Games
Games — playing, finding, writing, and specific titles.
169 threads · 1429 messages · 2002-01-03 → 2026-05-15
Defining and preserving the TS2068 game canon has been a through-line for the group across both eras. Back on the Yahoo list in 2008, Adam Trionfo opened the foundational "Best Exclusive TS 2068 Titles" thread asking what truly belonged to the 2068 (not just a Spectrum port) — surfacing Hungry Horace, Vu-3D and Flight Simulator, pointing to Paulo Leite's 2068 Treasures site, and tracking cheveron's then-in-progress official Timex archive at World of Spectrum. That cataloguing impulse carried directly into the groups.io era: Adam's recurring archival projects — digitizing Dan Tandberg's Starblasters and Timeblasters (Calliope Software), getting Creative Games for the Timex Sinclair 2068 scanned via Louis Florit and uploaded by David to archive.org, archiving JRC's Diamond Mike (whose author John Coffey later joined the group), and the QBert* investigation that confirmed the cartridge was never released on tape — extended the same project with a much heavier disassembly arm (dz80 + LUA scripts, EightyOne debugger, Ryan Gray's and Tim Swenson's .P-file listing utilities). A recurring technical finding: many "BASIC" type-ins are mostly Z80 ML (Timeblasters held ~4K of machine code).
Getting Spectrum/2068 games to actually run on real hardware is the other long arc. The Yahoo era established the basic moves: in 2015 Don's Twister board (with a Spectrum ROM and an SE BASIC jumper) gave 2068 owners a clean path to running Spectrum software; Eduardo Fuentes diagnosed the 2068's mis-matched black/bright-black quirk in 2017 (a hardware-side ULA design difference that subtly breaks the look of Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, Terra Cresta, etc.), and pointed to the Argentinian Valente Computacion digitization effort. The groups.io era inherits and extends all of this with the Pico, divMMC and FUSE-based workflows. The richest practical thread is the multi-week effort to convert The Crown to TAP/TZX for the Pico: FUSE auto-adjusts parameters mid-file and loads marginal WAVs far better than standalone tzx tools, MERGE-instead-of-LOAD defeats autorun ON ERR traps, an Oliger lets you break and resave on real hardware, and Ryan Gray documented concatenating tap/tzx files (cat, copy /b, tzxmerge) to repeat levels. Greg Skuza's batch of "2068 games" turned out to be exactly what the Yahoo-era Twister thread predicted — Spectrum programs lightly modified for AY sound and a 2068 joystick port, still needing the Spectrum ROM — with Johnny Red explaining the HOME/EXROM paging that makes those conversions fiddly.
Genuinely native-mode 2068 games remain rare, and Adam's perennial question "is there anything that uses the real 2068?" got its clearest answer in the RPGs thread: almost nothing was written for native mode, so the practical paths are 100%-BASIC Spectrum type-ins (which run as-is) or cross-compiling with z88dk. Bright spots are notable when they appear: François Lanciault's Tetris (which Adam used as the test case for learning to save BASIC+ML together), Hi-Color Hero exercising Timex high-color mode, the Elite saga (defeated by Lenslock copy protection until Adam found the un-protected version on the Supreme Challenge compilation, with a later tangent into the "Goat Soup" procedural universe generator), and modern homebrew — Eduardo Fuentes' fully-translated, Redcode-94-compliant Core War (Batcode) for the 2068, Greg Bennett's ZXWordle for the ZX81, and David's AI-assisted Retro Pixel Converter / PixelPaste image tools that grew out of a thread about Shaun McClure's A Guide to TS 1000/1500 Games book.
Key threads
- Best Exclusive TS 2068 Titles (archive.org) — Yahoo-era (2008-09) foundational thread that first tried to define the TS2068-exclusive canon across cart/tape/utility/app/demo, and surfaced Paulo Leite's 2068 Treasures site and cheveron's planned World of Spectrum Timex archive — the cataloguing instinct that the modern archiving work directly inherits.
- Inspired to Play the 2068 (archive.org) — Yahoo-era (2017) thread where Adam returns to the 2068, demonstrates the loading-from-WAV-on-iPhone workflow (Penetrator), and Eduardo Fuentes points to the Argentinian Valente Computacion digitization effort and pins down the 2068's mis-matched black/bright-black hardware quirk that still shows up in modern color-conversion discussions.
- Help me fix a file in The Crown? (#5436 on groups.io) — Richest practical groups.io thread on WAV-to-TAP/TZX conversion for the Pico: FUSE vs standalone tools, MERGE-instead-of-LOAD for autorun games, Oliger break-and-resave on real hardware, and Ryan's recipes for concatenating tap files to repeat levels.
- Q*Bert on tape? (#2011 on groups.io) — Confirms the 2068 Q*Bert cartridge was never released on tape and grows into Adam's deep disassembly of the cartridge ROM, including UDG graphics extraction — the archetypal modern-era 'preserve + understand' workflow.
- RPGs on T/S 2068? (#4733 on groups.io) — Captures the consensus answer to the perennial native-mode-games question that goes back to the Yahoo era: almost nothing native exists, so use 100%-BASIC Spectrum type-ins or cross-compile with z88dk.
- Elite? (#876 on groups.io) — The Elite saga across two years: defeated by Lenslock copy protection on real hardware until Adam found the un-protected version on the Supreme Challenge compilation, with a later deep dive into the Goat Soup procedural universe generator.
- TS 2068 GAMES (Greg Skuza's batch) (#5990 on groups.io) — Clarifies that most circulating '2068 games' are Spectrum programs lightly modified for AY sound and the 2068 joystick port but still need the Spectrum ROM — exactly the setup the Yahoo-era Twister-board thread (#1003604) was enabling a decade earlier — with Johnny Red explaining the HOME/EXROM paging.
- Core War (#3900 on groups.io) — Eduardo Fuentes' new homebrew Batcode — a fully-translated, Redcode-94-compliant Core War implementation for the 2068 — one of the rare genuinely new native-platform programs from the modern era.
All threads (169)
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