Timex Sinclair 2068 - The American ZX Spectrum

[Music] [Music] in a previous episode I covered the sinclair zx80 the Timex Sinclair 1000 and the 1500 but now it's time to show the fourth and final time X product for the North American market the Timex Sinclair 2068 this was the lineup meant to bring affordable computers to the North American market only three years had passed since the initial rollout of the zx80 and yet the time extinct layer 2068 is an improvement in almost every way the question is did it have what it takes to compete with North American offerings from Commodore and Atari looking at the 2068 you get and check the keyboard a cartridge slot hidden under this little door here two joystick ports one on each side of the computer which is kind of cool it sort of reminds me of the Commodore Maxx on the rear you get a composite video port cassette ports power jack and of course a traditional RF modulator port the selector switch for channel 2 or 3 is hidden on the bottom and very tiny also the speakers on the bottom here and this is where all of your audio comes from let's take it apart and have a quick look at what makes this thing tick there are just a few screws on the bottom and then you'll have to unplug this ribbon cable which is I'm an evil design I hate music like previous Sinclair units is based on the z80 processor running at 3.5 megahertz this chip here is called the ula and much like previous units basically handles most functions the computer including generating the video signal timing but make no mistake the z80 still does the heavy lifting of video production one massive improvement is the 48 K of system ram also a general Instruments ay3 sound chip which is used in many other computers including consoles like the Sega Master System and right next to it is the internal speaker there's no audio output on the rear all sounds are produced internally and there is no volume control and last these two chips are the ROM chips for 24 K of ROM but wait this advertisement shows the computer has 72 K and I just pointed out 48 K in the motherboard how is that well Timex had some very interesting math going on here you see they just took the 48 K of RAM added the 24 K of ROM and came up with 72 K total and I suppose it is technically correct since they don't specify that it is 72k of ram but it is certainly misleading since I know where the computer advertised it this way so to be clear what we really have here is that british sinclair ZX spectrum which outputs ntsc video instead of powell added a sound chip cartridge port and composite video ports and an updated rom chip but yeah at its heart it's still a Sinclair spectrum and one really annoying thing about using any Sinclair computer and this one is no exception is the keyboard now granted the 2068 has a check that keyboard which is miles ahead of the membrane keyboard of its predecessors but but that's not the only issue it's the fact that you can't just type like normal on it notice that every key on the keyboard literally has five different functions there are multiple modifier keys like cap shift or symbol shift that need to be used either separately or together in order to access these different functions I think of them like shortcuts that's all fine and dandy except for the fact that you're forced to use them so I can't just type out the command print in basic I actually have to locate the command on the keyboard and press it which isn't too bad since it's on the P key anyway and doesn't require pressing a modifier key but when you want something else you have to scan the keyboard to find it and then figure out which keys to use to make that command appear even the backspace of all things requires you to press shift and 0 I mean how hard would it have been to add one extra little key right there for backspace you see it would have even looked nice right there now admittedly if I were 12 years old again now we're using this computer every day I would probably eventually get used to where all the commands are in fact I think I could probably type a basic program as fast or maybe even faster than on a traditional computer but it would probably take months or possibly years to become that fast and also venture to say it probably makes these computers somewhat less desirable to emulate on a modern computer because you won't be able to see where all the commands are you'd never be able to find them when I talked about the Timex Sinclair 1000 point out that it basically had no graphics mode at all could essentially only display text and this was a pretty significant limitation it might surprise you to find that the Sinclair 2068 as well as its British cousin does that expectrum is exactly the opposite it has no text only graphics the screen is a bitmap of 256 across by 192 pixels vertically the bitmap consumes 6,000 144 bytes of RAM with an additional 768 bytes for color attribute area so that's six thousand nine hundred twelve bytes of RAM that is consumed by the screen even if only text is being displayed this means that when text is to be written to the screen the CPU has to actually copy eight bytes for every character drawing them out one line at a time like this and of course for every 8x8 pixel cell there is a color attribute where you can assign colors to the foreground and background time X calls us the ink color and the paper color but you get the idea you get two colors per cell so there's a grid of 32 by 24 color cells and I'll show you an example graphic from a Sinclair spectrum game as you can see you'll never find more than two colors per cell now while commodore used a similar system it had a two color and a four color mode which made it considerably more versatile another disadvantage to this system besides the extra memory required for text is that it's no longer possible to read what character is on the screen and it takes eight times longer to write text to the screen than other computers of the time period that may not be a big deal for most applications but it does start to be an issue if you need to scroll the whole screen quickly because it would be 8 times more data to move around granted later 16 and 32-bit computers like the amiga Macintosh or most likely even the computer you're using right now to watch this video also have no specific text mode but with faster processors more RAM and graphical operating systems this makes more sense so I'm going to write a little program here in basic and this is meant to illustrate two different things a screen ram starts at memory location 16 384 and so i'm going to fill the screen ram with 255 which should be solid pixels and the first thing i want you to notice is that I didn't need to enter any sort of graphics mode to do this because like I said we're already in graphics mode the second thing I want you to see is the screen Ram layout I'm advancing the loop by increments of 1 but you can see the data isn't being filled in on the screen in the manner you might expect on other computers this does mean your code has to be a little smarter in order to plot pixels on the screen and this was most likely another cost-saving measure what I've just shown will come up again here in a little bit but for the moment here's another little program that does something kind similar only it's writing random values to the color attribute Ram at least this ramp is organized more or less like you'd expect but you may be wondering about the flashing well one of the bits of the color attribute determines if a character is flashing or not and since I'm filling in random data some characters will be flashing and others won't be you can change the border color by using the border command which is pretty simple you can also change the paper color as well customizing your screen colors in 1983 was sort of like picking your desktop wallpaper today in case it wasn't obvious the sinclair line of computers ranging from the original zx80 all the way to the 2068 were meant to use a cassette recorder for the main storage device this drives were simply not a thing on these computers and neither were cartridges these Sinclair 2068 however did offer a cartridge slot which in theory would allow much easier and much faster loading of games much like a game console of the era however only around 7 cartridges are known to exist and none of them are particularly compelling let's open up crazy bugs here and have a look these cartridges are surprisingly small especially for 1983 they're just barely bigger than a Game Boy cartridge I took one apart to see what kind of ROM chip it had and was surprised to see an epoxy blob well not unheard of this wasn't a super common design yet at this time anyway so I'll just stick the cartridge in here and let's see what happens it does instantly appear much is to be expected the game itself is certainly nothing to get excited about but sadly this is probably the best game cartridge available here's another one states and capitals not really a game more like edutainment software so let's try loading a cassette based game instead I'll connect up the cassette recorder if you just wanted to load pre-recorded tapes of games on them all you would need is a single cable connected to the ear on the back of the computer and to the earphone output on the cassette player in this regard almost any cassette player would do even a Walkman if you wanted to be able to save as well then you need another cable connected to the mic in the same manner but we don't need that right now to load a game just use the load command followed by the file name in quotes but if you just type two quotes with nothing in between it will load the first file found so that's what we're going to do now you may notice the screen border will do some interesting things during loading this is to give the user some sort of feedback of what's going on the slow flashing means it's searching for a file once you see this that means it's found a file and will even show you the name in this case androids and now it's loading the intro screen now remember when I told you about the video RAM layout notice that it's filling in the screen exactly the same way that's because it's loading a file directly into video RAM from the cassette and it loads in exactly the same pattern as my little basic program filled the screen once it's done loading the graphics it loads the color attributes next of course this intro screen serves no purpose other than to get you excited about the game unfortunately it adds almost a whole minute to the load time of the game so whether it's worth the trade-off is entirely up to you and here we go this is Android so there aren't exactly a ton of games available for the Timex Sinclair 2068 in fact if you look at mobygames they actually list a whole 12 games yeah huge library there huh but what if it were possible to run games for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum which this machine is closely related to well it turns out you can there are a few different ways to achieve it the most elegant way would be by the use of this cartridge which is just called emulator and all this contains is a different ROM which is more or less identical to the Zedeck spectrum it turns out that the Sinclair 2068 is more or less Hardware identical to ascetic spectrum and all the ways needed to run the games except for the ROM code granted the original Zedeck spectrum didn't have a three voice sound chip so you won't be able to use that anyway same with the joystick ports but everything else should work the trouble is this ROM cartridge is as rare as a unicorn finding one is nearly impossible however there's an alternative way to do this I had my friend Kevin burn me a ROM chip for the Zedeck Spectrum 48k and just so I don't get them mixed up I made a nice little label for the chip there we go I'll also label the original one here so I don't forget what's on there now I'll just pop this chip out and replace it with these a tech spectrum ROM so what happens when we powered on well it looks almost the same but the splash screen is slightly different if you remember the old one had two lines and said Timex with a date of 1983 now it's just one line in dated 1982 but everything seems to be working my understanding is at this point I've lost compatibility with a sound chip joystick ports and cartridge slot but it's a small price to pay considering now I have access to a bigger library of software how much bigger will remember the twelve games for the Timex version let's see how many I can run now according to this 3287 I'd say that's a fair trade of course the ultimate test for you to try some specky games I don't actually have any on hand but I've downloaded a few as WAV files so all I need to do is plug my laptop here into the ear port on the Sinclair it should work just like a cassette recorder the first thing I'm gonna try is one of the most well known games called Jet Set Willy and it seems to be working fine granted I've never played this game on a real set expect from before but based on the videos I've seen online it looks more or less correct I've been told the colors are a little bit different on this computer for NTSC but if they are it isn't super obvious to me since I'm not a long time spiky user this game sort of reminds me of money on the run for the Commodore 64 while we're here I'd like to point out a couple of other things I said earlier that the three voice sound chip won't work in the zenyk spectrum mode so what you're hearing here is the regular one voice beeper speaker that's native to the ZX spectrum which is also present on this system so it's almost like a fourth voice on the system but in this mode it's all you're going to hear also you may be wondering how I recorded the sound since there's no audio output well I had to temporarily solder in my own audio line output for the video capture portion of this video anyway let's take a look at another game this time I'm going to load cyber noid now this one has a pretty neat intro screen but what's even cooler about it is there's this little countdown timer on the bottom left telling you exactly how long is left for the loading process that's really cool it does still take several minutes to load though now looking at this game I do see one immediate difference in the colors I see this light brown area behind all protect that not supposed to be there let me show you a screen capture from an emulator as you can see it's all black as I play the game you'll see this background color appearing all over the place now what I think we're seeing is a result of the way the game was coded if you look at the color palette for the ZX spectrum notice that it technically has two blacks so it doesn't really have 16 colors it's more like 15 apparently the Sinclair 2068 has brown as one of those colors so games like this are expecting there to be two blacks and there aren't it doesn't look beautiful or anything but it doesn't really detract much from the gameplay so I'd say it's a minor annoyance if anything in fact I've read that there may be some hardware modifications you can do to get the colors to match closer but I'm not going to mess with it so I think we can safely say this computer is more or less compatible with a Zedeck spectrum if you put the right ROM in there while the Sinclair 2068 was an obvious improvement over previous offerings from Timex how did it stack up in the overall marketplace in 1983 its main selling point was supposed to be its price of $199 well let's take a look at this magazine from April of 1983 you can see the magazine shows the zx81 and spectrum right on the front cover and has numerous articles about it but one thing that stands out is on page 106 where it shows you can buy a vic-20 mail-order for a hundred and thirty nine dollars so how does it compare to that well the vic-20 already had it be done price there's no question it had a better keyboard okay the timex unit does have more ram the vic 20s graphic chip is considerably more versatile although admittedly slightly lower screen resolution the Timex wins on audio but what about software library being there only about a dozen titles for the time index I'd say the vic-20 wins hands down but if you include the ZX spectrum emulation then the Timex unit actually wins but there's a catch the sound chip doesn't work in said expected emulation so we would have to concede the sound back to the vic-20 and last there's expandability there were so many more peripherals for the vic-20 especially things like disk drives so there's really no question on that so let's say you disagree with some of my comparisons here don't worry I'm not done let's look at another magazine this one is from June of 1983 just two months later and look here you can order a vic-20 for a mere $89 and you can even get a Commodore 64 for $197 that's less than the Timex unit and if we compare with the c64 there's little question that the c64 beats the Timex in every category without question so you can see the problem for a computer where price was the main selling point a computer that was supposed to be super cheap and affordable at the expense of having good features it was simply not a compelling offering in the face of what Commodore had achieved with their mass production and vertical integration as such the Timex Sinclair 2068 was only produced for a few months during the year of 1983 and then it was pulled from the shelves some 80,000 units were thought to have been produced but most of the remaining stock ended up getting shipped off to countries in South America where they were a little bit more competitive so to say that the 2068 was a market failure is somewhat of an understatement however if you were looking for a Zedeck spectrum that could run on North American hundred twenty volts as well as output NTSC video then upgrading one of these with these it X spectrum ROM chip is not a bad way to go it would be much easier than using an emulator since at least you have all of the different commands printed on the keys one of the quick point I wanted to make is this does come with a good user manual that's always been a big gripe of mine when computers come with user manuals that don't really explain how to program or use the computer so that's good there's also a few third-party books you can get like this one from Sam's which tells you look more in-depth how to program the Sinclair 2068 so that's also pretty cool but this is actually the end of the line for the Sinclair products here in the USA but I do have at least one more episode coming up on Sinclair products but it's not a computer I've actually managed to hunt down and locate a Sinclair c5 which was Clive Sinclair's pet electric car project and I'm getting it imported to the United States and actually I hope to have it in the next few days and Fargo as well that's gonna be one of the next videos so be sure to stick around for that and as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: The 8-Bit Guy

Views: 453,066

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Id: fTKckoSj-OE

Length: 17min 22sec (1042 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 14 2020