Timex Sinclair User Group Meeting — February 7, 2022

David, Tim Swenson, Adam Trionfo, Stewart, Al, Keith, Kevin, Neil, Greg

Stewart and Al opened the meeting with a long oral history of Zebra Systems' early dealings with Timex Portugal — the first disk-drive purchase (a self-contained 16K controller machine with its own ROM that the 2068 talked to via cartridge), then the FDD-3000 (64K, two serial ports, CP/M-capable, with its 16K RAM literally a soldered-on RAM pack), Spectrum emulator cartridges whose protruding tops had to be bandsawed flush to fit the 2068 slot, the black Portuguese TC2068/TC2048, and the AMDek 3-inch floppies they stocked to go with them. They also reminisced about Zebra's other lines — the WICO trackball conversions (≈11,000 units re-jigged via IBM-mouse boards for the CoCo, ST, Amiga and Magnavox Odyssey), the CoCo Greeting Card / Graphics Designer Plus, the TS2068 TechDraw drawing program written by Jeff Street, the Zebra A-to-D / graphics interface used with the Koala pad, and the ill-fated Car Sign Designer. The group noted that Tommy G, one of the original Zebra crew, had passed away about ten days earlier.

On the software/preservation side, David announced he had finally uploaded Tim Swenson's complete ZX-Zine run to archive.org and indexed the ~60 articles on his site, and that Kevin had connected with George Green, author of the TS1000 adventure The Trident: Kevin bought Green's broken TS1000 on eBay, repaired it for free, digitized Green's original cassette to .p/TZX, and printed the listing on a 2040 thermal printer for him. Adam and Tim agreed to split typing in the music programs from Oleg's book; Tim explained the shell-script workaround he wrote so ZmakeBas accepts the TS2068 SOUND keyword (mapping it to the single-character token the Spectrum tools choke on), and mentioned his local fork of the Boreal BASIC compiler with 2068-specific ASM tweaks. Jack Ratz's ZXList utility for generating BASIC listings from .p files came up as another preservation tool.

Hardware discussion centered on the NTSC Spectrum — a real Spectrum board with an NTSC-output ULA, apparently built by Timex (Neil sent David an unfinished example from the Eric Johnson stash), likely destined for South American markets that ran NTSC rather than PAL. Related thread: the early TS2068 books were written from Spectrum hardware and Timex spec sheets before authors had real 2068s, so their accounts of the extended-memory system are wrong in places — Wes Brzozowski's five-part series reverse-engineered what actually shipped. David announced a converter project for European TC2068 owners who want video out: he'll map the RGBI/composite-sync signals on the expansion edge to a standard 9-pin connector, with Jack Boatwright and Carl Miles supplying TC2068s for testing.

The rest of the meeting covered newsletter/magazine recommendations for Adam's archive browsing (Time Designs as the standout, Update, SyncWare News, SINC-LINK out of Toronto, the CATS newsletter, Sync, and the more idiosyncratic Syntax and Synchro-Sette cassette-magazine); cassette-magazine BytePower (Tim has issue 02/1988 and demoed it loading); a quick comparison of Sinclair spreadsheets (Omnicalc, VueCalc) against VisiCalc; the National Education Corporation briefcase-kit TS1500s sold to trade schools; and 1987 Midwest Timex/Sinclair Fair photos on Bruno Florindo's Flickr (Stewart's mother and Jeff Street visible). Tom Woods (SyncWare / ZX Profile database) and Will Column (ex-Timex programmer 1983–84, worked on the 1500 and 2068) have both agreed to join a future meeting. Next meeting moved to a Sunday afternoon to accommodate European attendees.

Highlights

Stewart & Al recount Zebra's Timex Portugal deals: first disk system, FDD-3000, Spectrum emulator cartridges, AMDek 3" disks
Kevin repaired George Green's TS1000 and digitized Green's original tape of The Trident adventure
Tim Swenson's complete ZX-Zine run uploaded to archive.org and indexed on David's site
NTSC-ULA Spectrums confirmed as a real (likely Timex-built) variant for South American markets; Neil sent David an unfinished example
David starts a converter project to map RGBI/composite-sync from European TC2068 expansion port to a standard 9-pin connector; Jack Boatwright and Carl Miles offer test hardware

Topics: Timex Computer (European: TC2048/3256) · Disk & floppy systems (Larken, AERCO, Oliger) · ZX Spectrum · Newsletters & documentation · Tape & library archiving (TAP/TZX) · TS1000 / ZX81 / TS1500

Summary generated from the meeting recording; the full transcript is kept in the group's private archive.