After seeing Bob's comments to fellow entropy member Luke Trevorrow
(Lord Blackadder) in the last issue of FORMAT, I sent this to him:
18 Braemar Drive,
Sale,
Cheshire,
M33 4NJ.
10/6/94
(0942) 886084
Dear Editor,
In response to Lord Blackadder's letter in the June
1994 issue of Format, I feel that I have to correct you
on a few details.
Firstly, the hard-drive. As Luke Trevorrow (Lord
Blackadder) said in his letter, I am working with Dr Andy
Wright on a new disc operating system for the SAM --
basing my code on MasterDOS as the skeleton for the new
DOS. Work is progressing slowly but steadily on this (due
to the pressures of a University education), but the end
IS in sight. As far as I know, Bruce Gordon was never
working on a hard-drive -- it was Steve Nutting who was
working on one which slotted into the second drive slot
of the machine.
The lack of a market for an improved sound chip.
Really. The SAM's sound chip is not too advanced. If it
were, then why is it not used in the Korgs and DX-50s
which the music companies seem so fond of selling? The
reason is that the SAM's SAA1099 chip is an FM synthesis
chip; this is why only tones are readily creatable using
it. When digital sound is used (such as samples, or
realistic sounding instruments such as drums or trumpets,
for example), the results are particularly hissy and
scratchy due to the chip having not been designed for
this purpose. What would be better would be the use of a
chip which had direct analogue output -- current sampled
sound users have to resort to tricking the chip to do
even an elementary operation used on many other machines.
This is being worked on by many people at the moment;
Colin Piggot is working on a sound board with either 4x8-
bit analogue outputs or 8x7-bit ones -- both with
comparable quality, the 8x7 one being possibly the more
flexible of the two. Stefan Drissen and Edwin Blink have
been working on a 2x7 bit DAC which plugs into the
parallel printer socket and the light-pen socket, giving
high quality sound with Stefan's Amiga Module player.
Saying that the improvements would be very small is a
patently uninformed remark.
As regards the graphics boards; surely you jest when
you say that the Kaleidoscope was graphics hardware. The
Kaleidoscope was a simple pull-down resistive network; in
other words, it altered the graphics output of the SAM to
change its palette. Graphics hardware it was not -- to
use it for graphics purposes would require an extremely
fast processor, as it would be necessary to change the
Kaleidoscope data for every pixel on the screen to give
satisfactory results. The graphics card: current
estimates indicate that it will cost between stlg100-150.
The fact that this may deter some SAM users is not the
issue; it is designed to be a multi-platform device which
can be plugged into any computer -- from the SAM to the
ZX81 to a Cray. If you looked on the SAM & Spectrum
Network Club stall at your recent FORMAT show, you would
have seen this in action. Oh yes, every other machine
does have 24-bit graphics; the A1200 and the PC, seeing
as they're the only machines really left in the running.
24-bit as in its palette, of course, which is catered for
in the current MiDGET design.
Now to quash a lie. There is no truth in what you
printed regarding either the ASIC upgrade or the
Accelerator board. The ASIC upgrade was a project which
Bruce Gordon and I were working on -- we designed a rough
outline for the prototype and were waiting for financial
support from a campaign in Your Sinclair. West Coast
Computers, FRED magazine and FORMAT all doggedly ignored
these efforts, so the ASIC upgrade never took off, which
is a pity. If you wish, I will write to you with the
original specifications of the upgrade.
The Accelerator board: "It just would not work
without very fast memory and other chips -- the ASIC
would need to be re-done to cope with the higher speed,
in fact you would have to build a whole new computer
because you just can't run the existing chips at that
sort of speed, anyone with even a limited knowledge of
digital electronics will confirm that."
At the first Gloucester/FORMAT show, I talked to
someone with a limited knowledge of digital electronics
about my Accelerator board design. He agreed that indeed
it would work, and would work exceedingly well.
This person was Bruce Gordon, so either you are
wrong, or Bruce knows less than we have all been led to
believe. The Accelerator would run at approximately 18MHz
and would remove most, if not all, memory contention from
the machine.
As for the disc controller chip, I have been
informed that SAMDOS2 will have problems working with
only one chip -- in particular with the FORMAT TO command
and COPY. BACKUP on MasterDOS as well as OPENTYPE files
may be more unreliable, as they were not originally
written with provision for this eventuality. Needless to
say, I shall not be going for the West Coast drive
"upgrade", as I prefer to build one myself.
All in all, thankyou for disillusioning your readers
and insulting everybody who tries to do some good for the
SAM. Computers are not a static field; if you don't move
with the times, they die. Let's not see that happen to
the SAM again, or it could be three strikes and it's out.
Yours respectfully,
Simon Cooke
(Ex-Technical Editor, Your Sinclair
Technical Editor, SAM Prime Magazine
Director, Entropy Software)
ps I do believe that Luke Trevorrow wrote to under his
real name, as well as his pseudonym (Lord Blackadder).
This is common practice amongst "stupid demo coders",
such as David Gommeren (he of Bats 'n' Balls fame),
myself and many others. It is so that people can readily
identify with the software producer; in much the same way
that Revelation software goes by the name Revelation.
Let's see what he says in return -- I personally reckon that he won't
print it...
Si
