Timex Sinclair User Group Meeting with European Friends — August 21, 2022

Adam Trionfo, Ryan Gray, David Solly, Tim Swenson, Jeff Burrell, Willie

Ryan Gray demonstrated the latest revision of his QuickFont character editor, a BASIC program he originally wrote in 1985 and recently retyped from a paper listing. The new version uses small Z80 routines to speed up the previously-pokey key-read loop and the bit-decoding that displays a magnified character, can copy the ROM font into RAM as a starting point, and lets the user edit/save fonts. Adam Trionfo had found a bug where editing on top of an existing font garbled the result (a stale byte buffer that was only ever exercised with a blank initial font); Ryan tracked it down live. The discussion drifted into the 256-byte offset on the user-font system variable (so the ROM can skip a -32 in its character-address math) and the #-prefix comment trick in ZmakeBasic that keeps comments out of the assembled BASIC.

David Solly told the story of Iris Tenholder, who ran Café Wim in Ottawa on a TS1000 (and later a TS2068) using ledger and payroll programs she wrote herself, with Larry Kenney's disk drive — and kept using them under Gertran Linter's Z80/Spectrum emulator on DOS, saving to TAP and microdrive (.mdr) images, all the way until she retired in 2000. David also described the High-Soft Pascal font-loader he built using ADDR and DOKE to point the system variable at a multi-font array (again with the same -256 offset). The group used the story as a jumping-off point for how long old code survives in production — Fortran, COBOL during COVID, CDC 6600 and PDP-11 assembly RFPs, and NASA reprogramming Voyager.

Willie recounted his TS2068 bulletin board: a dedicated 2068 with a Timex 2050 modem and 2040 printer that ran 24/7 for ~2.5 years with 60–65 regular Sinclair/ZX81/Commodore/Atari users. He and Paul started from Tiny Board (which kept crashing on bad parity), wrote their own, and later retargeted it onto John Oliger's disk system so messages could spill to disk and the message base grew past 1,000. David recalled co-running "Sir Clive's Castle" with Michael Dove. Tim Swenson covered his QL IRC client (a proof-of-concept later extended by Dilwyn Jones to v1.998 in SuperBASIC) and the group compared 5.25"/3.5"/ED/Waferdrive media availability. Jeff Burrell gave a short update on his TS2068 disk-interface project: ROM load/save hooks are working, and he's now designing how to handle awkward cases like Frogger, whose TAP file has three separate sections.

Adam announced two scanning projects on the archive: the Celestial BASIC astronomy book by Eric and Howard Burgess (and pointers to Lucian Strebler's astronomy book and a French-language Spectrum astronomy book by Serraine), plus an in-progress scan of Beepers, a TS1000/TS1500 hardware-projects book (shift-lock, A/D converter, light pen, burglar alarm, beeper) that Jeff K had mailed in. Tim then shared Dayton-era memories — the Hamvention/DMA computer show drew Midwest Sinclair folks (Bob Swagger of SMUG, Gary Ganger, Frank Davis & Paul Holmgren's Mechanical Affinity), and Tim's house cookouts gave them somewhere to actually mingle. The next meeting is Labor Day, 9 pm Eastern.

Highlights

Ryan Gray demoed the rewritten QuickFont editor with Z80 speedups and fixed an editing bug found by Adam
David Solly's story: Iris Tenholder ran Café Wim on TS1000/TS2068 software (under Gertran Linter's emulator) until she retired in 2000
Willie's TS2068 BBS: 24/7 on a dedicated 2068 + 2050 modem, ~60–65 regulars, eventually retargeted onto John Oliger's disk system
Jeff Burrell's TS2068 disk interface: ROM load/save hooks working; figuring out multi-section TAP files like Frogger
Adam scanning the Beepers TS1000/1500 hardware-projects book; Burgess Celestial BASIC + other astronomy books uploaded to archive

Projects discussed: UnoDos Topics: BASIC programming · Machine code, Z80 & assemblers · Spectrum emulation & software · Disk & floppy systems (Larken, AERCO, Oliger) · Modems, serial & RS-232 · Books & manuals

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