Sinclair ZX80 / ZX81 / Z88 Forums

A friend of mine often trade vintage hardware. I collect Timex/Sinclair, he does not. He came across a haul of goodies and this was one thing in the crate.

I know it was advertised in the TS magazines back in the day. The hardware may not be extremely rare, but I would think the packaging and all of the original documentation may be.

I have this exact product similar to this one! It is helpful whenever it shows the sound level supposed to be by it two LEDs!

DesSony

What is it?

I had one! In fact when I went to Penn State University one of the members of the Timex Sinclair SIG that met on Campus, I believe was the Centre County Timex Sinclair Group, was G. Russell. It is a device to enhance the tape loading of programs. You could listen in on what was going in and there was also a fast load program that compressed the output which I found a bit unreliable. There were 2 LEDs that blinked with the signal coming in, which is why it was called Blinky.

G.Russell was also trying to add color to the ZX81 display through software by blinking the characters at a frequency specific to the color on the color spectrum. He was never able to figure that one out.

Correction: I see from the picture it was called the Winky Board 2 not Blinky 2. The only thing blinky is my memory which needs an upgrade

Here's a little bit about the Winky Board 2: https://www.timexsinclair.com/product/winky-board-2/

And the company: https://www.timexsinclair.com/company/g ... ectronics/

The Central PA ZX/TS User's Group: https://www.timexsinclair.com/usergroup ... ers-group/

And that attempt to do color on the 1000: https://www.timexsinclair.com/product/chroma-soft/

Best,
David

jdfan1000,
Thanks for the links! I didn't know there was info on the web about that group. That takes me down memory lane. It was ZXLR8 that I used with my Winky Board 2 but I always had troubles getting the volume level right to make it work.

jipock or dessony would it be possible to draw up a schematic from the pcb? It looks simple enough. It would be great to build this circuit for my TS1000 since I made the big mistake of throwing out all my Sinclair stuff in a move years ago.

The last post on this thread has a zip file whose contents show the parts list and assembly instructions, which may be of some hep.

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