TSU Meeting SUNDAY — November 16, 2025
David, Jeff Burrell, Carl Miles, Ryan Gray, Adam Trionfo, Leroy, Jeff Kaye, Peyton, Gustavo, Mike, Joe, Larry, Karen, Rich
An unstructured 'origin stories' meeting: David, who has been working through old user-group newsletters as research for a book he wants to write about the Timex community, walked the group through how each member first encountered a Sinclair or Timex machine and what they did with it. Threads ran from the late-1981 ZX80/ZX81 mail-order era through the 1983 TS2068 Christmas push, the Sir Clive Alive and Update national newsletters, regional user groups in Washington DC, Chicago, Long Island, Fort Worth and Albuquerque, and out into adjacent ecosystems (TI-99/4A, MyArc Geneve, Tandy Model 100, Z88).
On the technical side, Jeff Burrell and Carl Miles compared notes on the modern TS2068 expansion / 'new 2060' board — Jeff handling the FPGA/CPLD side and Carl doing parallel old-school TTL work. Jeff confirmed his hijacked Grant Searle video core implements a useful subset of VT100-style ANSI escapes (cursor positioning, clear-to-end, clear-screen, one-deep save) but not the full set, and discussed adding a dedicated wifi/terminal core as a separate slot on the expansion board. Carl walked through his ongoing kit-built RoeTest computerised tube tester. The latest TS-Pico firmware was noted to include an 80x24 column mode.
Leroy gave a detailed AERCO disk-system retrospective: he extended the AERCO ROM to his own version 10.6 (the AERCO team stopped at 9), reworked the disassembled ROM so it auto-detects Spectrum vs Timex ROM at boot and switches to Spectrum-compatible behaviour without burning user RAM, and ported that Spectrum-compatibility work into the Warievo (Czech) emulator at the author's request. Jack Doheny later took a copy to distribute to his customers; the group noted Jack passed away some years ago after moving from the west coast to Georgia. Gustavo (Argentina) discussed using AERCO with CP/M at 80 columns and asked about an ANSI/VT100-capable smart terminal for the Timex — Jeff suggested implementing it as a dedicated core on the new expansion board, possibly reusable as the CP/M terminal.
Carl shared previously-unrecorded Albuquerque history: a teenage user group he organised and ran (meeting in APS schools and local computer stores), a newsletter printed at Cooper Press and traded with other groups via Sync magazine, and his paid work for Art Colgate writing the 2068 diagnostic cartridge using SCLD schematics Art had obtained from Timex under NDA — Ray Kingsley (HOT Z) burned the EPROMs. The meeting closed on TS2068 manufacturing history: David noted Timex had sold fewer than 40,000 units when they exited in Feb 1984 with ~90,000 still in Korea (implying an initial run near 200,000), and Gustavo raised the question of why the NTSC-only US model went to Korea (NCR SCLD) while the multi-standard model stayed with the Portugal factory — to be picked up next meeting. Next meetings: Monday Dec 1 and Sunday Dec 21; Peyton was given a friendly assignment to write a Christmas program for the Dec 21 meeting.
Highlights
- David is researching a book on the Timex/Sinclair community, tracing newsletters and user groups from 1983 through the Yahoo Groups era
- Jeff Burrell's 2068 expansion board includes a Grant Searle-derived video core with partial VT100 escape support; a dedicated wifi/terminal core was floated as a future slot
- Latest TS-Pico firmware adds an 80x24 column text mode
- Leroy detailed his AERCO ROM v10.6 — auto-detects Spectrum vs Timex ROM at boot for Spectrum compatibility without eating user RAM — and his Warievo emulator port
- Carl Miles revealed he wrote the 2068 diagnostic cartridge for Art Colgate in the mid-80s using SCLD schematics Art had obtained from Timex under NDA
Projects discussed: TS-Pico · FPGA "Advanced 2068" · TS1510 Cartridge Interface Clone · ZX-Wespi / Wespi-Nano Topics: User group meetings & events · Newsletters & documentation · TS2068 / TC2068 · Disk & floppy systems (Larken, AERCO, Oliger) · Hardware projects & new boards · Pico / modern interfaces (UnoDos, etc.)
Summary generated from the meeting recording; the full transcript is kept in the group's private archive.