SAM Coupé Windows XP

[azesmbog]

***moved by PeterJ***

as only the new version supports SSX.

Question about SimCoupe.
Recent versions no longer work in WinXP?
Only on Windows 10?

[obo]

Recent versions no longer work in WinXP? Only on Windows 10?

SimCoupe requires Windows 7 or later now.

Maintaining Windows XP compatibility was taking too much time and effort, and holding back future development plans. Visual Studio is dropping support for XP-comptaible platform toolsets in the next release.Tools such as vcpkg don't support targetting XP, and the patches I made to allow it are not comptaible with the latest vcpkg source code. Besides, XP is nearly 20 years old and reached end of life 6 years ago. It seems time to let it go!

[azesmbog]

It seems time to let it go!

for the forum on retro platforms - a strange prediction
I have no complaints. I don’t even have WinXP, but W2K3 in general - but most programs work on it, and even some 64-bit ones. Sim Coupe version of 2015 works - I'm quite happy.
Thanks for clarifying.

[TMD2003]

Thread necromancy (sort of) alert!

https://github.com/simonowen/simcoupe/ - this is the latest version of SIM Coupé, from August. I'm looking at it as I've found ZEsarUX's SAM Coupé emulation to be troublesome - mainly in that half the symbols appear to have no key attached to them. (Although, of course, I'm a total novice with this machine and maybe there's something I'm not doing.) I do at least need to try SIM Coupé to compare it - only, it doesn't look like a pre-compiled binary is available. I often have this problem on GitHub, only to find that there is a pre-compiled binary, and it was hiding somewhere about as obvious as that puzzle in Treasure Island Dizzy where a sharp glass sword is used to unlock a grave.

Bear in mind one thing - my intended total transition to Linux as far back as 2007 was thwarted by my complete inability to compile anything from source that was more complicated than adding FLAC and LAME to the command line. Anything more than that would inevitably fail with an error message I didn't understand, and I had no idea what I was doing wrong, let alone how to fix it. I would expect a Windows 7 C++ compiler to be just as obstructive.

So what's the score here?

[PeterJ]

[mention]TMD2003[/mention],

The latest builds are here:

http://www.simcoupe.org/download/

And on the GitHub page;

https://github.com/simonowen/simcoupe/releases

Click on assets.

The BASIC is based on Betasoft BASIC and is very good IMHO. Get hold of the user-friendly userguide. It's very well written.

It seems a common issue that people find it hard to find releases on GitHub. MS need to improve it.

By the way, if you last tried Linux in 2007, a great deal has changed. It's far easier now. Download Ubuntu 20.04, stick it on a USB stick using Etcher, then live boot from the USB. You can then experience it without having to install anything.

https://www.balena.io/etcher/

You will find hardware detection is excellent with modern Linux. Also look at Fedora and Mint.

I could never go 100% Linux because I need certain Windows software, but now that more and more stuff is cloud based things are much easier.

Email me if you want any help.

[TMD2003]

@TMD2003,
The latest builds are here:
http://www.simcoupe.org/download/

And on the GitHub page;
https://github.com/simonowen/simcoupe/releases
Click on assets.

Done, obtained, run. AVG fingered it as "Oooh crikey, this looks naughty, we'll have to take a look at it! We'll get back to you in a few hours."

They're not fans of 30-year-old backwards-compatible computers, clearly...

The BASIC is based on Betasoft BASIC and is very good IMHO. Get hold of the user-friendly userguide. It's very well written.

I'm going to lose track of all these different machines eventually! First the QL, then... Z80 machine code, at least at an elementary level, and there's this, and NEXT Basic still to come...

By the way, if you last tried Linux in 2007, a great deal has changed. It's far easier now. Download Ubuntu 20.04, stick it on a USB stick using Etcher, then live boot from the USB. You can then experience it without having to install anything.
https://www.balena.io/etcher/

That's a good point - I last used Linux... a few days ago, actually, but it was Lubuntu 15.04 as this is the only distribution I could ever get to work with LinuxLive USB Creator, itself the only program I could ever find that would create any USB-based Linux that would work. Bear in mind, however, that I'm likely to need this to work on more than one PC. I've recently installed Lubuntu 15.04 on a 13-year-old laptop and it's running OK, but the software is outdated and, for instance, the version of Firefox it has installed throws a tantrum whenever I try to do something so complex as... watch YouTube.

Incidentally, I did try Mint a few years back, but this is when it had no Flash capability and that crippled BBC iPlayer, 4OD and any of the other catch-up services I was relying on at the time. I probably don't need Flash at all now, so I might have another look.

And while I was writing this post, AVG have given SIM Coupé the all-clear. That was quick. I'll have a look at it straight away.

[PeterJ]

Use Etcher [mention]TMD2003[/mention].

With Ubuntu and it's derivatives you need to use the LTS releases. 16.04, 18.04 or 20.04. all refering to the year and month they were released. They get supported for 4 or five years. The others just have 9 month support.

Peter

[TMD2003]

Right, continuing the voyage of discovery on MGT's weird and wonderful machine...

I have discovered three emulators for the SAM Coupé, and they are:
- SIM Coupé (1.1 alpha)
- ZEsarUX (9.1)
- Speccy (5.5)

As far as I can see, none of them have any option to record to tape - or if they do, I have no idea how it's done, and the documentation says nothing about it (and/or is as clear as mud).

Am I being a brainlet here, or is SAM tape so disregarded that no emulator author saw fit to include it?

(Next port of call after that: the Atom Lite, which I may need to know how to use...)

[azesmbog]

The tape is ignored insofar as all of Sam Coupe software exists as disk images.
I have never found archives with programs in the form of TAP
There are only a few TZX images that have been converted from their disk versions.
Therefore, no one in a sober mind and solid memory uses TAP, and as far as I remember, files in the emulator can be written to disk.
This is why emulator writers do not support TAP. Maybe I'm wrong
Was the SAA1099 sound emulation very, very bad in ZEsarUX. I don't know how now.

[TMD2003]

The sound emulation in ZEsarUX was, as far as I can tell, absent. No loading sounds, nothing from the BEEP, or the in-built ZOOM, BOOM, ZAP and POW either.

But I did find an emulator that supported writing to tape - which is useful for ZEsarUX, because that's all it'll handle. ASCD - apparently a different fork of the original SIM Coupé project - can write to .TAP or .TZX, and in the SAM Coupé's native format (with 80-byte headers) as well.

Another project is complete! The next job: research the Spectrum's ULAPlus that made it look like a SAM Coupé...