Thanks for watching! Anyone lucky enough to own of have owned a SAM Coupé? I'd be interested in your thoughts. It could have been the original Spectrum: Next for all intents and purposes if it had succeeded. The SAM has a small but dedicated homebrew scene keeping it alive and has a fully functional and excellent emulator so I decided to explore it a little. Any must play games?
I still have a SAM Coupe under my bed (no box but decent condition). Not sure what to do with it tbh. Got it for my 10th birthday in 1990. Mainly used it to explore the Spectrum library and play around with BASIC - there was very little native software for it, and many of those were only marginally upgraded Spectrum ports or essentially homebrew stuff. It’s still a fun hobby computer if you like playing around with BASIC programming and stuff - it has a reasonable sound chip and some fun graphics modes. It was a nicely designed bit of hardware though, and the build quality was actually very solid. Also has one of the best BASIC programming guides you’ll see bundled with it. Very well written and charmingly illustrated.
Ian Tellam Nice! I’m sure if you were willing to part with it you’d get a good price for it. Not that many in circulation these days. Or better yet, put it to use 😀
Did you miss Lemmings and Prince of Persia when doing this? They are amazing and now freely downloadable from worldofsam.org. Also I love Defender (perfect conversion). As for me, I'm one of the homebrew coders supporting it 30 years in, quite proud of my version of Tetris (the Cooking Circle version). Have fun!
@@balorprice I was aware of them but I wanted to try some titles more unique to the system than those blockbusters. I will check out your work, glad to hear you've been supporting it for 30 years!
I own one and still make games for it occasionally! It's a lot of fun to use in its own right but the fact it can play speccy games as well makes it perfect! :)
I had two of these at one point, and still have one fully working one (original box), plus most of the peripherals (sambus, printer interface, voicebox, kaleidoscope etc.). Having two was great, managed to get them networked using the MIDI ports and wrote a (very) simple network game. I had a lot of fun with them, but a severe lack of good quality games was a major issue compared to the Spectrum.
I remember seeing the Sam Coupe in a ZX Spectrum magazine back in the 80s and thinking it looked amazing with colourful graphics and more memory. This video is the first I have heard or seen of it since! I was looking at speccy videos on youtube and suddenly remembered the new machine and the name of it just popped into my head along with some flashbacks of reading about it as a kid. Thanks for the video, I really enjoyed it and for bringing back those memories 🤗
Just backed the Spectrum Next KS2, I used to have a Sam Coupe when it first came out (yes, sad i don't still have it!). The Spectrum Next defniitely makes me think of the Sam Coupe and what the Coupe should have been. For instance, look at WarHawk and I see what Sphera should have been, I do feel like the Next is finally bringing us what the Coupe should have been, but back in the day it sadly just came at the wrong time. I guess nostalgia has brought a large community back together and finally giving us what the Coupe could only have hoped to achieve. Love the Coupe though, it was great at the time.
I remember saving for one, and it would have been the start of my career if I had managed to save enough in time. I was already fluent in BASIC and had written a few of my own games on the spectrum and BBC Micro in school. So many people having privileged upbringings could just go out and buy one. Gosh, it meant so much to me as a way out of the life I had at the time.
I was drooling over the SAM Coupe back in the late 80's, but then my brother came hone with an Amiga and I forgot all about it.... until I fired up the emulator (search for "SimCoupe" if you want to find it) a few months back, great fun :-)
It was interesting computer, but 1989 it was kinda too late for a new 8-bit machine. Amiga was already 4 years on the market and people were drooling over 16-bit graphics and GUI based OSes. Amiga 500 was the last nail to the coffin for 8-bit home computer era even when community and support was still thriving for Speccy and C64. It would be better to come up with a 16-bit system that had 8-bit mode compatible with one of already existing machines. That could be amazing.
Those were the days man!!!! I always loved the C-64 and Amiga, and didn't know this computer existed, there were lot of competitions, see what game looks better, which game will be released or not etc, lot of expectations and emotions, nowadays kids will never know that feeling, they will never know how did it feel to hear a sampled voice coming out from your favourite character or a difference of a "beeeep", or an explosion done in C-64 or Amiga, they now get almost what they want but they lost those invaluable feelings that only 80's and 90's computer gifted us in those times.
If it had 128K support, a lot more games on release with more planned, it would've fared better. But yes, it was too late. I had already upgraded to an Amiga by the time it came out.
@@jezz2k the standard Sam had 256k, which wasn't unusual for a 'bigger' 8 bit machine (my philips nms8250 has the same amount of memory, and is from 1986). It was too late, I guess they gambled that the lower price would be a selling point, but not long after the Sam was introduced the Amiga became a bit cheaper. People thought back in the day that '16 bit' was equal too faster processor, better graphics and better sound, which wasn't always the case. The Sam had a better soundchip than the ST (and I own an Atari), and had very decent graphics. And to be more specific, it is not like an 8088 is a monster compared to the Z80b running at 6 mhz.
I have 3 Sams in my collection. Both my brother and I had Sams after the Spectrum and I still have both of them, I Also bought a third a few years back as the orignal two weren't working properly. But since then I have had them fixed and all 3 are now functioning fine. I'm surprised you didn't cover some of the Sams bigger games namely Lemmings and Prince of Persia. These games really highlight what the system was capable of. I used to do some coding on it back in the day and I wrote a crummy mouse driven version of Duck Hunt which was published on the famous (in the Sam World) FRED disk magazine. My Sam now takes sits as the centerpiece of my retro collection :)
They are insanely expensive now, lucky got mine a couple of years ago for a good price. I longed for one as a Spectrum user in the 80s seeing it advertised. I still have magazine tapes with SAM demos that I can now use. For me I enjoy Lemmings (with mouse!) and Manic Miner.
I came *very very close* to buying one because I liked the specs and the price, along with the Spectrum compatibility. Ultimately I passed because the Amiga was a better choice in the long run. That was a good decision as the SAM doesn't even have hardware sprites or hardware scrolling abilities, something that was standard on the C64 in 1983! If MGT had released the machine a few years earlier, it might have stood more of a chance.
Probably the right choice at the time for those reasons although financially it would have been nice to pick one up back in the day considering how much they are worth now. 😁
@@RetroRecollections Don't take that eBay price as what they go for, that one has been on eBay for years. The general price for a SAM Coupe, depending on specifications, is around £300-450.
I had a SAM but I don't remember using it for much other than playing our old speccy games. I had a demo disk with Batz n' Balls, a good port of Manic Miner and a weird game called Vegetable Vacation where you were a flying tomato. We moved on to the Atari ST.
Your experience seems to be a typical one. The lack of software support and the success of 16bit systems really left a a potentially good system behind. It just came too late.
We had it at home. It was such a pity, it never get some proper exclusive games. Graphics looked great. Remember watching Robocop demo over and over again. But still I played a lot of ZX Spectrum 128k games on it. Or was it 48k? Not sure. It had sounds and nice music. Also Escape from the planet of the monster robots was great.
Highway code updated recently time for an update :) Always wanted a Sam back in the day but just too expensive and was lured to the Master System after the Speccy.
The sam coupe graphics should have been put in the Spectrum +2 or at least the +3. It's a shame the spectrum was abandoned, it was a great machine that had a future, they just left it too late. Had the coupe came out a few years before, it would have been a success.
Das Problem bei vielen heimcomputern ab Mitte der 80er Jahre war dass man leider an den alten 8-bit-prozessoren aus den 70er Jahren festhielt. Dabei waren sie zu diesem Zeitpunkt schon längst veraltet und man hätte auf die leider wenig erfolgreichen Nachfolger umsteigen sollen aber dies geschah nicht oder nur bei wenigen Modellen. Z280, 65816...
To release a brand new 8 bit system in 1989 was as brave as it was daft. Memorable games? Prince of Persia and Lemmings are very nice conversions, but they're better played on the Amiga or PC. Also, there is a nice 2013 or so homebrew version of Pang. Again, other systems have great version of this game as well. I think that's the problem, the SAM exclusive games aren't that special, and some of the conversions are very well done, but also better on other systems.
The SAM Coupe was intended to be released earlier, but it wasn't until December 1989 that the first machines shipped. Sadly, the press generally focused on the ZX Spectrum emulation side of things, rather than the true native specifications.
6 MHz though; that's not too bad is it? I suppose that a limitation of an 8-bit CPU though, is this kind of thing: "The Z80B CPU accesses selected parts of the large memory space in its 64 KB address space by slicing it into 16 KB banks and using I/O registers to select the memory pages mapped into each 16 KB bank." (Wikipedia)
@@amigabang6157 The Z80 CPU is still manufactured by Zilog at speeds up to 20MHz. I've made a prototype accelerator to get the SAM Coupe up to that speed, coupled with faster memory. The memory paging to select what chunks appear in the 16-bit address range of the processor isn't much of a hassle once you are used to it.
@@amigabang6157 actually most Sam software and including zx spectrum emulation is running close to 3mhz so is only 20% faster than original spectrum u need external 1mb ram interface for full 6mhz got a couple of videos one freescape of velesoft snapper disks that let u do this..wud love 2 c starglider2 at 6mhz
I had a spectrum 128 toast rack when this was being touted by all the mags of the day. I desperately wanted one but it just kept being delayed and I ended up giving up hope and buying an Amiga 500 instead.
I was considering buying one new but if i remember right it came out as the 16 bit machines starting to take over from 8 bit it was a great machine had it been out a few years earlier i reckon it would have done far better .i did buy a faulty one from ebay but sold it on again .
@@Trusteft This is not my video or image. Are you referring to the 6MHz with screen off? That's not really an option to use it without a monitor/tv, but to temporarily shut down the graphics generation so the CPU can run at full speed as the memory is not also being accessed to draw the graphics output. It's only ever used for speeding up calculations where you don't need a picture or for some sample audio playback as easier to time the playback frequency when at an exact clock speed.
That image is also not that correct. The clock speed of the Z80 is always 6MHz, but it's slowed down by memory contention by the graphics display which adds /WAIT delays, with even more delays when in graphics MODE 1 to assist ZX Spectrum emulation by slowing the machine down further to be closer to that of a ZX Spectrum. The "effective" speed is about 4.8MHz overall, and approximately 3.8MHz in MODE 1 (ZX Spectrum graphics mode) .
@@QuazarSamCoupe I thought you were RR, sorry I didn't see your name properly. How can you say it's not an option to have the screen off and in the same sentence give me an example of using it with monitor off? Funny. Thanks for the rest of the info.
Interesting machine which was too late and pointless at the time. Might have worked in 1985! With the advent of the Spectrum Next this seem even more pointless than it did before!
Yeah, everyone wanted 16 bit and windows PC's, so this failed. Odd that now people are paying 3 times as much for the Spectrum Next. And new "Next" games would have been made fun of when games systems were 16 and then 64 bit. But then in defense, the "next" is not a mass market and is still a market failure in that regard, like the Sam Coupe.
I dont think this is ultra rare. It is just a big fail. Releasing 8bit computer when there were cheap 16bits all around (amiga/atari) it was his destiny to fail. I must add - ugly design, steep price, almost no games/software at the time of release (not counting original zx spectrum games) killed support of 128k games - now it is just a forgotten branch of speccy. Dont bother to buy it, not worth it.
