Sinclair Odds and EndsSinclair Flat Screen TV Service Manual
These are links to an OCR'd version of the Sinclair Flat Screen
TV Service Manual. Whilst the values and component numbers have been verified
against the original document, they are NOT necessarily correct, as
the original document itself may have had errors and I may have made mistakes
during the 'translation'. As servicing the television may expose you to in excess of 2000 volts,
these instructions are best used ONLY by trained service engineers.The available documents are:
In Netscape you can shift click the links to save them to your local drive.In the case of the text version of the manual Word decided to 'flatten' the tables out. I've fixed this now, and am fairly sure I haven't introduced any further errors. Latest news - EBay finally came to my rescue and I now own a mint and fully working TV - you can see the pictures here. I also recommend Ancrum Electronics in Dundee, who can carry out servicing for these devices. If you have any comments or suggestions, email me: Andy.Toone -at- feertech.com Free (Ancient) Software!
The program is in a .tap format, so you can save it to a real tape and use it on a real Spectrum. Alternatively, you can try it on an emulator - though you'll need one that can read from an audio input in real time to be much use. Utilities to save to tape, and an enormous listing of emulators can be found at the Planet Sinclair site. Please don't email me with questions if you haven't read the FAQ there first.
To use it, use Sinclair Interface II Right hand joystick keys (ie. 6,7,8,9 and 0) to move and select things. The options 'Load', 'Count' and 'Clear' are fairly obvious. Click 'Baud' whilst playing a 'noisy' bit of a fast loader to measure the baud rate, which will then be used for saving and loading. I have no idea what 'Tone Load' does!!. 'Add Header' creates a fake header so that headerless code can be loaded and examined. The weirdest option is 'Long' which probably doesn't work - it should load as much of a large file as it can (corrupting the screen as it does) and then try to compress it. It will then re-load the file, fitting in as much extra data as the compression allows before saving it out. Or at least that was the theory. In practice I think it just went wrong. My only excuse is that I was young at the time. And Finally (for now) this is a program that I wrote without the benefit of any of the hardware it was meant to run on. It emulates the BBC Computer's SOUND and ENVELOPE commands in BASIC on the Spectrum 128. As I didn't have either a BBC or a Spectrum 128, it is not perfect. The code uses interrupts to provide a queue of notes, and FN functions in BASIC to represent the equivalent BBC sound commands. It was written on a 48K Spectrum with a sound card I'd built and with music files downloaded from a bulletin board for the BBC. The file plays It's a Sin (by the Pet Shop Boys). Just don't ask me why though.
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The first program was published in 'Your Sinclair' in (I think) August 1985.
They called it Speech Melba, I called it Speech System III - history hasn't
yet decided which title was the most naff. Anyway, it samples and plays back
sounds on a 48K Spectrum with a stunning 1 bit resolution. Play sounds in
through the ear socket of your Spectrum, and hear them reduced to mush on
the buzzer.
The second program was my take on the Lerm tape copiers. It couldn't cope
with speedlock, but it could handle fast loaders and pretty big files. Not
only that, but it features 64 character per line text and a point and click
interface. It's more of a curiosity these days as the idea of backing up
tapes has been made redundant by emulation, but I was pretty pleased with
it at the time.
