Timex Sinclair User Group Meeting — May 2, 2022

David, Bruno, Dan Roy, Adam Trionfo, Willie, Jeff Burrell, Mike

The group hosted Dan Roy as a special guest. In the July/August 1983 issue of SYNC, Dan published "So You Wish You Had Bought a TS2000" — a giant ZX81 expansion he built around the TMS9918A video chip (the same chip used in the TI-99/4A, ColecoVision, and MSX machines), with joystick port, RF modulator, onboard sound synthesizer, ROM, and expansion slots. Dan recounted that he wasn't an engineer at the time — he leaned on coworkers at Sanders Associates (Ralph Baer's company) for parts-level advice, wrote roughly 4K of Z80 assembly for the inline command extensions, and shipped around 200 wire-wrap kits worldwide before the IBM PC and Apple killed the market for productionizing it.

Willie showed off an eBay find: an A&J Micro Drive 2000 (a spin-off of Exatron's Stringy Floppy, originally for the TRS-80 Model I) with six wafers, five of them still working. He was struck by how fast the endless-tape drive is — listing nine or ten programs on a wafer in 30–40 seconds — and worked out the commands from articles on archive.org since he hadn't touched one in 30 years.

Adam Trionfo reported on his ongoing work with Tad Painter's speech synthesizer — originally a TS1000 program, later expanded for the TS2068/2084 — loading all 173 words of the speech library, recording MP3s of each, and uploading them to groups.io and archive.org alongside Tad's price list, catalog, and word list. He also demoed a Spectrum take on the Commodore "10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10" maze, including a variant that overwrites the first pattern with a second one, and noted that the "50 frames/sec" counter on these listings is a software counter, not the host frame rate.

The back half turned to archiving and newsletters. David explained groups.io for newer members (it replaced the TS2068 Yahoo Group after Yahoo Groups shut down around 2019; 67 members, 253 topics since March 2020) and made the case for archive.org as the long-term home for scanned materials — more durable than World of Spectrum or personal sites. Adam described uploading ~25 GB of Bally Alley scans to archive.org with their help. Bruno asked about newsletter preservation; he has runs of Sync-Link (Toronto), CATUS, Long Island, Night Times, Chicago, and ZX Appeal, and will send David an inventory before scanning to avoid duplicating what's already preserved. The group also flagged the 40th-anniversary Spectrum events in the UK and Portugal (attended by Sir Clive's son and nephew, former Timex engineers, and the author of Ant Attack) and noted Jeff Mazem's visit the previous week — Adam used Jeff's book to get Tetris from a ZX80 image back onto tape.

Highlights

Guest Dan Roy on his 1983 SYNC article and TMS9918A-based ZX81 expansion board — ~200 wire-wrap kits shipped before IBM PC/Apple ended the productionizing plans.
Willie acquired an A&J Micro Drive 2000 (Exatron spin-off) with six wafers and was impressed by its speed — ~30–40 s to list nine or ten programs.
Adam uploaded all 173 words of Tad Painter's speech synthesizer as MP3s to groups.io and archive.org, with the catalog and word list.
Bruno will send David an inventory of his newsletter holdings (Sync-Link, CATUS, Long Island, Night Times, ZX Appeal, etc.) before scanning, to avoid duplicates.
Group flagged the 40th-anniversary Spectrum events in the UK and Portugal, with the Ant Attack author and former Timex engineers attending.

Topics: Newsletters & documentation · Tape & library archiving (TAP/TZX) · Hardware projects & new boards · TS1000 / ZX81 / TS1500 · Utilities & applications · BASIC programming

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