The SAM Coupe: The forgotten Z80 powerhouse

[@81632bit]

A correction: the SAM Coupe was commercially available from.1989 to 1999, not 1992 as stated in the video. My bad.

[@kilianhekhuis]

1999?? My god, I doubt they sold many in those days. 😂

[@DougHolmes]

I made a few games on the Coupé. Exodus was the main one though. From there I had a 17 year stint making games

[@ZXSpectrum128K]

Did u know the 1mb ram interface runs full 6mhz?

[@CallousCoder]

How many copies did it sell? 10? Because I have the feeling that’s the amount of Sam Coupe’s ever made 😂It’s even harder to find that the Holy Grail 😜

[@ZXSpectrum128K]

@@CallousCoder 12k according to Wikipedia which won't let me post my link

[@CallousCoder]

@@ZXSpectrum128K A bot more than 10 but still as rare as a lady of the night without herpes ;)

[@RonniMenziesStirling]

Me too! I made the "MegaDisk" games compilation, which was distributed by MGT for me, and also Review diskzine, amongst a load of other stuff. The SAM Coupe was an amazing machine for its time, but sadly did come out later than it should have.

[@paulweston1106]

I was a Spectrum person, but my younger brother had one of these and I remember that when it shipped, they included a new firmware chip that you had to install yourself because they had updated it but not in time for the production run. MGT did a lot of peripherals for the Spectrum, I had one of their disk drive/printer interfaces. The Sam Coupe was an excellent little machine but came too late.

[@Larry]

Did the SAM Coupe ever hit retail? I only ever remember seeing it mail order.

[@81632bit]

I think some small quantities did, but the vast majority of it's sales were indeed mail order.

[@StefanDrissen]

If you look at for example Your Sinclair issue 48 (December 1989) the MGT ad on page 28 includes a 'Details of my nearist stockist' check box. My dad picked mine up from Reading.

[@kev7345]

I remember doing some work experience in my local computer shop where they had one on sale there. This was shortly after seeing it advertised in CRASH! magazine - must have been around 1989 or 1990 but can't be sure, they had a music demo playing on it, my naive teenage brain convinced me that it would go on to outsell the Amiga...

[@StefanDrissen]

@ it had 6 stereo channels, so it was “obviously” better than the Amiga. 😉

[@whatamalike]

I know that there was a few independently run computer shops that sold it but that's about all. You wouldn't expect to see one in dixons or the like I don't think.

[@craiggilchrist4223]

My friend had Amigas and Spectrums back in the day and really wanted a SAM Coupe.

[@WooShell]

Interesting system.. I thought I knew that era of computing quite well, but I never had heard of this one before.

[@81632bit]

It's an obscurity for sure.

[@nightbeast8105]

iirc according to the magazines at the time. games like DOF were running the speccy version with minor adjustments and the graphics updated (like with the amstrad ports). in some cases upcoming titles stated they were re-using ST graphics. they also mentioned about how games were easy to port. but how many of the games actually got made/released though was very limited unfortunately :/ I wanted one at the time and as I would have loved to have seen an updated or hacked versions of speccy classics up to the later arcade ports. R-Type, Rampage, Renegade, Gryzor, Gauntlet, Outrun, Chase HQ etc.. for example (the faster z80 would help tons) would have looked and played great on this system.

[@StefanDrissen]

@@nightbeast8105 faster Z80, yes, but needing to manipulate FOUR times as much screen memory without hardware support made it a challenge.

[@DirkDierickx]

I knew the sam coupe was a thing back in the day, and for an 8bit very capable, but like you said, it came just too late. basically the same story as the cpc plus range. i was a cpc owner, and really, really liked what the cpc plus was able to do, but who in their right mind would buy these machines now that the amiga and st was available?

[@81632bit]

Right? If it had launched just 12 months earlier, it may have been more of a success. Hindsight is 20/20, though.

[@helmargesel3972]

Thanks for the information

[@yorkshireitguys1418]

I so much wanted one of these but I got an Atari ST instead.

[@gdclemo]

I had one of these, nice little machine. Good built-in BASIC. But it was underpowered, the Z80 wasn't fast enough to move that 24K display, especially when all RAM was shared with the graphics chip so you were effectively running at almost the same clock speed as a Spectrum. Sold it and got an Amiga 500, which was much much better.

[@ZXSpectrum128K]

1mb ram interface runs full 6mhz see snaper disks velesoft website for a speccy emulator at 2.4times speccy that's faster than a next at 7mhz!

[@michaelelsy2209]

I wanted one but too expensive for me.

[@1337Shockwav3]

Marketing it as the next "super Spectrum" was the biggest failure in the first place. And compared to the Enterprise which came in 1985 already the specs are meh at best. Never the less a mildly interesting system.

[@81632bit]

I don't know.... If it had launched when it was originally planned to do so, the Spectrum market was still huge and vibrant. The 16bit market was barely taking off, so it may well have done some reasonable numbers. But we'll never know.

[@ZXSpectrum128K]

It's basically a zx spectrum 16k in that tge entire 512kb of ram suffers from video ram contention only the 1mb ram interface runs full 6mhz more than doubling performance see snaper disks velesoft website for a speccy emulator at 2.4 times speccy

[@andrewbevan4662]

Had to give up watching because of the constant background music