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Timex Sinclair User Group Meeting with European Friends — July 24, 2022

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David Anderson, Adam Trionfo, Jaroslav Švelch, Stanislav Hrdý, Evie Salomon, Jeff Burrell, Tim Horner, Tim Swenson, Ryan Gray, Stewart Newfeld, Keith Watson

This meeting was anchored by two European guests. Jaroslav Švelch (Charles University, Prague), author of Gaming the Iron Curtain, walked through his book's account of how the ZX Spectrum became the dominant home computer in 1980s Czechoslovakia — over 100,000 users in a country of 15 million, driven by affordability, versatility, smuggleability, and the rise of computer clubs that filled the gap left by the absence of a legal software market. He covered the role of self-imported and self-built peripherals (homemade mice, joysticks), the Slovak-made Didaktik Spectrum clone, the dominance of Czech-language text adventures, and the activist/satirical games that came out of the era (Šatochin, the Indiana Jones game set on Wenceslas Square).

Stanislav "Stano" Hrdý described his ongoing project to translate Czech and Slovak Spectrum text adventures into English — 10 games done, with a new grant funding 12 more (now expanded to cover Czech titles and a couple of Atari 8-bit games as well). Translations are patched into the original binaries with help from a period-era coder and a native-English proofreader, and a poster exhibition of Slovak Spectrum loading screens is being prepared for Tokyo in autumn.

Evie Salomon (BackBit) joined to explain her universal SD-card cartridge: one STM32-based device with per-machine adapter boards, now covering ~20 systems. She has shipped TS1000 and ZX Spectrum adapters and is designing a TS2068 adapter — essentially the ZX81 adapter plus a few extra pins (XROM, ROS chip select, BE). Jeff Burrell and David walked her through 2068 bus quirks (asserting BE disables the internal ROM/RAM but also kills XROM/ROSCS, so the cartridge has to latch ports F4/FF itself). They discussed making a Spectrum-ROM-via-cartridge boot mode so 2068 owners can run Spectrum software without a Twister board.

Project updates: Jeff Burrell got David's annotated 2068 home-ROM + EXROM disassembly assembling cleanly under ZMAC, byte-for-byte matching the original ROM (about three days of reformatting, fixing hyphens in labels, and camel-casing the routine names) — useful for his own FPGA/SD-card interface work, which now uses a Raspberry Pi Pico over SPI via a CPLD. Tim Horner sent his redesigned 2068 NTSC video digitizer board off for fabrication, having disassembled and commented the original SYNC-magazine type-in machine code; he swapped a 556 timing chip for a microcontroller and noted the digitizer dumps directly into screen memory using a lookup table. David reported that a third box from Jack arrived containing Long Island Sinclair Timex newsletters plus folders from Keith Watson and others; SyncLink and the CATS (Capital Area Timex Sinclair) newsletter runs are now nearly complete on the site. Next meeting is August 8 (then Aug 21); the group agreed to keep the Labor Day meeting on the calendar.

Highlights

  • Jaroslav Švelch (author of Gaming the Iron Curtain) on why the ZX Spectrum dominated 1980s Czechoslovakia — affordability, smuggleability, and computer clubs filling the missing software market.
  • Stano Hrdý's grant-funded project to translate Czech/Slovak Spectrum text adventures into English — 10 done, 12 more underway, with a Tokyo poster exhibition planned for autumn.
  • Evie Salomon's BackBit universal SD-card cartridge: TS1000 and Spectrum adapters shipping, TS2068 adapter in design (ZX81 pinout plus XROM / ROSCS / BE).
  • Jeff Burrell got David's annotated 2068 home-ROM + EXROM disassembly to assemble byte-for-byte under ZMAC — making the commented source usable for downstream projects.
  • Tim Horner's redesigned 2068 NTSC video digitizer board sent off for its first PCB spin, with the original SYNC-magazine machine code now fully disassembled and commented.

Projects discussed: UnoDos · FPGA "Advanced 2068" Topics: ZX Spectrum · Games · Pico / modern interfaces (UnoDos, etc.) · Machine code, Z80 & assemblers · TS2068 / TC2068 · Newsletters & documentation

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