Gavin Smith

SAM Community ran from March 1999 to October 2000

PDF Issues available at www.samcoupe-pro-dos.co.uk

Printed Issues (remaining stock) available from Quazar.

SamCo

In the later days of SamCo a 256kB model with no disc drives known as the GameStar was released, presumably to attract the tape-based ZX Spectrum owners and then get them to upgrade with the Memory Expansion and Sam Drive.

West Coast Computers

The Sam élite was a re-packaged Sam Coupé with the addition of:

1. 512kB Memory Expansion as standard
   
2. A Floppy drive (with Drive 1 in the right hand bay instead of the left)
   
3. A parallel printer interface
   
4. Modified ROM version 3.0 (called 3.5)
   
5. Black feet instead of blue
   
6. Un-sprayed External PSU in Amstrad grey.

The Sam Drive slim-line floppy drives from Citizen had been withdrawn them from the European market in 1990 and were replaced with standard 3.5 inch drives which required some modification to the front drive plates for the faces to stick out.

MGT

One of the original peripherals produced by MGT it allowed users with a ZX Spectrum and PLUS-D/DISCiPLE interfaces (previous MGT products) to re-use their Shugart 400 type 5.25” or 3.5” disc drives with the Coupé without having to purchase the internal units.

It also featured the same parallel interface as the Comms Interface allowing the users’ printers to be accomodated.

It came with instructions and an “SDI loader” on cassette.

Was re-launced and sold by West Coast Computers as the XDI (eXternal Drive Interface).

MGT

The Coupé could support two 3.5” Ultraslim Citizen Double Density drives each with their own WD-1772-02 disc controller allowing both drives to operate independantly.

Unformatted capacity 1Mb, formatted as double sided, 80 track per side, 10 sectors per track, to the IBM 3740 standard gives 800kB with 780kB usable after directory space subtracted.

Having the drive controller within the drive housing meant that the floppy drive connectors could be used for other devices, most notablty the ATOM IDE interface.

Drive Connectors:

Connections to the two drives are made via two 32-pin Euroconnectors, with rows A and B connected. Drive 1 is on the left of the machine and drive 2 on the right. A list of signals available at these sockets are shown below.

Presumably, three editions of the user’s guide were published. The 3rd edition can be found as a PDF Manual Scan at www.samcoupe-pro-dos.co.uk

BetaSoft

Dr Andy Wright

In the same wasy that MasterDOS was the update to SamDOS then MasterBasic was the same to Sam Basic.

This program provides major enhancements to the SAM Coupe’s editing, data-handling, sound, graphics and printing capabilities.

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

Review by Tim Paveley from the Sam Coupé Scrapbook

I’ve already got a BASIC on my Sam, why do I need a new one?

A-ha! It’s not a new BASIC at all, but rather an Extension to the one you’ve already got, as well as doing up your DOS slightly, and generally improving things.
Eh?

Okay, I’ll go through it’s features one at a time for you, and you can see what you like the sound of.

Editting & Debugging

Okay, for a start we have options to move the cursor left and right by a whole Word (deliminated by spaces). There is also a small buffer, allowing you to recall the last few lines you have typed in. There is the option to join and split program lines.

There are several commands that allow you to search through the program, and to alter references (i.e. variable names). You can search through the program, calling lines in the edit buffer that contain the reference, or print the line numbers of each line containing the reference.

You can now trace through your program, either a line at a time, or a line every so often. When tracing through a program, the line and statement number are shown at the bottom of the screen.

There are also a couple of general speed improvements

Data Handling

You can now recall a string to be re-edited. ie if you have INPUTed a long string, and then noticed an error, you can recall the string and change it.

There is a very nice SORTing command, that allows you to do all sorts of sorting, using different parts of the string to sort by.

SamCo

The SamBus aka ‘The Card Cage’ was a multi-port expansion device to allow 4 expansion devices to attach to the Coupé.

The SamBus also featured a battery-backed real-time clock (OKI M6242B) which MasterDOS and B-DOS could utilise for timestamping files.

All devices connected will use up some of the available power, and some will be more power-hungry than others. All future peripherals produced will carry a “Loading Factor” number which will be located near the device’s serial number and prefixed by the letters “LF”. This will allow you to estimate how much power a device is likely to consume. If the “Loading Factor” total is above 200 units for all the devices connected, an external 5v power supply will need to be plugged in to the SAMBUS via the external power connector.

The following peripherals were designed before the SAMBUS was in production, and you should assume the following “Loading Factor” units for them.

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

Blue Alpha

Adrian Parker

The VoiceBox is an allophone based speech synthesizer based on the SP0256 speech processor.

It comes complete with its own driver software which enables you to type in English text, which is converted to speech.

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

From http://www.sadsnail.co.uk/

“Our first major program was the game “EGGBuM” for the Sam. This was freely distributable, and was included on the popular Sam disk magazine “Fred”. A PC version, with additional features, is currently being written.”

Sad Snail Productions

Tim Paveley

The Sam Coupé Scrapbook first came into existance sometime around the start of November 1994, making it the first web site dedicated to the Sam.

Tim has kindly agreed for the contents of the current site to be replicated within World of Sam