SAM Coupe Blog

… very annoying when you spend hours on a level – to find you’ve saved zero bytes…. and rather more annoying to realise you’ve saved over the same filename.

Never mind – redone and it looks better than previously.

At least Thorin isn’t singing about gold?

Sorry been out of the way for a bit – moving home stuff, and lack of time and Internet access has been rather a pain – not to mention being unable to get much in the way of game work done.. 🙁

However – made a start again the other day – managed to get a couple of levels sorted that I was working on before – and they seem to be working ok!

Another project has started up in my off-time – which I hope to help with in some way – even if it’s just with play-testing. Not my place to talk about it yet – but the work that’s done so far is very good 🙂

That’s all for now! back later!

Busy few days with some personal stuff – I will add more to the previous entry in the next day or so…

Anyway – we got some work done tonight on a suggestion that came out from the show… seems to have worked quite well and should make it a bit simpler to spot the changes between the level banks 🙂

Nice bit of work from Gordon – thank you!

Right – time for a kip and back with the levels tomorrow!

It’s been a few days since Saturday. I’m still a little worse for wear, as I’m not really a great traveller these days.. but my heads settled a bit for commenting etc 🙂

Anyway – Howard kindly offered to take both of us down the long stretch from his home town, picking me and the kitchen sink (metaphorically – the actual thing is still firmly attatched) on the long way down to the Retroshow.

I don’t think I quite calculated the distance there – but I believe it was something in the region of at least 160-200 miles! Ouch!

A great journey down – a nice smooth drive – and only a quick coffee (in my case) break … and we got there a pretty reasonable time – just before 10 when the show opened.

The venue itself is a nice comfortable sized place. People who’ve only been to big glitzy shows like Manchester may have been shocked, but to Howard and myself who had visited the Wetherby and Bolton Norther SAM and Spectrum Show – and Bobby Brenchley’s shows in Gloucester – the venue was a familiar sort of size.

A great spread of stall holders out – some great machines in the flesh as it where. Gordon had made a great start on the table for ourselves – with his SAM altready in place… and some great Screen Plotters advertised on the wall, that he’s made for SAM + Spectrum, and also for CPC, C64 and others…. I’ll add a buy link for them when I have one as they’re worth the pittance he’s asking!

We soon added both mine and Howards Sam to the collection.. which did leave the table rather packed – but gave some people who had not seen even one SAM before – a chance to be very spoiled 🙂

On the left, My own SAM – with a couple of familiar characters decorating the wrist rest [my trinity sticking up as you can see! You might also notice the keyboard + interface.], Howards SAM on the middle screen – running Stratosphere [www.samcoupe.com] and some belting music from my little speakers and the Quazar Soundcard [also from www.samcoupe.com] …. Gordon’s machine towards the wall with Lemmings running… 🙂

A bit more later… got to add some piccies and more – so a bit of an update tonight 🙂

There’s a number of people I am grateful to for support while i’ve been working on this… and they’re all getting their turn in the scrolly – so I’ll leave that for then 🙂

However I’m particular humbled by the great work by Gordon Wallis – who’s been working hard on producing some really excellent work on the graphical side.

Not to mention being very good at QC! 🙂

Some of Gordon’s work may not appear in the release version … but they will certainly be used for further projects in the planning stages 🙂

Likewise – there’s a number of more talented coders who’ve helped point me in the right direction with some issues – but particularly helpful has been the very patient Balor … thanks for putting up with me so far! 🙂

And thanks to other Entropy members who’ve contributed in

Right – back to getting stuff together…!

If you’ve landed at this page because of the retro show please remember that it’s a joint project between other the members of entropy and not just yours truly.

There’s other people who have contributed to this and I’ll give them all credit for that hard work

Gosh that was an annoying song

I feel like going to a computer show.

Was given this link the other day … but it’s a shock hearing me speaking to Matthew 🙂

This was at the Retro show in Manchester a couple of months back .. was great to see Matthew finally – and interesting to hear some of the background to JSW.