Peripheral

SamCo

The Official Sam Mouse interface used and Atari ST type Mouse as opposed to the then more common serial mouse.

The mouse driver code once loaded would populate the variables XMOUSE, YMOUSE and BUTTON that could be read by the user.

The disc contains a Basic demonstration, a (poorly) modified version of Flash! and a ‘Slidy’ game by Richard Robinson that was modified by Colin MacDonald to use the Sam Mouse.

Many games such as Lemmings and Batz 'n Balls were best played with the mouse and for Basic users Steve Taylor’s Mouse Driver 2.0 offered an interrupt-driven pointed system.

Persona

The Three-Up is a 3 port EuroConnector expansion similar to the Two-Up and SamBus but without the real time clock.

Features two vertical and one horizontal connector, an auxillery PSU jack and a headphone/speaker jack.

SamCo

SamTek

Very simple - One Megabyte of memory on an expansion card.

The memory could not be accessed from Basic but could be paged in at machine code level and was most useful to use as a RAM Disc with MasterDOS.

Most users with the One Meg also had a SamBus or a Two-up/Three-up interface expansion unit.

On the circuit board there is a jumper connection (bottom left above the capacitor) to allow a one from four position selection (which is factory set to position four). This enables up to four 1 Mb External Interfaces to be connected together giving a possible total memory capability of 4.5 Megabytes of RAM (4,718,592 bytes)

A few products utilised the extra memory such as E-Copier by Chris White and Sam Paint.

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

Schematics

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).

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

SD Software

Nev Young

SPI or Sam Parallel Interface was unlike the Comms Interface a bi-directional parallel interface designed by Nev Young and sold through Format Publications.

However only one direction at a time could be accomodated so for full-duplex operation two devices with a SamBus would need to be used.

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

MGT

The Comms Interface was a parallel and RS-232 serial interface box and one of the first peripherals for the Coupé.

The RS-232 interface based on the SCC2691 UART (Universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter) could be driven up to 38,400bps using the Comms Driver sofware supplied although there are issues with the serial hardware that needed to be fixed via a hardware modification, see Hardware Bugs.

The parallel interface utilised a standard 26-way ‘BBC’ to Centronics cable to drive printers although the inferface unlike the SPI was uni-directional.

Information from Andy Gale taken from the Sam Coupé Scrapbook

The SAM allows 8 i/o ports for the comms interface - PRINTL on the expansion port goes low when any of these are being addressed. Ports 232 & 233 are for parallel printer port#1, 234 & 235 for parallel printer port#2, and 236-239 are for the serial interface, which we won’t cover here.

How do you send a byte to the printer? First read port 233 - if bit 0 is set to ‘1’ then the printer is busy and is not ready to accept any data - so keep on testing bit 0 until it becomes logic ‘0’. Next output your byte to port 232 then output 01 to port 233, wait for 1 microsecond and then output 00. Doing this pulls the printer’s /STROBE line low temporarily, telling it that there is a byte for it to print. (/STROBE is fed with an inverted version of bit 0.) For printer port#2, just use ports 234 & 235 in place of 232 & 233 respectively. PRINTL on the expansion port is low whenever an i/o port in the range 232 to 239 is being addressed.

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

ByteDelight

Edwin Blink

Produced from the schematics of the EDDAC the SAMdac is a Stereo 8-bit DAC that plugs into the parallel port on the SAM élite, Comms Interface, External Drive Interface or the SPI.

By connecting to the ‘Audio out/Lightpen’ port the SAMdac allows standard audio from the SAA1099 or beeper to pass through without having to swap speaker connections.

The main application to utilise the SAMdac is the SAM MOD Player

Blue Alpha

Adrian Parker

The Blue Alpha Sound sampler was a mono 8-bit DAC to provide sampling and playback of sound samples.

A straight forward product that was hindered by the fact that in order to play back samples other people also needed the unit.

Was well used by Stefan Drissen’s SAM MOD player

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

Possibly the worst piece of SAM Hardware ever. Playback was only possible with the sampler plugged in, and samples were of very poor quality. This particular sampler also caused a large amount of distortion to the television display.

The software that was supplied with the sampler was very crude, and the ‘manual’ was badly photocopied and held together by a single staple in the corner.

- Stewart Skardon