Thalamus

Delta Charge known as ‘Delta’ on other platforms was the first Sam Coupé “Compatible” title to be released in which the instructions memorably said “Load the Spectrum Emulator and follow instructions”

A scrolling shoot ‘em up not overly dissimilar to Parallax and Sphera.

From MobyGames

This horizontally scrolling shoot ‘em up with 32 levels is something of a predecessor to Armalyte. It’s set in the Delta region of space, in which the Hsiffan Khanate species have a powerful presence, using their technology to steal and analyze Terran ships.

The 32 levels each feature different static hazards, as well as the actual Hsiffan forces, which come at you in programmed attack patterns. Your default ship isn’t strong enough to survive half of these, so in time-honored tradition power-ups are available via a credit system. The more credits you have, the more blue tokens (offering weapons) are offered - if you don’t have many, fatal-to-touch grey tokens are unleashed.

MGT

MGT Graham Mason

One of the selling points used to position the Coupé in the marketplace (which is often debated as both a good or bad move on the part of MGT) was as the upgrade to the ZX Spectrum and thus you could play backwardly compatible speccy games whilst enjoying the new features of the machine.

This meant that MGT had to provide some form of emulation to ship with the machine to allow this.

What users were not told at this stage was that the emulation was for the 48K only and not the 128K machines, in fact emulation of the 128K’s memory map would prove impossible at workable speeds. Simon Cooke began work on an emulator that ran at best at about 1/16th of the required speed although many demos and games were converted manually to great effect by people like Simon Cooke, Stefan Drissen and Edwin Blink.

The original emualtion was via a patched ROM image that was not 100% compatible leading to many problems with software that made extensive ROM routine calls or utilised undocumented calls or features.

Another issue discovered was that getting the software to load at all was an often problamatic due to differences in machine timing.
Many games with anti-piracy software protection loaders like Speedlok and Hyperload would not work at all.

To address this MGT engaged the services of Graham 'Turbo' Mason a well known hacker on the Speccy scene and Your Sinclair’s resident ‘game cheats’ expert to provide workarounds for the loaders.

NVG

The sam-users Mailing list is an email list set up at NVG and has been in existance since 1994.

Any subscriber can post, read by most of the people who have a current interest in the Sam. The amount of traffic varies quite a lot; at the time of writing it’s rather quiet but has been very busy in the past.

Discussions range from technical questions about details of the Sam’s architecture, to playing tips on old Sam games, announcements of any new projects, and behind-the-scenes insights on past events

Sam Mailing List On-Line Archives

There are three on-line archive of posts:

• January 1994 - Present from GMANE Archive, also offers an RSS feed for new posts.
  
• February 1994 - December 1999 from Ian Collier at http://users.comlab.ox.ac.uk/ian.collier/sam-users/
  
• 2001 to the current time is available at http://www.mail-archive.com/sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no/

Sam Mailing List Basic Instructions

To subscribe to the sam-users miling list, send the following command in email to sam-users-request@nvg.ntnu.no:

subscribe

If you ever want to remove yourself from this mailing list, send the following command in email to sam-users-request@nvg.ntnu.no:

unsubscribe

Or you can send mail to majordomo@nvg.ntnu.no with the following command in the body of your email message:

Demos

Utilities

All my work is now, as it was then Public Domain.

From the masses for the masses.

AXE

Long time coder for Fred magazine and pioneer of the PALETTE command.

Format

Gloucester based magazine publisher synominous with INDUG run by Bob Brenchley.

Format were instrumental in the design and development of the Coupé and worked closely with MGT by virtue of their close links establised via INDUG.

Format Publications

Formerly the INdependant DISCiPLE User Group then altered to be INDependant User Group following the release of the Plus-D and the expansion of Format Publications.