Timex Sinclair User Group Meeting with European Friends — November 20, 2022
David Anderson, Adam Trionfo, Ryan Gray, James March, Stewart Newfeld, Joe, Jeff Burrell, Jeff K, Carl Miles, Mark, Tim Horner, Larry Lorenson
Marking roughly one year of the online user group, the meeting opened with Joe walking through how he used a Greaseweasel to pull flux-level images off a stack of old floppies — including some CP/M and Amstrad three-inch disks — and the tooling (CPCDiskXP on a salvaged Windows XP machine, Unix utilities, GoTek/FlashFloppy on the playback side) needed to turn raw flux into usable disk images. The group compared Greaseweasel with the Kryoflux and noted that Joel House's enhanced FUSE build adds an FDD 3000 disk emulation, but only in Spectrum mode — for 2068-specific programs you have to extract via the companion 'tomato' tool to a TAP and switch FUSE back to 2068 mode.
Much of the meeting circled around cassette preservation. Adam Trionfo has begun archiving a 90-minute master tape lent by Ryan Gray from the 1980s Fort Worth Timex user group (Tim Ward's club), uploading the raw WAV to archive.org; Joe shared his trick of using a cheap (~$20–35) USB cassette deck that bypasses sound-card noise, then cleaning up in Audacity by zooming in to count the four/nine-pulse ZX81 bit cells and hand-repairing dropouts. The group discussed whether a DSP/AI approach in the analog domain could reconstruct marginal recordings the way a video time-base corrector rebuilds NTSC, and how Winky-Board-style hardware squarers, tone-control-equipped decks like the Timex 2020 and Radio Shack Minisette-9, and recorder speed variance all factor in.
Stewart Newfeld recapped delivering James March's collection to David: a shoebox of ~60 TS1000 tapes, an Adam Super Game Pack, a Micronix/CompUSA ZX81 floppy interface (with its hefty external drive), MemoTech modules, a TreeForth ROM swap with its rare manual, William Stewart Systems speech synthesis and recognition boxes, and signed copies of Jim's encyclopedia. Stuart sold five MemoTech modules as a $500 eBay lot to fund his own PCB projects, and is shipping a spare 2068 to Ingo Schmid for his brother. David scanned Jim's book to archive.org with good OCR and plans to back-fill website review text from it.
On the project side, Jeff Burrell showed a prototype board built around a newer-vendor FPGA (~$12–15 at DigiKey) with 74LVC245-style level shifters, intended as an open-hardware 2068 interface now that traditional FPGA boards are unobtainable. Jeff K reported reverting his cartridge tooling from C#/.NET to DOS-based utilities (bas2tap, bas2bin) and is exploring whether Wes Brzozowski's 64-column BASIC can be booted from cartridge. Larry Lorenson described getting the ZX-Wespi (mentioned by Kevin Dorff in September) working — an ESP32-based wireless P-file loader for the ZX81 with VGA-output variant — and David is targeting end-of-2022 to publish his TS2068 ROM disassembly (~504 pages) on Amazon. Mark from the Netherlands introduced his Sinclair-clone collection (Polish TC2086s, a low-serial TS1500, Russian and South American Spectrums). Stuart asked for surface-mount microscope recommendations; Carl pushed the trinocular boom-arm scope with camera, and the group warned against going smaller than 0603 passives by hand. The next meetings were set for Dec 5, Dec 18, and Jan 2; David is trying to track down ex-Timex engineers — including 2068 technical-manual author Mike Brannigan — for future sessions.
Highlights
- Joe demonstrated recovering damaged TS floppies at the flux level with a Greaseweasel; group compared it with Kryoflux and the FDD 3000–enhanced FUSE build.
- Adam Trionfo began archiving Ryan Gray's 1980s Fort Worth user-group master tape (~40 programs/side) and posted the raw WAV to archive.org.
- Stewart Newfeld delivered James March's collection to David; rare MemoTech modules sold as a $500 lot to fund new PCB projects.
- Jeff Burrell prototyped a new open-hardware FPGA interface board for the 2068, using a ~$12 DigiKey FPGA with 74LVC245 level shifters.
- David Anderson set an end-of-2022 target to publish the ~504-page TS2068 ROM disassembly in print on Amazon and as a PDF.
Projects discussed: Library Tape Archiving Process · FPGA "Advanced 2068" · ZX-Wespi / Wespi-Nano · TS-Pico Topics: Tape & library archiving (TAP/TZX) · Tape, cassette & loading · Disk & floppy systems (Larken, AERCO, Oliger) · Hardware projects & new boards · Pico / modern interfaces (UnoDos, etc.) · TS1000 / ZX81 / TS1500
Summary generated from the meeting recording; the full transcript is kept in the group's private archive.