TSU Meeting MONDAY — May 1, 2023

David, Carl Miles, Adam Trionfo, Tim Swenson, Ryan Gray, Jeff Burrell, Larry, Blair, Dennis, Conrad, Dario

David opened with archive updates from the late Bob Swoger's collection, forwarded by John Mobley: a first box of print material (the Sinclair Survivalist Handbook from Time Designs, several issues of Jay Siegel's FDD newsletter for the Timex/Portugal floppy system, an E. Arthur Brown directory) and then five boxes of cassettes. Flipping through the tapes he found a JRC Software cassette by John Coffey labeled Diamond Mike / Tic-Tac-Toe — a program Coffey had asked him about years ago, never archived. His Walmart tape deck wouldn't load it, but a TS2020 player that came in the same shipment did; both sides were actually full copies of Diamond Mike (a Boulder Dash-style game), not the tic-tac-toe demo the labels suggested. David reunited Coffey with his 40-year-old tape. He also identified a mystery DOCK image on his disk as Tom Woods' TS2068 Programmer's Toolkit cartridge and made both the .dck and a clean EPROM-ready ROM image available.

David previewed a new video series with João Diogo Ramos of the LoadCX museum in Portugal. The first episode focuses on the TS1500: João's collection includes a silver/white ZX81-class machine whose case turns out to be a Portugal-side prototype path toward the 1500, and the matching TS1500 sticker matches one of several oddball labels David got from Eric Johnson out of Middlebury — evidence that Timex America and Timex Portugal were both working on a 1500 in parallel. Carl Miles riffed on this: he plans to paint one of Ryan's spare TS1000s silver and drop a 1500 ROM into it (David will send him a ROM and a sticker) so the TS1510 cartridge adapter auto-boots, and he's separately collecting parts — black metal keyboard overlay, 1500-style rubber mat, a 1500 case — to build a TS2000 mockup. Discussion of the Timex diagnostic cartridge followed (Carl has the manual and is hunting for his original listing) and of the dearth of TS2068 diagnostic hardware compared with the Spectrum.

Dennis introduced himself (longtime ham, has three ZX81s, recently re-keyboarded two and is hunting a replacement ULA for one with weak video). Dario joined from Argentina to describe a sealed TS2068 his father bought there that shipped with the Horizons demo tape and six Quicksilva titles (Mined-Out, Time Gate, Astro Blaster/"Cyber Attack," 3D Strategy, Bugaboo, Smuggler's Cove) — Timex-specific conversions distinct from the later Knighted Computer releases. He uploaded the original inlays for Cyberzone (the SubSync release), which confirmed the long-suspected voice-activation feature: the game listens on the mic input and fires when it hears sound — players used to scream at the machine or tape-record noise. Tim Swenson reported on the emulator getting-started guide: text is being finalized in OpenOffice for Scribus layout, David owes him the EightyOne-on-Windows section this week, and Tim proposed a separate tips-and-tricks chapter per emulator (e.g. the universal "why is my Spectrum screen so small in Fuse" gotcha), with load/save covered consistently across Fuse, ZEsarUX and EightyOne.

A long technical thread covered running Spectrum software on the TS2068. Carl OCR'd Lloyd Dreyer's TS2068 ROM disassembly (the low-contrast dot-matrix book Adam mentioned) into a searchable PDF — far more usable than archive.org's OCR — and offered to send copies. The group compared it with Bob Orfali's memory-dump-style disassembly and noted disagreements between them. Adam discussed his Time Blasters disassembly using DZ80 with an emulator-produced op-map to distinguish code from data, and SchoolKit was mentioned as a similar tool (links on inkland.org.uk). They explored why a few Spectrum machine-code programs run unmodified on the 2068 (RST calls land at the same vectors; programs that read the keyboard via IN rather than ROM calls survive; tape load/save and the Spectrum ROM's trailing 0xFF region used as an IM2 vector table are the usual blockers). Blair demoed a PCBWay-built TZX-Duino with a 16x2 display (he ended up preferring the simpler ZX-Wespi for loading); discussion ranged across the SVI-CAS multi-machine cassette interface and an unusual AERCO STD-bus disk setup for the TS1000 from a vintage magazine photo. Adam closed with a screen-share showing the frequency-transition artifact he keeps hitting at the start of the data block on library tapes — a small dip he hand-edits in Audacity to get a clean load, likely caused by high-frequency rolloff from a dirty head or azimuth drift. Scheduling: next meetings on May 21 (skipping Mother's Day) and the Sunday after Father's Day in June.

Highlights

Diamond Mike, a 40-year-old John Coffey TS2068 game, recovered from a tape in the late Bob Swoger's collection and returned to its author
New video series with João Ramos (LoadCX museum) reveals Timex Portugal and Middlebury were independently developing the TS1500, evidenced by matching prototype stickers
Tom Woods' TS2068 Programmer's Toolkit cartridge identified and posted as both a .dck image and a clean EPROM-ready ROM
Carl OCR'd Lloyd Dreyer's TS2068 ROM disassembly book into a searchable PDF, finally making the Spectrum-to-2068 ROM mapping usable
Dario confirmed (with inlays) that Cyberzone's voice-activated fire control works by listening on the mic input — players really did scream at their 2068s

Projects discussed: Library Tape Archiving Process · "1068" — Enhanced TS1000 Topics: Tape & library archiving (TAP/TZX) · Tape, cassette & loading · Machine code, Z80 & assemblers · TS1000 / ZX81 / TS1500 · Spectrum emulation & software · Cartridges, EPROM & dumping

Summary generated from the meeting recording; the full transcript is kept in the group's private archive.