I've done a SAM-specific version of my little BorderTron Spectrum utility (an editor for drawing graphics and text in the border area of the Spectrum and various Spectrum-like machines). As this version is SAM-only, it isn't restricted to the limitations of the speccy, so it gives a greater horizontal resolution (16 pixels, compared to 24 on the speccy), and allows the use of any of the 16 CLUT entries in the border.
This version also uses line interrupts to position the bottom border, removing the idle-loop needed by the speccy version. This leaves >80000 cycles free per frame when images are displayed in both the top and bottom borders, with no display-sync issues, so it should be entirely feasible to have border graphics active during, say, the main loop of a game or demo. You can fetch it from:- http://freestuff.grok.co.uk/bordertron3000/sam/ -- it's a Windows app at the moment, but I'll do an OSX port just as soon as I work out how the hell binary resource files work on a Mac. The Windows version should work fine with wine on linux and MacOS anyway. It spits out ASM files if you want to include/hack the results in your own projects or DSK files if you just want to see your results on an emulator or the real thing. Hope it's of some interest. Thanks are due to Simon Owen for the various pointers-in-the-right-direction he's given me with this. Best wishes, Chris.
