Repairing and using a Sharp ZQ-700 organiser as a pocket computer

Saturday, 21st March 2026

The Sharp ZQ-700 Electronic Organizer, also sold as the Sharp OZ-700 Wizard, was a pretty interesting device. Its large 239×80 pixel resolution back-lit LCD and QWERTY keyboard made it a comfortable device to use, though the built-in programs are somewhat simplified from Sharp's more sophisticated earlier offerings; there's also no card slot for software expansion and the connectivity is much more limited. Gone are the options to connect a serial modem, send a fax, print to a thermal printer or back up data to cassette tape, but perhaps this was all a sign of the times. The US version of the organiser proudly sports the mywizard.com domain name, and the features I mentioned were all pretty old hat in an era when the Internet was being rapidly embraced. Whilst the organiser could not directly connect to the Internet, the accompanying website allowed users to share and download data files for the organiser and synchronise them with a PC using the supplied data cable.

Where this becomes particularly interesting the organiser's My Programs button. Previous Sharp organisers could be turned into pocket computers via the addition of a Scientific Computer card which included a powerful BASIC interpreter. The ZQ-700 has a BASIC interpreter built-in, and up to ten BASIC programs can be stored on the organiser and accessed via the My Programs button. Unfortunately, these BASIC programs cannot be edited directly on the organiser itself and there is no interactive BASIC prompt, but Sharp supplied a free SDK which let you edit BASIC programs and convert them into the tokenised form that could be transferred to the organiser. Being able to write your own programs to run on your organiser is an extremely powerful feature.

Even better, the BASIC interpreter does provide PEEK, POKE and CALL keywords even though these are not directly accessible when using Sharp's official SDK. By creating a BASIC program with a stub CALL at the start and appending machine code to the end of it it's possible to run native code on the organiser. The organiser is powered by a Z80 CPU, and so a user-developed alternative SDK (including a C compiler) was released, allowing people to write their own native code for the organiser.

Unfortunately, most of the sites relating to the ZQ-700 and its community are long-gone. The official mywizard.com has been offline since at least 2009, though interestingly Sharp do still host some downloads relating to the organiser on their global website. The mywizard.com site eventually required user registration to download files, so very little of the user-generated content has been preserved by the Internet Archive. However, some of the hobbyist sites about the organiser have been preserved there, so it is possible to scrape together a bit of a software collection that way.

LCD repair

Aside from the link rot there are some more pressing age-related issues with the ZQ-700 relating to its LCD. Or, as the case may be, non-pressing issues as the flat flex cable that provides an electrical connection between the main PCB and the LCD's rows and columns gradually comes unstuck.

The photo above shows the typical state of the organiser's LCD after all these years. The discoloured paintwork around the hinges is somewhat less typical; I bought two organisers recently for cheap due to their non-working condition, and both showed signs of severe alkaline battery leakage. The two organisers were sold as a pair, and both were showed the same owner's name and address when powered on. I always find it interesting if an electronic organiser has any old user data on it, as it gives you an impression of how much the owner appreciated the device; in this particular case these organisers were very heavily used, with around 5,000 records stored on each. This gave me all the more inclination to want to repair them. As well as thousands of contact details and diary entries there were also numerous BASIC programs in the My Programs section, all related to cars and financing, so I thought it would be worth trying to find a way of backing up said programs before erasing all of the personal data from memory.

Getting access to the LCD is reasonably easy; the rear cover simply clips on. I find it easies to start popping it off near the hinge side, unclipping both sides and working up towards the top edge furthest away from the hinge. Some screws hold the PCB in, with each screw hole marked with a white triangle. In my case one screw was missing from the factory! The LCD glass itself is secured to the front of the screen housing with double-sided tape; some gentle pressure on the screen from the inside will unstick it.

The flat flex cables that are stuck to the LCD glass use a heat-activated adhesive. One potential fix for the cables coming unstuck is to heat them with a soldering iron to reactivate the adhesive, though this is a somewhat risky procedure. In this case, however, that is not an option due to the use of two cables at right angles to each other, with the problematic column-driving cable being folded between the LCD and PCB with no easy way to access it with a soldering iron.

A mechanical fix can be an option, however. This involves finding some way to put pressure between the flex cable and the PCB and/or LCD to physically hold the cable against the contacts. Thin rubber sheeting can work well for this, and for the ZQ-700 series I've found cutting a piece that's 3mm wide and about 105mm long from a 2mm thick sheet does a good job.

I also put two layers of Kapton tape on each side of the rubber strip before cutting it out. Aside from a little extra thickness, this gives the otherwise grippy rubber strip a smooth surface that will make it easier to slide into the fold of the flat flex cable between the LCD and its PCB.

There are two pieces of white tape stuck to the back of the PCB and the flat flex cable which pull on the cable slightly and can make it harder to install the rubber strip. Rather than remove these entirely I very carefully peeled them off the PCB and then cut them rather than try to peel them off the fragile flat flex cable and cause further damage.

After installing the rubber strip and screwing the PCB back down, there was a notable improvement but not all of the columns came back. Putting some additional pressure on the back of the board in just the right place resulted in a complete picture. One possible way to apply this pressure is to put something inside the back cover so that when it's clipped back on it simulates what my thumb was doing in the previous set of photos:

Unfortunately in this organiser's case there was still one missing column, and this was with so much rubber stuck inside the back cover that the whole screen was bowing outwards and could no longer be clipped shut. This clearly wasn't the answer, so the rubber pieces inside the back cover were peeled off. Some targeted application of the heat treatment seemed like the next best option.

There is no direct access to the flex cable, however there is nothing too delicate on the opposite side of the PCB which we do have access to – mostly just a thick copper track. A pair of spring clamps were placed on either side of the missing columns, applying firm pressure to the cable courtesy of the rubber strip inside its fold. The soldering iron was set to 350°C and held against the copper track for a few seconds. Everything was left to cool, then the results were checked – all columns were back!

I must stress this is a risky operation, as the flex cable is very delicate and heating it can ruin it. 350°C is far too hot for directly heating the cable and if the soldering iron slips and makes contact with the cable you'll probably melt a hole in it. When directly heating the cable I use an iron at around 240°C, but even then I only lightly swipe it across the cable in the direction of the contacts – no prolonged contact and no firm pressure.

Once I had the OZ-770 working I turned my attention to the ZQ-770, the other organiser from the pair. This one also has faulty columns on its display, however the fault is rather more intermittent – gently flexing the screen brings the missing columns back, and once the organiser has been on for a short while they generally remain visible until the organiser is switched off for a while. It'll probably need repairing in the future, but for now it's working well enough that I don't want to risk accidentally making it worse.

Backing up My Programs from ZQ-700 series organisers

One of the two organisers I'd bought had a number of BASIC programs loaded into the My Programs area. Unlike the personal data, which I had wiped, I thought it would be interesting to preserve these BASIC programs. Connecting the organiser to a PC is easy enough via an RS-232 serial cable; though I don't have an original one, I was able to make my own from a 3.5mm TRRS connector and a DE-9 plug following the wiring diagram on IMSL Software's copy of a page from the OZdev website. IMSL Software also develop the XLink/Win software which can be used to synchronise data between a Windows PC and an organiser, though this won't let you back up the data from My Programs.

Sharp supplied a copy of Day-Timer Organizer for similar purposes and though this won't help back up My Programs either there is a handy backup utility on the CD that can dump the entire contents of the organiser to a file. Someone has uploaded a copy of this OZ-700 Software CD-ROM to the Internet Archive, and though it can't seem to restore backups on modern versions of Windows it happily created backup images from my organisers.

I did take a look at the created backup files and though they looked like nonsense at first I think this is because all of the bit values are inverted. After flipping the bits back I could find various program fragments, though they not contiguous so I suspect there's a file system or similar data structure embedded in the backups that make pulling out the data a little more difficult.

Fortunately this is a solved problem: SbkExplorer can open the backup .sbk file and export the programs as individual .wzd files, ready for reinstallation on other organisers.

When these BASIC programs were originally developed using Sharp's SDK they were stored as a .bas containing the source code as a plain text file and a .prj project file that contained some information about the program such as its full name and a text description. The program would be "compiled" into a .obj file (effectively a tokenised BASIC program with the comments stripped out) and then published as a .wzd file which is an XML-like file containing the description from the project file and the compiled object file as raw binary data. Sharp's downloader tool could then open the .wzd file, show the project description on the screen, and allow the user to transfer the compiled BASIC program to their organiser's My Programs menu.

The .wzd file recovered by SbkExplorer won't be a perfect match for the one used to install the program originally, as it will be missing any descriptive text. However, it's good enough to back up an installable version of the original program file. If you wanted to edit the source code for the program, then the Sharp Wizard Decompiler can be used to extract a .bas file from the .wzd. Again, this won't be a perfect match for the source material as any comments would have been stripped out by the Sharp SDK, but it's definitely a good starting point to recovering old programs.

Links to OZ-770 resources

Unfortunately, a lot of the old sites that used to host information about this series of Sharp Organisers are long gone. Fortunately, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has copies of a lot of them, and I've linked to those archived copies where the original sites are no longer online.

General tools

• Sharp's Software Downloads ZQ-700 series page still hosts the Downloader, Data Creation and SDK tools for the organiser as well as some sample installable .wzd files.
• IMSL Software show how to make a serial cable for the organiser and sell XLink/Win linking software that is compatible with the organiser.
• Day-Time Organizer: Sharp Edition was originally bundled with the organiser on CD-ROM and can be used to back up and restore data from the organiser.
• SbkExplorer can be used to extract data from a .sbk backup (created using the Backup Utility on the previous CD-ROM).

File archives and information about the organiser

• Wizworld.
• The OZ-750 Paradise.
• Marshall's Amazing Wizard Organizer.
• Nadisha Ranmuthu's Wizard.
• Grigori Fursin's Homepage (FSFM).
• Software for the PC and for Sharp Wizard OZ/ZQ 7xx Organizers mainly by Alex Pruss.

Software development

• OZdev Wizard Development: 2001, 2002. Lots of good information but the archives have some broken links, hence two captures from the two different domains are provided.
• Official Sharp SDK to develop programs using BASIC.
• Zifnab, an alternative SDK for developing BASIC programs (includes additional keywords like PEEK, POKE and CALL).
• Bacon, an organiser add-on that lets you execute BASIC programs created directly on the organiser as memos.
• Sharp Wizard Decompiler to decompile .wzd files into BASIC source files.
• C SDK with a lot of sample code.

If you pick up one of these old organisers you can probably have quite a lot of fun with it as a pocket computer containing a Z80 CPU, a large LCD and QWERTY keyboard. It's just a shame about the poor durability of the screen.