While the SAM Coupé wasn't supported by the wider group of developers and publishers back in the 1990s, there were a couple of mainstream software publishers who offered some support, at least initially, and some surprisingly high-profile games appeared on the system. One such game was Atari/Tengen's isometric arcade shooter, Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters, published across multiple formats by DoMark, and developed for the SAM by Enigma Variations.
If ever there was proof that the concept of creating a SAM Coupé conversion simply by using graphics seemingly from the Atari ST, and modifying code from the Spectrum, was genuinely viable, EftPotRM is it... with one notable exception: the introductory slideshow was ported straight from the Spectrum.
Not to say it looked bad - in fact, for the Spectrum, it looked great... it probably ranks among Neil Adamson's best work. On the SAM, however, it was a massive disappointment to the majority of users. Granted the SAM version of EftPotRM is not without problems in other areas: slowdown is prevalent, the flip-screen environment isn't ideal, there's only one kind of giant Reptilon boss, you can't move and shoot at the same time, and it runs on tank controls rather than having directional movement.
In terms of presentation - that is to say, how it looks in screenshots - the game itself is fantastic, and still one of the best-looking on the SAM... but those intro screens lower the tone considerably, and make it look like a cheap, low-effort port. Who knows? Maybe that's exactly what it was, considering most other high profile games, like Lemmings and Prince of Persia, were presented to the publishers as faits accomplis, meaning they had little to lose by releasing the game in boxes already printed up for other versions.
Back in my early days on the SAM, I had a go at reworking the Spectrum graphics into MODE 4 and, while some of it is a little bit better, it wasn't as good as it could have been if I'd optimised the palette rather than just adding a couple of shades of skintone into a palette left largely untouched from the Spectrum default. Also, the Speccy version squeezed the intro images into the 224x112 pixel gameplay window, while the 16-bit home conversions retained the arcade game's full-screen presentation.
Now, I haven't played EftPotRM in years but, during the Autumn of 2023, for no readily discernible reason, I decided to look at the intro screens from the Atari ST version of the game - which would already be 16-colour, albeit at 320x200 pixels - and port them over to the SAM. It was more of a technical exercise than artistic - I had been experimenting with various methods of transferring higher-spec assets - mostly from arcade games - over to the SAM, and all I really needed to do for these six screens (plus the credits screen) was crop down to 256x192 pixels, tweak the content to fit, and keep a close eye on the palette, since the SAM can't necessarily match the ST on specific colours.
By and large, all the work was done in Adobe Photoshop (I'm still on CS5, which I bought using some of my redundancy money back in 2010), first marking out the SAM's 256x192 screen area, then adjusting image frames (where present) to fit within that. The images themselves didn't need that much work, though some of the elements that break through the frame had to be cropped slightly on a couple of screens. The main problem was fitting the large text into a much smaller area, since I didn't want to go through the nightmare of shrinking pixelated text. For the most part, I was able to get away with (manually) reducing the kerning, letter by letter, and reducing the spacing between both individual words and complete lines. Some of it looked a little cramped, but none to the point of being unreadable.
Transferring images from Photoshop to the SAM used to be a case of transcribing, almost pixel by pixel, running SAMPaint under the emulator SimCoupe. Thankfully, a few years ago, I was introduced to the wonderful utility, SCADM (SAM Coupé Advanced Disk Manager), created by Adam Dawidziuk, aka Sir David, of the celebrated Polish coding group Speccy.pl. Amongst other things, this amazing piece of software for Windows allows one to import a bitmap image in a variety of different formats, and then convert them into the SAM's SCREEN$ format, colour or greyscale, in either MODE 3 (4-colour) or MODE 4 (16-colour), and with some dithering options to help compensate for any colour reduction. This simplified the process considerably, and I ended up chucking the results up in the SAM Coupé Users Group on Facebook:
As you might infer from the tweaked credits screen, this prompted a couple of SAM coders to look into patching these into the game, and later to fix the controls to be directional. Much of it is done, but I subsequently provided an inter-level hostage rescue counter screen, a pre-boss screen, and a 'Mission Complete' screen, which needed a bit more tracking down.
I'm looking forward to the 'Remaster' patch becoming available - and can only hope that my SAM disk copy hasn't degraded over the years. The new graphics and improved controls will show what could have been possible on the SAM, with a bit more time and effort, back in the 1990s.
At some point, I might end up looking at the arcade assets, to see if the SAM version could have been improved further, but the arcade game runs at an even higher resolution than the Atari ST - 336x240 pixels - so it would need rather more extensive cropping.
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