TSU Meeting SUNDAY — December 15, 2024

David Anderson, Jim Baumgartner, Tim Horner, Joe, Adam Trionfo, Ryan Gray, Carl Miles, Tim Swenson, Gustavo

The group's final 2024 Sunday meeting opened with a long guest talk from Jim Baumgartner, a CalArts-trained composer (and now puzzle constructor at CrazyDamp.com). Jim recounted how, as a third-year music student in 1982, he bought a Timex Sinclair at Kmart specifically for its RAND function and used it to generate the random numbers behind his John-Cage–inspired tape piece "Wound Room" — 32 dorm-recorded reel-to-reel loops mixed by chance operations on a Buchla synth. The original tapes were lost in a 1980s storage fire, but Jim has since reconstructed the piece with an FFmpeg + Python pipeline. David showed off The Dragon's Companion, a 2068 I-Ching program that uses the machine's 85-column mode, as a thematic tie-in.

Tim Horner then demoed his Pico-based ZX-printer emulator board. It plugs into the back of a ZX81, TS1000, Spectrum or TS2068, intercepts L PRINT / L LIST / COPY, and forwards the output to a real Epson-class dot-matrix printer (serial or parallel) or a Bluetooth/Wi-Fi thermal receipt printer. The Pico also self-hosts a web UI that captures each print as PNG/JPEG/PDF, OCRs the screen back into editable text (using TrueType fonts Tim built for both the Spectrum and Timex character sets — he found the TS2068 ships subtly wider lowercase 'm' and 'w' than the Spectrum), and saves it to SD. Live demo hit a wifi/serial hiccup but the parallel print path worked. Tim and David agreed to talk about productizing the board.

Joe showed a 3D-printed Sinclair-layout keyboard built on a plywood baseboard using standard MX switches, with paper labels sealed under clear spray, plus a small companion board that uses a couple of ICs and diode logic to expose the popular shifted functions (cursors, EDIT, GRAPHICS, DELETE, quote, etc.) as dedicated keys — based on circuits from old Syntax magazine articles. Joe will share STL files and was nudged to put the design on GitHub.

Adam recapped the Albuquerque "Holiday Textravaganza" retro-computing meet that he, Ryan, and Carl attended the day before — a quarterly gathering of ~30–45 people. They ran two TS2068s plus a 1000/1500 in case; Carl's table included the Timex in-store ROM demonstrator (he finally got the ROM-cartridge build working the night before), a TC2048, ZX Microdrives, a Kaypro 2 with GoTek, and assorted pocket computers. They discovered another local Timex owner (a ZX81 with a Suntronics keyboard) — now five known Timex people in Albuquerque. Tim Swenson and Gustavo gave a short update on porting Boreal Basic / ZX Basic to the 2068: the previously-broken commands now work, and LOAD/SAVE is the next step, requiring the runtime to intercept ROM calls and handle EX-ROM bank switching — Gustavo has sent Tim a worked sample. Adam also flagged that two 2040-A printers (with paper) plus assorted software and cartridges from the Bill Miller collection are still looking for homes. Next meeting: Monday January 6, 9 PM Eastern.

Highlights

Jim Baumgartner guest talk: bought a TS1000 in 1982 to generate random numbers for a John-Cage-inspired tape-loop composition; reconstructed the lost piece in FFmpeg+Python
Tim Horner demoed a Pico ZX-printer-emulator board: captures L PRINT/COPY from ZX81/TS1000/Spectrum/2068, forwards to real Epson/thermal printers, OCRs back to text via a self-hosted web UI
Tim built TrueType fonts for both Spectrum and Timex character sets and discovered the TS2068 uses subtly wider lowercase m/w than the Spectrum
Joe presented a 3D-printed Sinclair keyboard with MX switches plus a small IC+diode board exposing shifted keys (cursors, EDIT, DELETE, quote) as dedicated keys
Albuquerque trio (Adam, Ryan, Carl) attended a local retro-computing 'Holiday Textravaganza' and found a fifth local Timex owner; Tim Swenson and Gustavo reported progress porting Boreal/ZX Basic to the 2068 — LOAD/SAVE via EX-ROM switching is next

Projects discussed: The Bill Miller Collection Topics: Printers & plotters · Hardware projects & new boards · Pico / modern interfaces (UnoDos, etc.) · User group meetings & events · BASIC programming · TS1000 / ZX81 / TS1500

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