. First of all I am in the US so most of my experience is with the Timex Sinclair 1000. Back in 82 while I was getting my Electrical Engineering degree my mom bought me my first computer, a TS1000 from a local grocery store as part of a promotion. I quickly learned the ZX81 basic and became a member of the Centre County TS user group which met at my school, Penn State. During that time I also got some tapes, a printer, Memotech HRG and a plastic Keyboard case for my TS1000. The year between my graduation and my first job I spent alot of my time learning Z80 assembly on my TS1000. I also added a 8255 chip to my TS1000 and interfaced a Atari joystick to it. I modified Cornsoft's Frogger to use it.
During my first job in Washington DC I became a member of CATS, Capitol Area Timex Sinclair User Group. There I picked up many books, a TS 2048 and built a ZX Spectrum conversion cartridge for it.
Sadly after that I moved a couple of times and also went onto the C64 so much of my stuff slowly got thrown away during moves or lost in a flooded basement. I ended up with just a handful of books.
In the 90's I had a job which I programmed a proprietary device which ran with a Z80 chip using assembly
. From this job I ended up with 16 Z80 chips, 8K Rrams and som Z80 peripheral chips. This got my interest back on the TS1000. I went on Ebay and bought a couple of TS1000s. Most of them ended up with ripped keyboard ribbons and/or bad ULAs. As of right now I have one TS1000 which works, 3 16K ram packs, 6 cassettes and about 6 books. I also have converted many .p programs to wav and burned them on CD.My interest got perked again when I was on another forum for microcontrollers and talked to someone with a (hopefully near mint) TS1000, 16K ram pack and cassettes he wanted to get rid of at no cost! I'll be getting them this weekend. I do want to leave one working TS1000 untouched for nostalgic reasons.
Right now I am into microcontrollers quite a bit. I have 30+ boards some being Parallax Propeller based, PIC, Arduino and TI launchpad. I did post a while ago about uing a Propeller as a ULA replacement but I don't think it has the speed needed to do it.
I do most of my ZX81 stuff using the Eight One emulator. I am extremely interested in the ZXpand and the hardware development mentioned on the RWAP site since the Propeller would be an excellent one chip solution for SD cards, PS2 keyboard, sound (AY or C64 Sid) and WII nunchuck interface. I hope to become more active on this forum.
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