Rob now brings you the lowdown on Sam Coupé emulation for the PC. In the form of SimCoupe. I know that this is an old release but SAM emulation isn't exactly regular. Read on....

Emulator - SimCoupé v0.79
Emulates - MGT Sam Coupé 8-bit computer
Written by - Aley Keprt and A.J.Skillman

The SAM Coupé from Miles Gordon Technology was an attempt to revamp the already flagging at the time Sinclair Spectrum market. It had a Z80 running around twice as fast along with true, 128 colour graphics. It also looked very nice with easy to add floppy drives. I actually own one of these beasts, mine has 512K of RAM and a 3.5" disk drive.

Another bonus of the SAM Coupé was that it was practically entirely Spectrum compatible giving it a very large software base to start with. While the Spectrum emulator bundled with it would load, run, and grab snapshots of 70-80% of Speccy software, it was soon realised that if you simply ran a 16k grab of a spectum rom, it was up to around 99%. Of course, having a faster processor meant that games often ran faster. But that wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

SimCoupé emulates this creature with a fair deal of success. Disk images of real SAM disks (MGT +D format - almost PC format but 800K) are used. I spent ages converting my SAM disks to these images only to find out that this version of the emulator can boot them direct from the drive! Drat! It is slow doing the direct thang though so I would advise using the images.

Although the SAM didn't have a great deal of software, what came out was great. Prince of Persia was the spitting image of the ST version as was Escape from the Planet of The Robot Monsters. Unfortunately Prince of Persia refused to work in the emulator due to a wierd disk format but EFTPOTRM ran perfectly. Take me back!

There are a few niggles with the disk image selection screen. Although you can click files with the mouse, you have to use the cursor keys and Return/Enter to actually select them. This was the reason why I never used this emulator before as I though that it simply didn't work. While there is no sound built in, from the ftp site you can get an external TSR which traps the sound calls from the emulator. It isn't an ideal solution but music does work, sort of.

You need to search quite well from the newsgroups to get hold of software but believe me, you will find some. While this emulator is more of a novelty, it is nice to see even small computers being emulated. SimCoupé is also available for other systems as there is an open source version floating about.

7/10 - Lots of problems not necessarily the Authors fault. But the best there is.

NOTE : IF YOU GET THIS EMULATOR GO TO THE DOWNLOAD SECTION FOR A DISK IMAGE WRITTEN BY MYSELF FOR USE WITH THIS EMULATOR. GO NOW..! ...GO!