TSU Meeting SUNDAY — October 20, 2024

David Anderson, Michael, Jeff Burrell, Gustavo, Tim Swenson, Ryan Gray, Joe, Peyton, Tom Heinz, Johnny

David opened with two announcements: the Load ZX Spectrum Museum is staging an online event next Sunday (Oct 27, 4 PM ET / 9 PM Portugal time) for the museum's anniversary, with a teaser "big reveal" about a 1986-era Timex Portugal hardware project (likely tied to the Portuguese Minerva initiative). And while archive.org is still half-down — Wayback Machine partially up, but scanned books, magazines, and digitized software offline — David has dumped his personal mirror (~86 GB of magazine PDFs plus TS1000/2068 software and books) to a public Google Drive folder linked from groups.io. He also solicited holiday programs (Thanksgiving, Christmas) for group sharing.

A new attendee, Michael, walked the group through his FujiNet port targeting the ZX Spectrum and TS2068 — now in its fifth revision after 3+ years of work. The board uses a Tang Nano 20K FPGA (he's learning Verilog), SN74LVC245 level shifters between the 5V Z80 bus and 3.3V FPGA, and an in-line memory chip serving as a swappable ROM/BIOS. A generic 40-pin connector lets him swap interface cards for Spectrum, TS2068, MSX, and TS80. The Spectrum side will need a custom BIOS since the Spectrum has essentially no built-in I/O routines. He hopes to hand hardware to coders by the beginning of the year. Gustavo offered to extend the TS-Pico's BASIC command syntax (currently prefixed with "TPI") with a second prefix for Michael's hardware so a Speccy could host both peripherals simultaneously, and Jeff offered backplane-form-factor and code-insight help.

Tim Swenson reviewed ZXZine production logistics for the upcoming physical edition: eight articles in hand, layout is a day or two, hardest piece is the print/mail pipeline (funded from Bill Miller collection proceeds). David urged Larry (ZX-Wespi build), Paul (vendor/BBS history), Jeff (Pico video story), Keith and Ryan to write up their work; David is drafting the TS-Pico history piece with Ricardo and Gustavo. Jeff reported progress on his multi-personality Pico mass-storage board — basic file routines done, TAP routines underway; the board can pose as a TS2068/Super 2068, Spectrum, ZX81, or CP/M machine. David showed his Cherry-MX keyboard replacement for the TS2068 (three-board sandwich, low-profile keycaps) and will share Gerbers; Peyton may swap his non-working 2068 with Joe for repair.

Shorter items: Tom couldn't get a large SD card recognized by his TS-Pico — Mike, Jeff and Gustavo diagnosed it as the FAT32 32 GB partition limit (use Disk Manager or Rufus to carve a 32 GB FAT32 partition). A TS-Pico firmware update in testing changes the load-command sigil from * to &, so Joe will ship his Pico file browser in two flavors. David Sali asked about TextToBAS; Joe demonstrated the simpler .b81 plain-text route into EightyOne. Ryan floated using ON ERR (à la Interface 1's RST 8 trick) to graft TS2068 BASIC commands like SOUND, STICK, FREE onto a Spectrum; the group sketched how it could work. David flagged Lee Hart's plan to build an Altoids-tin-sized ZX80/ZX81 badge for VCF next year. Tom asked whether a TS2068 could drive a DCC model-railroad setup — answer: yes, with a Pico front-end. Next meeting: Monday Nov 4, 9 PM ET (the night before US election day).

Highlights

Michael unveiled his 5th-revision FujiNet board for Spectrum/TS2068 using a Tang Nano 20K FPGA, targeting hardware handoff by early 2025.
Gustavo offered to extend the TS-Pico's TPI command prefix so the Pico and Michael's FujiNet can coexist on the same machine.
Load ZX Spectrum Museum anniversary event Oct 27 will reveal a 1986-era Timex Portugal hardware project.
ZXZine physical edition has 8 articles in hand; print/mail funded from Bill Miller collection proceeds.
Tom's SD-card failure on the TS-Pico diagnosed as the FAT32 32 GB partition ceiling — use Disk Manager or Rufus to repartition.

Projects discussed: TS-Pico · FPGA "Advanced 2068" · ZX-Wespi / Wespi-Nano · The Bill Miller Collection Topics: Pico / modern interfaces (UnoDos, etc.) · Hardware projects & new boards · ZX Spectrum · TS2068 / TC2068 · Newsletters & documentation · BASIC programming

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