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Pac-Man (1980)

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The SAM Coupé (pronounced /sæm ku:peɪ/ from its original British English branding) is an 8-bit British home computer that was first released in late 1989. It is commonly considered a clone of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer, since it features a compatible screen mode and emulated compatibility, and it was marketed as a logical upgrade from the Spectrum. It was originally manufactured by Miles Gordon Technology (MGT), based in Swansea in the United Kingdom.

MGT, Miles Gordon Technology, plc., which originally produced add-ons for the ZX Spectrum, launched the SAM Coupé late in 1989, missing the Christmas sales. They ended up with a vast number of machines in stock. The 16-bit and PC markets were on the rise and it helped little that MGT in the beginning of 1990 had to ship a new ROM to about 8,000 existing customers to fix bugs, notably a DOS booting bug. MGT went into receivership in June 1990.

The machine is based around a Z80B CPU clocked at 6 MHz and a 10,000-gate ASIC. The ASIC performs a similar role in the computer to the ULA in the ZX Spectrum. The Z80B CPU accesses selected parts of the large memory space in its 64 KB address space by slicing it into 16 KB banks and using I/O ports to select the particular blocks appearing in each 16 KB bank.

The basic SAM Coupé model has 256 KB of RAM, upgradable internally to 512 KB and externally with an additional 4 MB (added in 1 MB packs). The computer has a direct connection for a cassette recorder for data storage but two 3.5 inch floppy disk drives can be installed within the case as well. Six channels of 8-octave stereo sound are provided by a Philips SAA1099 sound generator chip. The ASIC also includes a screen line interrupt, allowing video effects to be synchronised to specific display lines with little effort.

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