Date: October 16, 2022
- 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.
- 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. Tim Horner recommended EightyOne.
- 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.
- Adam Trionfo 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. 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. He told us about CPCDiskXP, which can be used to read FDD 3″ disks directly with a Windows XP computer.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.