Using Timex’s Dual Screen Mode Support
The TS2068 has a second display file at 24576 (6000h). The hardware can show it, the EXROM has a routine to open it, but BASIC has no way to write to it. Timex wrote a machine-code module to fill that gap.
Writing Channel Code for the TS 2068
The TS-Pico, a Raspberry Pi Pico board that gives the 2068 an SD card, comes with its own ROM, and that ROM gives the 2068 two new kinds of channel: f: reads and writes files on the SD card, and d: reads folder listings.
Vintage Computer Festival MidWest 2026, Part 4
Last in a series on VCF Midwest 21. Part one, part two, part three. The first two pieces in this series were about hardware being designed now. This one is about hardware somebody already built, in some cases forty years ago, by people whose names we mostly do not have.
Vintage Computer Festival MidWest 2026, Part 3
Third in a series on VCF Midwest 21. Part one, part two. The Timex Sinclair 2060 Bus Expansion Unit was not a rumor or a sketch. Timex showed it at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 1984, priced it at $120, and according to Bill Skyrme, who worked on it, had it through engineering and ready for production.
Vintage Computer Festival MidWest 2026, Part 2
Second in a series on VCF Midwest 21. Part one is here. Consider what a Timex Sinclair 1000 actually gives you out of the box in 2026. One kilobyte. A membrane keyboard. No sound. No storage but a cassette deck you no longer own.
Vintage Computing Festival MidWest 2026
Eight of us from the Timex/Sinclair Online User Group took three tables at VCF Midwest 21 in Schaumburg on September 12 and 13. Joe VandeZande, Jeff Fetta, Peyton Bratton, Carl Miles, John Mark Mobley, Mark Martin, Evan Wright, Stewart Newfeld, David Green and me, plus assorted spouses and children who put up with us for a weekend.
Pro/File +5: The Machine-Code Module
Pro/File +5 is Tom Woods‘ database for the TS2068, with later modifications by Robert Fischer. The BASIC program carries the interface — menus, editing, print formatting — and hands the slow work to a 2,046-byte machine-code module loaded at 63488 ($F800).
Two Decades of Timex/Sinclair Wisdom
If you’ve ever had a ZX81/TS1000, TS1500, or TS2068 question and thought “I’m sure somebody on the list solved this years ago…”, you were probably right. The trouble was finding it. Mailing-list archives are a haystack: thousands of messages, no real structure, and in the case of the old Yahoo Group, a haystack that effectively disappeared when Yahoo Groups shut down.
Minesweeper for the Timex/Sinclair 2068
In 2003, Alvin Albrecht wrote a Minesweeper for the TS2068 in C, built with z88dk. Porting the Windows game to a Z80 was the easy half. The half he cared about was getting the computer to play it well, and to play it honestly: every move reasoned from the numbers on the board, never from the mines hidden underneath.
Making the Timex/Sinclair 1500
By late 1982, Timex Computer Corporation had a gap problem. The TS1000 had launched in July of that year and sold in extraordinary numbers, over a million units by some accounts, but it was showing its limitations fast.
The NEC Technical Literacy Series
National Education Corporation (Irvine, California) had been selling vocational training by mail since 1946. When home computers became affordable, they saw a natural extension of their business. Timex was looking for the same thing from the other direction. Dan Ross, COO of Timex Computer Corporation, was vocal about the TS computers as educational tools.