Spectrum Computing

Off the back of some of my youthful pie-in-the-sky posts, I got talking with willbrooker about the general concept of videogames as movie adaptations. He challenged me to create a pitch for a new game based upon The Empire Strikes Back, as it might/could have been made for the Spectrum, circa 1988. ...

Great fun, but I think the use of a mouse is almost imperative - a joystick or the keyboard just wouldn't offer the speed and precision that makes this game work fluidly. There were several mouse options made for the Spectrum, but I don't think any of them really took off... Games like The Binding o...

Subtitle: The Perils of Collaboration One thing my memory is a bit hazy on is precisely how I came into contact with some other SAM users back in the day. The internet was not as ubiquitous, and I tended to be posting physical media and making/receiving phone calls. Pretty sure I didn't include my a...

I learned only recently that there's a Spectrum conversion of Dune II, Westwood Studios' precursor to the Command & Conquer series... and it looks surprisingly good. Haven't played it yet, but it seems to be a fairly comprehensive conversion, even down to having some of the digitised speech. Nat...

Dug out a few more Spectrum upgrade pics from my archive... I should probably sort the disks a bit more thoroughly! https://i.postimg.cc/BLddq9ZK/simc0512.png Aliens! Honestly, I'd be curious to see a SAM conversion of either Electric Dreams' adaptation or the 'US Edition', originally by Activision ...

Can't say with any certainty, but it could be that Hit/Miss was nothing more than an indication of whether or not the reviewer enjoyed playing the game, regardless of how objectively good/bad it was... So, it might look terrible, the sound/music might be rubbish, and the gameplay sluggish, but it's ...

Thanks, Spud! While working on the Street Fighter stuff, I looked into how Tiertex bodged their conversion so badly... and it looks very much as though every frame of animation had to fit on a single (Atari ST) screen... which explains why, the larger the character, the fewer frames it got. Same was...

Let's talk arcade games. The SAM did actually get a couple of official arcade conversions, back in the day, courtesy of DoMark/Tengen: Klax, a block puzzle game, and Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters. Both were decent enough... but contained rather too many MODE 1 elements, which let the ...

OK, so the Speccy Ghostbusters idea seemed quite popular, so... Here's the barely upgraded SAM Coupé version I churned out quite early on... Like AVP, it's basically the black pixel linework of the Spectrum graphics, filled with largely flat colour via MODE 4. What's really crazy, looking back at th...

Something a bit more up-to-date, and with a sad story attached. There's a common thread in SAM Coupé development of unfinished projects. It feels sometimes as though the SAM came along not just at the wrong time to prove successful as an 8-bit home microcomputer, but also at the wrong time to take t...

Some of you may be aware that there was an 'official' SAM conversion of Elite... but that it was basically just the Spectrum version bodged to load and save via the floppy drive, with absolutely no improvements in terms of framerate, despite the faster processor, no 'quality of life' updates beyond ...

Back in the day, I was attached to a number of projects which would now be referred to as "Games That Weren't" for the SAM. One of these was Asteroids clone... or perhaps 'Stardust' is a more appropriate basis, which I got involved in briefly after becoming a sort of honorary member of the...

Well, it's a bit lame for a computer that claimed to be "Super Spectrum" :) Bit late to the game on this topic, but the nobody involved with making the SAM claimed it was a "Super Spectrum". If anything, MGT tried very hard to break away from that description. It was lazy shorth...

Oops bad experience then for a new owner, I think you would have to copy from a friends ZX as most people I would imagine had to sell their current computer to fund the new one (and hope they hadn't upgraded to some sort of 128k). Agreed - I can imagine lots of new users being rather pissed off abo...

Turned out that a good number of 128 games could be used, with some adjustment to the paging structure, and using a special music player to handle the different soundchip. Was just having a quick game of Chase HQ 128 earlier as a matter of fact :) I get the impression that any and all 128K games co...

Loading was a matter of just loading a 48k snapshot from disk when the code was loaded. Yup - and snapshots made on the Spectrum for use via MGT's floppy drive interfaces for that machine, could also be loaded on the SAM, but still needed the ROM code. As far as I can tell, the only exception to th...

From the original brochure: "most commercial 48K (but not 128K) software is going to work in graphics mode 1. But which titles? MGT continually tests as much software as possible and will list those titles which are known to be fully compatible." While that may have been the hope in the b...

That's not a misconception,. If you had the machine when it was first released then that was exactly how you loaded Spectrum cassettes. The emulator software came later when it became clear just how bad the compatibility actually was. Can't have been that much later, as the MGT emulator was on the ...

This has been bubbling away in the back of my mind since I read "Why The SAM Coupé Could Not Save The ZX Spectrum" at the back of the Crash 2023 annual. While it's certainly nice to have eight full-colour pages devoted to my favourite home microcomputer, I found myself cringing at the inac...

As if the Aliens Vs. Predator license wasn't unlikely enough, after picking up the Batman: Arkham Asylum graphic novel by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean (aka A Serious House on Serious Earth), I started thinking about how to turn it into a game on the SAM... more than 15 years before the amazing Ark...

One of my more recent obsessions is the Visual Novel genre... although I should probably have realised how much I'd enjoy them when I discovered Snatcher and Policenauts, two classic examples of the genre from Hideo Kojima/Konami, back in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Both appeared on PC-88 originally...

OK, so I've mentioned in my showcase threads that one of my favourite hobbies as a kid was designing games... But I think it was more with the SAM than the Spectrum that this really took off. Naturally, my first few projects were essentially just upgrades of things I'd started on the Spectrum. I'd l...

If anyone's stuck for something to do this coming weekend, I'm going to be exhibiting my SAM Coupé, along with a couple of retro consoles, at RetCon. Based in Greenford, west London, RetCon is an annual festival of retro gaming put on by the Greenford Computer Club since 2018. There are guests deliv...

By and large, I'm a lot more active on the SAM Coupé than on the Spectrum these days, but I've felt a bit odd about posting anything in particular in the 'Other Retro' forum. I've added to the 'Yes' pile but can't say that having a SAM-specific forum will cause a sudden outpouring of posts from me. ...

Sam Revival is published very infrequently. So I would imagine the next issue may be at least six months away, anyway. So you're potentially looking at twelve months before the full game will be downloadable for free. You can pre-order issue 27 of Sam Revival here: https://www.samcoupe.com/ (and is...