Inspirational stories from computing’s long-distant past
My friend had a SAM Coupé. He bought it in the early 1990s from a shop called Micro-Tech, having been convinced it was the Next Big Thing by a computer salesman wearing a lab coat. But my friend seemed happy. “Prince of Persia,” he would say, nodding. “Prince. Of. Persia.”
The fact that the game to which he was referring had been released on pretty much every platform under the sun mattered not one jot to him. Nor to any SAM Coupé owner. Prince of Persia, with its lifelike character animation, was trotted out as proof that this 8-bit computer was powerful enough to stand toe-to-toe with 16-bit machines.
The game was ported to the machine by developer Chris White who, like my friend, was lured into buying a SAM Coupé. Not due to a salesman’s patter, but because the computer was based on a Z80 processor: a Zilog Z80B running at 6MHz, which was a step up from the more commonly used 3.5MHz Z80A that powered the ZX Spectrum. “The SAM Coupé was, in my honest opinion, the next big thing and it was based on a processor I knew,” White told APC. “I’d started with a ZX81 computer and Z80 was my first language.”
His first task: to port the to the
