Timex Sinclair User Group Meeting with European Friends — April 24, 2022
David Anderson, Jeff Mazur, Frank Mora, Jeff Burrell, Ingo, Tim Swenson, Stewart Newfeld, Ricardo Calcagno, David Solly, Larry Lorenson
This meeting drew several new faces around the 40th-anniversary milestones for the ZX Spectrum and TS2068. Jeff Mazur — author of the Sams book Mastering Your Timex/Sinclair 2068 — found the group via the anniversary buzz and recounted how he and Fred Blackman came to write the beginner/advanced pair: Sinclair shipped them prototype 2068s (essentially NTSC Spectrums), and the advanced book ended up packed with ROM-routine and chip-level detail that nearly didn't get published when Timex pulled out of the computer business in February 1984. Mazur also pointed people at theromexchange.com, the Apple II ROM-replacement board he develops with a collaborator in Australia.
On the project side, Jeff Burrell demoed progress on a Raspberry Pi Pico–based SD-card interface for the TS2068: low-level SD routines coming up, plans to port ChaN's FatFs (with multi-partition support), and a 5V-tolerant Altera/Intel MAX 7000A CPLD for the bus glue (debating SPI vs. UART between Pico and CPLD). Discussion branched into using a Pi Zero off the expansion bus to regenerate clean HDMI video in place of the SCLD's 3-bit RGB, and the difficulty of sourcing FPGAs and Pis. Ingo showed his finished ZX81-style mechanical keyboard built with Cherry MX/Gateron switches on a laser-cut 3 mm acrylic plate, designed in Keyboard Layout Editor and Swill's plate generator, and posted part 1 of a write-up; a buffered microcontroller version (Carl's suggestion) is next.
Software preservation was a recurring thread. David has cataloged roughly 3,000 Timex/Sinclair software and hardware products from period magazines and user-group newsletters into a 543-page reference, and David Solly is digitizing his user-group library cassettes — finding that some old transfers don't load and have to be re-captured. The group also dug into language tooling: Tony Baker's Mastering Machine Code on the ZX81 (the corrected HTML version by "Thurner" recommended over the print book), Tim Swenson's ZX81 assembly write-ups (TASM under DOS, PASMO under Linux), Semper Software's quirky Partial Pascal for the TS1000 (manual finally OCR'd and a YouTube walkthrough now exists), Forth on the 81/2068 (Hog-Wild's 2068 Forth, the Minstrel Forth Jupiter Ace clone kit, and the ZX81 "Husband Forth" identified as a lifted version of Tree/Multi-Forth), and the limits of HiSoft/Eversoft C and MegaBasic on emulators.
Ricardo Calcagno introduced himself from Portugal — a TC2068 owner and broader retro collector — and was pointed at the SinclairQL Forums chat/Discord. Stewart Newfeld (Zebra Systems) confirmed he still has a couple of second-printing copies of Mazur's book. Tim Swenson did a show-and-tell of his Sinclair TV80 pocket television (bent-CRT design, black-and-white, no longer useful now that analog broadcast is gone) and his QL Gold Card, with a side discussion of Metacomco Pascal/C dongles turning up on eBay and a poorly-scanned Metacomco C manual that someone is currently re-ordering into a readable PDF. Next meeting: Monday May 2, 9 p.m. Eastern.
Highlights
- Jeff Mazur — author of the Sams TS2068 advanced book — discovered the group and shared the story behind the book and his prototype 2068
- Jeff Burrell demoed a Raspberry Pi Pico + CPLD SD-card interface for the TS2068, porting ChaN's FatFs
- Ingo finished a ZX81-layout mechanical keyboard on a laser-cut 3 mm acrylic plate and posted part 1 of a build write-up
- David Solly is digitizing user-group library cassettes; some legacy transfers won't load and need re-capture
- Tim Swenson showed his Sinclair TV80 pocket TV and QL Gold Card; group flagged a Metacomco C manual PDF being re-ordered for readability
Projects discussed: UnoDos · Library Tape Archiving Process Topics: TS2068 / TC2068 · Books & manuals · Pico / modern interfaces (UnoDos, etc.) · Tape & library archiving (TAP/TZX) · Machine code, Z80 & assemblers · Timex Computer (European: TC2048/3256)
Summary generated from the meeting recording; the full transcript is kept in the group's private archive.