Peripheral
Quazar Surround
Submitted by Dan Dooré on Mon, 2006-05-01 09:52. Peripheral
1995
The first piece of Sam hardware designed by Colin Piggot in 1995 and demoed at the Gloucester Show in April.
The Quazar Surround gives the Sam Coupé multichannel digital sound, up to a quality of 16 bits, and in full surround.
Backed by a large catalogue of software, including games from various companies and Soundbyte - a regular disk produced with games, utilities and demos for the soundcard, of which there has been 76 issues to date.
The Quazar Surround is still produced, see the Quazar Site for details.
Sam Clock
Submitted by Dan Dooré on Sun, 2006-04-30 12:58. PeripheralFabled clock interface that never appeared.
Was due to be a passing-through Euroconnector device to provide a real time clock like the SamBus and Dallas Clock devices.
The Kaleidoscope
Submitted by Quazar on Tue, 2006-04-25 11:54. PeripheralThe 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
Hardware Development Kit
Submitted by Dan Dooré on Tue, 2006-04-25 11:25. Peripheral
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).
Samplifier
Submitted by Dan Dooré on Sun, 2006-04-23 18:21. Peripheral1991
A self-contained stereo amplifier that plugged into the Audio Out/Lightpen port, taking power from there to drive headphones or small speakers.
The Messenger
Submitted by mcleod_ideafix on Thu, 2006-04-20 10:50. Peripheral
1991
The Messenger was an interface for the ZX Spectrum that allowed a PLUS-D/Multiface-type snapshot to be taken and then transferred via the MIDI/Network port to the Sam (with an additional card for NMI debounce)
Information by Andrew Thompson from the Sam Coupé Scrapbook
‘The Messenger’ was Samco’s ultimate answer to spectrum compatibility. It consisted of an interface which plugged into the edge connector on the back of the spectrum and from this a cable ran to the SAM’s network port. There was also a very small card which plugged into the SAM’s EuroConnector and had a single button on it which generated an NMI. The third part was a disk that had the Messenger program itself on it.
Basically operation worked like this:
When you first bought the messenger you transfered the Spectrum’s rom down the network cable and stored it on the Messenger disk.
From then on, to get a new game onto the SAM you loaded the Messenger disk into the SAM and loaded the game that you wanted into the Spectrum from tape in the usual way.
Once the game was loaded into the Spectrum you pressed the button on the back of the Messenger interface (which is plugged into the Spectrum remember), and this ‘froze’ the machine at that point.
You then had a number of options that you could select from a menu on the SAM:
Here they are the typewritten instruction sheets that came with my Messenger (v1.1).
Information by Steven Pick from the Sam Coupé Scrapbook
The Messenger is Bruce Gordon’s first Spectrum interface for over 2 years, but it seems that the old man hasn’t lost his touch on producing a fine piece of valuable hardware for any SAM-Spectrum owner.
The Messenger is a black box which hugs onto the Spectrum’s edge connector, and has a cable linking to the Coupe’s MIDI ports. From here, you can load up Spectrum stuff on your Spectrum, then once the game is loaded, “port” the code across to the SAM. A button on the Messenger itself freezes the action of the Spectrum - a lot like a Multiface, and with this, you can do the business and save it to disk.
Because you are loading stuff on the Spectrum itself, there is a very, very high compatibility rate of 99%. The other 1%, I think, is for a crap tape header, or something. There’s no buggering around with tape volume at all, and it’s all extremely friendly to use. In short, a worthwhile and essential purchase for any Spectrum-SAM owner!
Lightpen
Submitted by Dan Dooré on Thu, 2006-04-20 10:09. PeripheralN/A
Information from Andy Gale taken from the Sam Coupé Scrapbook
Very simple really - the SPEN pin on the lightpen/audio port is usually pulled high internally with a resistor. This means that ports 248 and 504 are constantly updated with the x and y coordinates respectively of the raster beam. If SPEN is held low then those ports ‘stick’ at their current value. So, basically, your lightpen circuit should hold SPEN low and blip it high very briefly when the raster beam passes in front of the photodetector (you could use a photodiode, phototransistor, photodarlington - preferrably a fast one) - this shouldn’t take much more than one i.c.! Note that the x-resolution is not too great, and that line interrupts (often used for palette changes) will not operate. Sorry.
ATOM
Submitted by Dan Dooré on Wed, 2006-04-19 09:52. Peripheral1997
The ATOM Hard Disc interface is an internal IDE hard disc interface that fits to the Sam Drive connector.
The interface consists of a 16 to 8 bit bus converter, address decoder and a bus stabiliser to make the rather slow Z80 bus interface with the fast IDE bus.
The interface takes it power from the SAM. A single 2 inch drive which consumes not more than 500 mA can also be powered by SAM. But Other drives must be powered by a separate power supply.
See Edwin’s ATOM Page for full details.
The ATOM is merely the IDE interface, the operating system to drive it is B-DOS.
This is the second IDE interface in wide use, the fist being Nev Youngs’s SD IDE interface that ran HDOS.
A popular media to use rather than a full IDE drive is a Compact Flash (CF) card which prompted the development of the Atom-Lite.
Load Save Switch
Submitted by Dan Dooré on Wed, 2006-04-19 09:14. Peripheral1991
The Load Save switch was a solution to excessive wear and tear on the tape connector on casette players.
Becuase the Coupé had a single tape socket (unlike the ZX Spectrum’s MIC and EAR) when saving a program to tape you had to swap the lead from the EAR to the MIC connector on the tape player.
The Load/Save Switch was a box with two flyleads going to the MIC and EAR on the tape player and a switch to allow you to select either and this save wear on the tape player sockets.
