TSU Meeting SUNDAY — April 21, 2024

David, Paul, Tim Swenson, Kurt, Marc Kloosterman, Greg, Ryan Gray, Jeremiah, Rich, Jay

David opened with Pico-side news: Joe Van des Andy sent over a snap-together 3D-printed case for Jeff's Pico Video board (PLA prints from Joe and Ingo, resin print to come, with plans for STL files that fit either Pico Video or TS-Pico). Ryan has joined the Pico software team, and Ricardo continues firmware work toward loading ROM images from SD card into Pico flash or SRAM so they can be used like DOCK cartridges. Carl had ripped the EPROMs Paul shipped him, including Tom Bent's revised TS1000/ZX81 ROM (documented in SyncWare News) — notably, it skips the RAM check on power-up.

Kurt (new) introduced himself: 40-year embedded engineer, ZX81 day-one buyer, built a wire-wrapped TMS9918 graphics card as his senior project and wrote some of the first 64-column code for the 2068. He has ~600 cassettes and JLO floppies to archive; David offered Greaseweasel + a Python parser he wrote for Oliger disk dumps. Marc Kloosterman walked the group through his collection on video — UK QL, Portuguese TC2068/TC2048, Polish Unipolbrit (with the swapped keyboard variant), Polish FDD-3000, Brazilian Microdigital and TK 95, Jupiter Ace, Micro Ace (the photographic-negative ZX80 clone), New Brain, and a Sinclair Vega Plus rescued from a dumpster lot.

Tim Swenson reported on ZX Scene: he is looking for article submissions toward a print run funded by Bill Miller collection proceeds. The Bill Miller dispersal is nearly done (printers and cassettes left); George Gwilt's collection in Scotland was similarly rescued; Jack Boatwright lost a chunk of his RMG-derived archive in a garage fire. On the QL side, Paul walked through the JS/JSU/MG/MGU ROM lineage — he and Frank Davis bought out Tom Bent (who in turn bought A-Plus's North American rights) — and the group discussed releasing the JSU as freeware. Ryan demoed progress on Carl's TS1510 cartridge loader: an original-style loader plus a tape-loader variant that gets around system-variable checksums used by VuCalc and similar programs, with open questions about EightyOne behavior under Wine/Box64 on Apple Silicon and the Quicksilver multi-load games. Ryan also flagged that Mike's newly surfaced Dallas/Fort Worth user-group library tape may let them recover the Side B programs Ryan couldn't pull from his own copy; Mike's tape even has Ryan's old "Fudge" UDG editor on it.

David announced a major archival find: Lon Hildreth (ex-Timex, who once visited a meeting) sent in his box of original printouts, including the long-lost Spectrum ROM assembly listing and source for the 2068 Home ROM and X-ROM. A revised second edition of the 2068 ROM disassembly book is planned. David also produced a print facsimile of the 1985 TS2068 Technical Manual from a clean scan. Jay asked about exploiting the unimplemented 2068 paging scheme — the group walked through the "missing 253 pages," Wes Brzowski's article series, Larken's 256K RAM board, Bill Peterson's bank-switching writeups in SyncWare News, and Ray Kingsley's bank-switching article, and noted that Tom Woods' cartridge-resident programmer's utility library is a good model for running BASIC from ROM line-by-line. Jay also described killing his 2068's 8 key with a stray solder splash; David walked him through removing the keyboard overlay and pointed at the German seller on eBay producing reproduction overlays (~$33–40). Next meeting is Monday May 6 (9pm Eastern).

Highlights

Carl ripped Tom Bent's revised TS1000/ZX81 ROM from Paul's EPROMs — the actual binary (skipping the RAM check) is now in hand.
3D-printed snap-together case for the Pico Video board, with STL files planned to fit either Pico Video or TS-Pico.
Ryan joined the Pico team and demoed TS1510 cartridge loaders, including a tape-loader variant that works around system-variable checksums.
David received Lon Hildreth's archive — the lost Spectrum ROM assembly listing plus 2068 Home/X-ROM source — and a second edition of the ROM disassembly book is planned.
Tim Swenson is calling for submissions toward a print run of ZX Scene, funded by Bill Miller collection proceeds.

Projects discussed: TS-Pico · TS1510 Cartridge Interface Clone · Library Tape Archiving Process · The Bill Miller Collection Topics: Pico / modern interfaces (UnoDos, etc.) · TS2068 / TC2068 · TS1000 / ZX81 / TS1500 · Cartridges, EPROM & dumping · Tape & library archiving (TAP/TZX) · Newsletters & documentation

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