This is the Sunday, October 16th, 2022, meeting of the Timex/Sinclair Online User Group meeting. It's hosted by David Anderson and Adam Trionfo. You can find all of the Timex/Sinclair products discussed in this meeting and more at https://TimexSinclair.com/ Adam is a computer polyglot but his main focus has been the Bally Astrocade, an early computer/game console. You can find Adam's encyclopedic website about the Bally here: https://ballyalley.com/ Newcomer Thomas Aaron told us about his first computer, a Timex/Sinclair 1000. He learned to program on the 1000, eventually switching to the Commodore 64. He's recently returned to the Timex/Sinclair fold. He's considering making a LISP-based interpreter of Sinclair BASIC. Jim March, co-author of The Timex/Sinclair User's Encyclopedia, told us about how he got into computers as a kid in the late 1960s and the Timex/Sinclair 1000 in particular, and how that led to co-authoring the Encyclopedia. Jim was also in the East Bay Zilog User's Group and he had several columns published in Timelinez. https://www.timexsinclair.com/book/the-timex-sinclair-users-encyclopedia-ts1000-ts2068-and-zx81/ Stewart Newfeld jumped in to chat with Jim about the best way to distribute his collection and also gave us a short history of his company, Zebra Systems. Newcomer Chris asked in chat about what he could use to program on. We recommended ZEsarUX or FUSE: https://github.com/chernandezba/zesarux https://fuse-emulator.sourceforge.net/ Tim H recommended EightyOne: https://sourceforge.net/projects/eightyone-sinclair-emulator/ Stewart asked about making the replacement 1000 keyboard (with tactile switches) emulate an IBM keyboard, for use with the emulators. David Stephenson built something along those lines, more info here: https://www.zx81keyboardadventure.com/p/zx-key-support.html Adam asked about which emulator might do single-stepping, a feature helpful in debugging code. Adam is disassembling the Q*Bert cartridge. Johnny Red, from Portugal, joined us to talk about his website and the Timex Portugal disk drives systems (FDD 3 and FDD3000). Johnny has had a website about the Timex computers since the early 2000s: http://timex.comboios.info/ We talked about the disk system and Johnny described the disk structure and showed us a version of Fuse built with an FDD3000 emulator that can load disk images. https://sourceforge.net/projects/fdd3000e/ He told us about CPCDiskXP, which can be used to read FDD 3" disks directly with a Windows XP computer: http://www.cpcmania.com/cpcdiskxp/cpcdiskxp.htm Adam gave an update on his BackBit cartridge; he only tested it 15 minutes before the meeting. He has also continued with his disassembly of Q*Bert and has made tremendous progress. Jeff Kuhlmann gave us an update on his work towards making bootable binary images for use with the TS 2068 cartridge. He told us about OshonSoft's Z80 emulator, which he's using to program and debug his work. https://www.oshonsoft.com/ Ingo Schmied told us about a 4 port I/O board he built for his computer using the Z80 PIO chips. We got back to Jeff's projects and referenced the Third Party Software Guide produced by Timex, available here: https://archive.org/details/timex-computer-corp/TimexSinclair2068ThirdPartySoftwareGuide/ Stewart caught us up on his collaboration with Tim Horner. Tim has designed a circuit to allow connecting a ZX Printer/TS 2040 printer to an Arduino, with an ultimate goal of being able to print to either printer from a Windows computer. Stewart is going to make Tim's circuit board available, when it's ready. You can learn more about these meetings, the Timex/Sinclair computers, hardware, software and accessories at https://timexsinclair.com You can sign up for meeting reminders and see the calendar of our upcoming meetings here: https://www.timexsinclair.com/about/community/video, orig pub: 10.28.26, updated: 10.28.26

Timex Computer Corporation produced a kiosk retailers could purchase to display the TS1000, programs on cassette and other information pieces. Part of the kiosk was this EPROM module that provided an interactive demonstration of the computer. You can learn more about this demonstrator here: https://www.timexsinclair.com/product/eprom-store-demonstrator/video, orig pub: 10.28.26, updated: 10.28.26

This is the Monday, November 7th, 2022, meeting of the Timex/Sinclair Online User Group meeting. It's hosted by David Anderson and Adam Trionfo. You can find all of the Timex/Sinclair products discussed in this meeting and more at https://TimexSinclair.com/ Adam is a computer polyglot but his main focus has been the Bally Astrocade, an early computer/game console. You can find Adam's encyclopedic website about the Bally here: https://ballyalley.com/ Adam Trionfo, Carl Miles and Ryan Gray met in person to discuss Timex Sinclair computers and told us about their meeting. Ryan showed his custom keyboard with ZX Spectrum stickers, for use with Sinclair emulators. Jeff talked about his Python programs that will take BASIC and machine code plus BASIC files into files that can be burned to an EPROM for use as an AROS cartridge for the TS 2068. Thomas Aaron talked about his progress in writing his LISP-based Sinclair BASIC interpreter. Stewart Newfeld caught us up on his collaboration with Tim Horner. Tim has designed a circuit to allow connecting a ZX Printer/TS 2040 printer to an Arduino, with an ultimate goal of being able to print to either printer from a Windows computer. Stewart is going to make Tim's circuit board available, when it's ready. Ingo Schmied talked to us about a board he's built for his homebrew Z80 computer that displays the address and opcode of a program as its being executed. It also shows the current state of the Z80 flags. We talked a bit about the GreaseWeazle and Kyroflux devices and using them to archive old diskettes. Joe Vandezande used a Greaseweazle to preserve some 3" disks that had been created on a Timex Portugal floppy disk system (FDD). https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle https://kryoflux.com/ Last, we talked a little bit about Chris Smith's book deconstructing the ZX Spectrum ULA. https://www.amazon.com/ZX-Spectrum-Ula-Microcomputer-Computer/dp/0956507107/ You can learn more about these meetings, the Timex/Sinclair computers, hardware, software and accessories at https://timexsinclair.com You can sign up for meeting reminders and see the calendar of our upcoming meetings here: https://www.timexsinclair.com/about/community/video, orig pub: 10.28.26, updated: 10.28.26

Upgrade the internal 5 and 12 volt power supplies in your Timex Sinclair 2068 with the ND4012DA, modern switching power supply module. This will slightly improve video signal quality. This power module is widely available: https://www.google.com/search?q=ND4012DA Please see the blog post on TimexSinclair.com for more information: https://www.timexsinclair.com/timex-sinclair/upgrading-the-power-in-your-timex-sinclair-2068/video, orig pub: 10.28.26, updated: 10.28.26

This is the Sunday, November 20th, 2022, meeting of the Timex/Sinclair Online User Group meeting. It's hosted by David Anderson and Adam Trionfo. You can find all of the Timex/Sinclair products discussed in this meeting and more at https://TimexSinclair.com/ Adam is a computer polyglot but his main focus has been the Bally Astrocade, an early computer/game console. You can find Adam's encyclopedic website about the Bally here: https://ballyalley.com/ David Solly had invited Iris Ten-Holder to join but unfortunately she could not. Iris had run a business using a Sinclair computer for a number of years. Joe Vandezande talked about using the Greaseweazle to read Timex Portugal FDD disks with the eventual goal of converting them into recoverable files. https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle The files are available here: https://archive.org/details/zebra-fdd-disk-images Adam and Ryan gave an update on their latest meeting, Ryan talked a bit about his Raspberry Pi setup, vintage hardware and a tape from the Fort Worth Timex Sinclair Group. Adam had read the tape and uploaded it to archive.org, here: https://archive.org/details/Fort-Worth-Timex-Sinclair-User-Group-2068-Club-Library-Tape Joe told us about his success with a portable USB cassette player, available from online retailers for about $30. Stewart Newfeld told the story of selling some of Jim March's rare collection on eBay, which will help Stewart bring new products for Timex/Sinclair computers, including the TS 2040 printer shield Tim Horner has developed. Mark Kloosterman collects all manner of Sinclair ZX Spectrum computers and clones. He showed us some of his collection. You can see it here: https://www.sinclaircollection.site/ Jeff Burrell has discovered yet another toy to explore, a new FPGA, that could be useful for his TS 2068 expansion board that might include a SD card interface solution and potentially a ULA+. Larry Lorenson showed us the ZX Wespi he built and talked about how it worked with his computer. The ZX Wespi is an ESP32-based tape/WLAN file server for the ZX81/TS1000 with VGA and/or LCD support. More info here: https://github.com/holmatic/zx-iot-video Carl Miles shared some advice on stereo microscopes in response to Stewart's question about getting into surface mount work. Jeff Kuhlmann talked about his work on creating cartridges for emulators and real TS 2068 computers. Last, we talked about some of the updates to the timexsinclair.com website and new scans uploaded to archive.org, mostly from material from Jim March's collection. You can see recent updates to the TimexSinclair.com website here: https://www.timexsinclair.com/recent-updates/ You can learn more about these meetings, the Timex/Sinclair computers, hardware, software and accessories at https://timexsinclair.com You can sign up for meeting reminders and see the calendar of our upcoming meetings here: https://www.timexsinclair.com/about/community/video, orig pub: 10.28.26, updated: 10.28.26