Date: December 18, 2022
- David Anderson talked a bit about Bob Swoger, a long-time Timex/Sinclair user and supporter. We had hoped Bob would join us for a meeting; unfortunately, Bob passed away in the evening after we held this meeting. Bob was very active in the Chicago Area Timex User’s Group. A video of Bob demonstrating his program, Logi-Call, is on YouTube.
- John Mobley, who sent David four boxes of Timex/Sinclair materials from Bob’s collection, joined to share more about Bob. One of the items in the box John sent was a device Tad Painter had sold to accompany his speech synthesis program. Adam, who tested and reviewed the program, has been nominated to test the device and try recording his own samples.
- We talked a little bit about meeting agendas and topics to cover in upcoming meetings. One of the ideas that came out were special interest group meetings, which we’ll try to explore this year. Coming out of that, Ryan Gray talked a bit about FUSE running on the Raspberry Pi 400.
- Carl Miles, Ryan, David Solly, Jeff Burrell and others talked about the signals recorded on tape and ideas about improving capture from tape and editing as necessary.
- Gustavo Pane joined us from Argentina and told us a bit about the Timex/Sinclair scene there and about Ricardo Colcagno’s project to make an RP 2040-based device to save/load to/from SD cards on the TS 2068. Carl shared a link to a video about the SVI-CAS, a tape emulator for SpectraVideo computers that can work with other computers. Gustavo asked about Tenet, the networking system Timex proposed for use with their computers. He and Johnny Red talked about the system, which was incomplete and under study.
- Adam Trionfo talked “Thief”, one of Ryan Gray’s programs. Adam and his friend were stuck on a level and reached out to Ryan, who showed up at Adam’s house with an improved version. Adam, Ryan and Carl reported on their meeting, where they looked at and played with Timex computers. That led into a conversation about getting Adam a TS1000 so he can be a true Timex/Sinclair fan.
- Stewart Newfeld let us know what spare parts he has available. He has video adapters and replacement keyboards for the ZX81/TS1000. Reach out to him via his website. Stewart also showed new-old-stock ZX81/TS1000 membrane keyboards available. We talked about the vLA81 and other ULA replacements. He also reported on his progress in building USB keyboard from the ZX81/TS1000 keyboard and on an internal 32K RAM expansion device.