding logic, 8 resistors and 3 transistors forming 3 simple Resistor DACs which drove the transistors to pull down on the red, green and blue video signals.

Quote from Colin Piggot on the Sam Users Mailing List

It was a complete bodge.

What the kaleidoscope did was pull down the RGB video signals generated by the Sam as normal (by darkening the output by varying amounts of red, green, blue - set with an OUT command to the kaleidoscope port) so it technically produced 256 tinted shades of the original colours - in total 32768 shades, but could they be used in a proper fashion - nope!

In Your Sinclair July 1992 Issue 79.

“The Forgotten Artifacts of SAM - The Kaleidoscope” a 7 page feature in Sam Revival issue 15 (May/June 2006).

Issue 1 of Retro Fusion, a brand new magazine which should now be available in branches of GameStation, features a 4 page article covering the history of the Sam as well as the history of Quazar, written by Colin Pigott.

http://www.retrofusion.co.uk/

Storm

Coder. Wrote various demos, and games Joystick Power and Stax. Authored a machine code programming column in Zodiac magazine.

Was a member of MNEMOtech for a while.