Even though it's been in my collection for a few years now, I've had little direct experience with the Timex Sinclair 2068 (1983). It was time to inventory everything since someone wished to purchase one of my spare units.

As luck would have it, I came across an amazing stash of Panasonic JR-200U (aka, Panasonic Personal Computer or PPC) stuff for about $40 shipped that puts my previous collection for this system to shame. In fact, the only major item not present in this new haul was Wordwatch. There will be no need for me to re-hash what was in the prior "A Long Visual Look at..." as you can just read it for yourself if you haven't already. Since all of the setup stuff is already taken care of, I can get right into this haul and PART 1, which will briefly lead into coverage of one of the interesting games now in my possession (subsequent parts will naturally follow suit in various degrees of detail).

First, here's a photo of the new stash, followed by a few cursory findings, then a preliminary look at the first game:

In lieu of doing this as a traditional Photo of the Week - Know your History! feature, I decided that this extremely obscure, but not particularly valuable vintage personal computer deserved a bit more attention.

GameTap for PCFor those following the ongoing GameTap saga on Armchair Arcade, for instance here, I recently signed up and finally gave it a whirl. What follows are some stream of consciousness first impressions...

I got a chance last night into early this morning to play around with GameTap on my MAME arcade machine in between paying bills, backing up my main PC and working out (don't ask). If you remember, the arcade cabinet contains a fairly high end 1GB PC with a 128MB ArcadeVGA card (ATI-based) and 27" Wells Gardner arcade PC monitor. I have a regular mouse and keyboard inside the cabinet, but use the main control panel as my primary means of doing most things, save for typing. It has a plethora of buttons, three joysticks, a trackball and a spinner.

After returning from our "last hurrah before baby number 2 cruise", my wife and I went to see if we could get new cell phones, since our Nokia 6820's just weren't cutting it anymore. Luckily, even though we were originally AT&T Wireless customers, they were bought out by Cingular, so we were in reality Cingular customers now, and they finally had a mechanism in place to transfer customers to new phones and plans without penalty (and of course keeping the same phone number). Also, now was a good time since the company I work for, Volt, has a corporate deal with them for minor discounts.