Membership Profile

I spend about 12-16 hours a day hacking away on this little black box doing who knows what. It could be anything from working on my new rom to making tapes for customers, or trying to straighten out the clubs library. I’m transferring the library over to disc so that I can allow access to the library via downloads all month long. Hopefully this will encourage people to dig out those 2050’s and learn how to use them, if you need help getting the hang of things or you need a modem or software then give me a call and we can arrange to get together at your convenience. I guess to get an idea of what I’m up to with this machine I will give you a rundown of my system as it sits at present:

1. ZX 81 in a Suntronics keyboard case with M1 and NMI adaptors
2. Memotech 64k memory pack
3. 32k Nvm (DELTA DEVICE)
4. Karl Brown I/O port driving a Brother HR5 80 col. printer
5. Westridge 2050 modem
6. Aerco drive interface with 4 drives; 2 full height 5.25 inch DS DD drives, 1 half height DS DD 5.25 drive and one 3.5 inch 360k drive. At the present time I’m only running 2 drives the other 2 are just waiting for a good excuse to be plugged in.
7. JIL composite green monitor
8. TI color video board and rom board for the extended basic (JOBASIC) to transparently drive the color video

That was only a partial list of my hardware. I’ve got plenty of other hardware as well, such as eprom burners, 2040 printer, JIL compu deck, 256k bank switch, speech board, Scram board, RS232 interface, rom selector boards and more. That should give you an idea of just how much of a ZX freak I am.

I use my system for many varied uses, but lately its main use has been for word processing. I’ve been extremely busy trying to keep up with INSOMNIAC ELECTRONICS business correspondence. Ever since I took over SILICON MOUNTAIN from Fred Nachbaur, I’ve had to put all my personal projects aside (well most of them anyway). As a lot of you may already know I’ve been working on hires screen dumps to my 80 col. printer and thats one project finaly out of my hair. I have also been working on a new extension rom (probably another 8k). It will contain my 80 col. printer and disc drive commands as well as hires extended basic. All commands can be accessed from 40 new basic keywords. It’ll be awhile till I get it ready for use by the public. My next major project will be a 1200 baud hard/software package for the ZX81/TS1000. Harvey Taylor is writing the software driver core and then I will install it into ZX*TERM 80 as soon as possible! I could go on and on but this profile is starting to get lengthy so I think I’ll sign off for now. If anyone has any questions feel free to call me at 438-5739 anytime.

P.S. If anyone has any suggestions for ZX81/TS1000 hardware articles then let me know and I’ll see if I can get a regular monthly hardware column going!