Phil South

The 'designer' plastic casing of the SAM features a 71 key tilted full travel (proper) keyboard for typing purposes, which sits on top of a state-of-the-art rubber membrane. This ensures that no grot can enter the machine through the keyboard; but, please, don't go pouring your coffee over it just to test it! The drives, if you fit them, are hidden under the front of the machine out of the way, so the look is very clean. By the way, the colour of the rim-moulded casing has yet to be finalised, but the possibilities for changing colour are apparently endless. Pink? Lime green? Purple? P'raps we could see a gold special edition?
    The basic SAM Coupe comes with a facility for tape loading so you can load all your Sinclair games right away. But the beauty of the SAM system is that you can bolt on more wazzy stuff as it becomes available. Underneath the raked keyboard there is space for two ultraslim 3.5' Citizen disk drives. MGT are the first people in the world to use these new drives, and they're only 0.75" thick! The drives come in two flavours, the normal IBM size and a whopping 2Mb. Because each drive has its own controller on board, you can run both drives at once. The drive mechanism is encapsulated in plastic, and can be slipped in and whipped out as many times as you like. (Honk!) This means that if you have a mate who's got a SAM with one drive you can pop yours in his machine for some twin drive computing! Coo. The disk operating system is so clever, it is actually faster than the likes of the Amiga and ST.
    The printed circuit board inside the machine is T-shaped. This caused a great many problems, as the CAD program they used fell over when they fed in the board shape. So part of the hold-up with the machine has been due to Bruce Gordon designing the board by hand. The top of the T runs along the back of the machine and has the interfaces on it. The board runs down the centre of the two drives towards the front of the computer.
    In the back of the machine are all the output and input ports. UHF (channel 39), composite video, digital and analogue RGB, standard Kempston type joystick port with 'dual' capability (with a splitter), mouse port, lightpen/lightgun port, Sinclair cassette port, MIDI IN/OUT/THRU, network port, RS232 and parallel printer port via a Smart cable. The joystick port will run normally if you just plug one joystick into it, but with a special splitter it'll run two. The reason for this is there wasn't room on the back for two with all the other ports on it. The MIDI ports have recently been redesigned by Keith Thrower to run independently of the main processor.
    The centre of the machine is a normal Z80B running at 6Mhz, backed by the custom SAM ULA chip made by Fujitsu, a 32K ROM containing the BIOS, Basic and disk operating system, 256K of RAM (upgradable to 512K on the board) and the two Philips sound and video chips.
    

The graphics on the SAM are spankingly good. (Slap! Yow!) The chip responsible for most of this is the Philips TEA 2000 chip, giving you four basic modes of operation. Mode One is a 32 x 24 character screen, and can be thought of as the Spectrum mode. Each character square is capable of two colours from the Spectrum palette of 16 colours, but selectable from a bigger palette of 64. Mode Two is similar to Mode One, but with a 32 character x 192 pixel screen. Again each 'character' is capable of two colours, but as they're much, much closer together it looks like more. Again, 16 colours from a palette of 64. Mode Three is the 80 column text mode, with a 512 x 192 pixel screen. Each pixel can be a different colour, but only four colours from the 64 colour palette. Mode Four is a 256 x 192 pixel graphics mode, where each pixel can show any of the 16 colours from the 64 colour palette. This is the top end graphics mode.
    To program the advanced graphics and sound you can use the built-in Basic, written by Andrew Wright (the author of Beta Basic), which features all the bells and whistles you expect from a modern Basic, like PROCedures, DO-UNTIL, WHILE and WEND. You can do calls to Z80 Machine Code and there's a whole load of new commands to take advantage of the new graphics. Bo Jangeborg, author of Artist II, is writing a special set of graphics utilities for the creation of SAM graphics, plus a new art program specially for the new machine.
    

Think of a sound. Now! Go on, think hard. Got one? Good. Well, now you can create that very sound with the SAM's amazing sound chip. The chiplet in question is the Philips SAA1099, and it features stereo sound generated from six oscillators and two noise generators. Yes, that's six, instead of the usual three. And using the amazing music and sound software designed by music 'wizard' and man of a thousand notes (all of them fivers) Dave 'Interesting' Whittaker you and your SAM can make bootiful music together. And it's true, 'cos the sound chippy is over eight octaves and has control over waveform, amplitude and envelope. The waveforms give you the basic shape of the sound, and the amplitude and envelope shape the sound thereafter giving it a slow attack for smooth, sleepy sounds or a sharp attack for percussive, snappy sounds.
    

Yes, we know you'd like to have one. But you're going to have to wait. "Before Christmas" is all that MGT would say, and it's not messing about when it says that. The firm is relying on so many outside contractors that "committing to a firm date at this point would be a bit silly". Prices are yet to be confirmed, but the £150 mark for the basic cassette-based unit will be stuck to as far as possible. Software is no problem, as the unit on its own will run any Speccy software, but specific SAM stuff is being written right now, and PDS has written the SAM version of the PDS development system to help with this. A lot of effort is going into making the conversion of games to SAM graphics as easy as possible. Utilities exist to grab Spectrum graphics and convert them, but also an ST to SAM graphics utility is in preparation. Could the SAM be the ST of the 90s? In any case, interest in the machine is running high, and "several of the top software houses" are looking at doing software for it.