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TSU Meeting SUNDAY — May 18, 2025

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David, Adam Trionfo, Philip, Tom, Tim Swenson, João (Johnny), Mowgli, Mike, Ryan Gray, Paul

The May 18, 2025 Sunday Zoom meeting opened by welcoming a new member, Philip from West Palm Beach, who co-founded the South Florida Timex/Sinclair user group in the early 1980s and is now restoring his old gear — including two non-working QLs that he is gathering parts for. That led into a wider QL thread: Tim Swenson talked about the Sinclair QL Forum, the Sell My Retro shop, running IRC on a QL via a framework he wrote (extended by Dilwyn Jones), and his publications ZX-Zine and SMS Q-Zine. The group also plugged its Discord (a counterpart to the groups.io list) for newer members.

Tom shared a stream of AI-generated Timex/Sinclair-themed songs he has been producing with Suno, using ChatGPT to draft lyrics, choruses and verses before pasting them in — David plans to use one as a podcast bumper. Tom is also rewriting his old cash-register program from scratch on the TS2068 (his original wafer-disk version is long gone), now with city/state sales-tax variables. David walked him through using a text editor plus the CMakeBase tool to assemble BASIC into a TAP file, test in Fuse/ZX-RX, then run on real hardware via his TS-Pico. Paul described an old space-saving trick from his 2068 days: packing UDG data into the hidden five-byte number slugs inside REM statements by walking the next-line system variable — the group worked out that with the UDG-address system variable you could even just move the pointer.

Adam ran a 'Book Nook' on the TS2068 user manual. Members compared it favourably to the dry Commodore 64 manual (it has whimsical illustrations and is more approachable), recalled the history of the Fred Blackman beginner/intermediate and Jeff Mazur intermediate/advanced Sams books (rescued by a user-group letter-writing campaign after Timex folded, possibly still available from Stewart Newfeld at Zebra Systems), and showed off the fold-out reference card. Mike recounted buying a refurb 2068 by mail order from Pyramid Electronics, his Larken disk interface, his Westridge/Timex 2050 modem, and more recently picking up a still-sealed 2068 plus a TS-Pico with the video expansion. A brief tangent covered the planned 'TS2060' board, which will have Pico and Pico-video functionality integrated, and the historical TC3256 'super Spectrum' prototype (256K RAM, networking, loadable OS).

João (Johnny) gave a long report from Portugal on a Timex-factory reunion in Cantanhede attended by ~150 ex-employees plus ~40 outsiders from the museum, with stories of the building's three construction phases, the 1974 revolution that collapsed production (the workforce dropped from ~4,000 to ~100), and the wind-down to watches-only before the company finally closed in 2014. He also visited the farm where Rosalina Alves (former secretary to consultant Álvaro Oliveira of Alpha Micro) grew up, which is being demolished for housing; Diogo Reis filmed the event for the museum, more schematics and watch-era materials were donated, and the group is taking notes toward interviews. Mowgli told a found-in-the-trash story: a friend rescued a homemade wooden desk with a custom angled 2068 stand, wired-in power outlets and lights, plus a drawer full of rolled TS2040 thermal-printer stock-portfolio printouts from 1983–1989 and a sealed Flight Simulator cartridge.

The technical centrepiece was Ryan's deep-dive on Sinclair BASIC's DEF FN. He walked through a Spectrum function compendium he had found (Andrew Owen's), showed how to write recursive user-defined functions using VAL to conditionally build the recursive call as a string (because the argument is overwritten in place — only tail-style recursion works), and demonstrated the DEFADD trick: poke an address and length into a DEF FN's argument slots, point the DEFADD system variable at them, and the variable lookup is fooled into using your poked pointers — giving BASIC a near-machine-speed memory copy via plain LET. He used the trick to slam a screenful of pre-computed colour attributes into screen memory and showed his game running in full colour at the same speed as the monochrome version, with new features (Carl's animated shovel, jumping out of holes). Next meeting: Monday June 2nd at 9pm; Adam will pick a ZX81 book for the next Book Nook.

Highlights

  • New member Philip — co-founder of the South Florida Timex/Sinclair user group — joins and is reviving two QLs.
  • Ryan demos the DEF FN / DEFADD trick: recursive user-defined functions and a poke-the-argument hack that gives BASIC a fast memory copy, used to colorize his game in real time.
  • Adam's Book Nook on the TS2068 user manual, with history of the Blackman and Mazur Sams books rescued by a user-group letter-writing campaign.
  • João reports from Portugal on a Timex-factory reunion of ~150 ex-employees, more documents/watch-era materials donated to the museum, and plans to record interviews.
  • Mowgli's found-in-the-trash story: a homemade 2068 desk with custom angled stand, wired-in outlets, and a drawer of TS2040 stock-portfolio printouts from 1983–1989.

Projects discussed: TS-Pico · DEF FN & BASIC Technique Deep-Dives Topics: BASIC programming · Books & manuals · TS2068 / TC2068 · Timex Computer (European: TC2048/3256) · Pico / modern interfaces (UnoDos, etc.) · Tape & library archiving (TAP/TZX)

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