Mtg — December 18, 2022
David Anderson, John Mobley, Carl Miles, Ryan Gray, Adam Trionfo, Joe, Tim (New Zealand), Gustavo (Buenos Aires), Jeff Burrell, Stuart (Zebra Systems), Johnny Red
The holiday Sunday meeting (the international-friendly slot) opened with David and John Mobley remembering Bob Swoger — Chicago-area Timex group stalwart, author of the LogiCall menuing front-end for the TS2068+Larken, and a regular contributor to Sir Clive Alive (the nationwide newsletter Bob, Mel Nathanson and Don Lambert kept going 1991–2003). A community GoFundMe paid to ship four boxes of Bob's collection (via John) to David, plus an eBay tape haul. Among the finds: missing pages from the TS2068 technical manual that Adam Trionfo had been chasing, and the tiny electret-mic recording circuit that pairs with Tad Painter's HS68 driver — turning out it was sampled-word playback, not true speech synthesis, and Adam will try recording his own words with the rediscovered hardware.
Much of the technical discussion centered on archiving the cassette tapes flooding in. Ryan Gray, Adam, David Sully and others compared workflows in Fuse, sZ80 and TZX-Tools: Fuse can load raw WAV files (it slows the emulator while it decodes), but success depends heavily on the original recorder. The group went deep on wow-and-flutter, tape-deck servo regulation, capstan speed calibration, why Radio Shack Minisette 9s and the Timex 2020 keep coming up as good cheap targets, and Ryan's two-emulator workflow (one loads only the header to validate a recording, the other runs the full load). Adam asked David to bench-test a few tapes before recording the whole stack, so any process problem gets caught early.
Gustavo (Buenos Aires) introduced himself and described joining Ricardo Calcagno's TS-Pico effort — a Raspberry Pi Pico cartridge that gives the 2068 SD-card mass storage by replacing the internal ROMs with patched routines that target Ricardo's board instead of the FDD. Gustavo, who has 40 years of Z80 assembler experience and runs a real FDD-3000 / CP/M setup, has already flagged schematic issues (an inverted I/O write line, weak TTL level-translation) and wants the BASIC interface to use real keywords (LOAD/SAVE/OPEN) rather than PRINT #. Jeff Burrell asked to be looped in. The conversation then moved to TENET (Timex Educational Network): João/Johnny Red from the Load ZX Spectrum museum explained it uses an Intel 8031 microcontroller (not the Z80) and is completely unlike the Interface 1 network; the museum has the board with both ROMs and is studying them, hoping eventually to clone it.
Ryan floated the idea of running occasional special-interest "side meetings" on specific tools (Fuse setup across Mac/Linux/Windows, Audacity tape cleanup, tape file-format internals) and recording them as tutorials — David agreed and asked people to suggest agenda topics on the groups.io list before each meeting. Carl, Ryan and Adam recapped an 8-hour hands-on session: three TS1000s opened up, two with bad/early 1984 ULAs producing dark or black screens, fixed by swapping in a 210-revision ULA — composite mods and Stuart's ZX81 spares were proposed for the remaining unit. Stuart (Zebra Systems) detailed what he has on the shelf: ~$7 composite-video adapters and ~$11 tactile keyboards from Ginger Electronics in Germany, original ZX81 membranes (with both rub-out/new-line and delete/enter variants), ~50 brand-new clamshell cases, and a new Trevor Jacobs 32K RAM board for the ZX81 aimed at hi-res-graphics software. Tim (New Zealand) and Stuart also pointed at the A81 FPGA ULA replacement sold on Tindie — replaces the ULA, adds 32K with flexible mapping, and offers inverse-video — as a fix worth the ~$30. The next meeting was set for Monday January 2, 2023, with David promising to post chat links and a summary to groups.io after each session.
Highlights
- Tribute to Bob Swoger (LogiCall, Sir Clive Alive); GoFundMe-funded shipment of his collection arrived from John Mobley.
- Rediscovered the Tad Painter HS68 recording board — confirms his 'speech synthesis' was actually user-recorded sampled words.
- Gustavo (Argentina) joined Ricardo Calcagno's TS-Pico effort, flagging schematic and level-translation issues and pushing for real LOAD/SAVE BASIC syntax.
- Deep dive on tape archiving: Fuse WAV loading, wow-and-flutter, recorder choice, and a two-emulator header-validation workflow.
- Three TS1000s opened on the bench — dark/black screens traced to early-1984 ULAs, fixed by swapping in a 210-revision part.
Projects discussed: TS-Pico · Library Tape Archiving Process Topics: TS1000 / ZX81 / TS1500 · Tape, cassette & loading · Pico / modern interfaces (UnoDos, etc.) · Hardware projects & new boards · Tape & library archiving (TAP/TZX) · Spectrum emulation & software
Summary generated from the meeting recording; the full transcript is kept in the group's private archive.