Skip to content

TSU Meeting MONDAY — August 4, 2025

Watch on YouTube

David Anderson, Steven Reid, Ryan Gray, Gustavo, Jim, Michael, Paul Anderson, Jeff Burrell

The Monday meeting centered on a guest interview with Steven Reid, who runs the long-running ZX81 blog Read for Fun (211+ posts tagged ZX81). Steven walked the group through his origin story — a ZX81 bought in Europe around 1983, then a hiatus while he moved through Commodore/Amiga/PC machines — and the decision in 2006 to publish at least one ZX81 program write-up every month, a streak he has now kept up for nearly twenty years. He talked about coming to Z80 assembly as an adult after a CS degree, his in-progress Ultima-style RPG "Jim Quest" (his vehicle for learning machine code, with compression for maps, pathfinding and a Chroma colour mode), and his recent Truchet-tile program (BASIC version published, faster machine-code version in the pipeline). Asked for assembly learning resources he recommended Toni Baker's Mastering Machine Code on Your ZX81 and Rodney Zaks' Z80 book, plus the TI-calculator (Z80-based) forums for code examples.

The other big segment was a hands-on demo from Ryan Gray of his new menu / file-browser program for the TS-Pico, written entirely in TS2068 BASIC. Ricardo Calcagno's idea was to bundle it inside the Pico's built-in "no file mounted" TAP, so a bare LOAD "" on an empty Pico brings up a colour cheat-sheet of TPI commands and offers SPACE to jump straight into the menu — no manual LOAD "menu" step. The browser is a Timex-styled (cyan/black/white) Norton-Commander-ish two-column view with arrow navigation, jump-by-letter, jump-by-index (&N), tap/doc mount detection (it prompts for a type when the extension is missing or mangled, e.g. %20-encoded filenames pulled from the web), an embedded help screen, and hooks into the Pico's GET INFO / help. Ryan is tweaking command bindings ahead of TS-Pico firmware v1.2.

Gustavo (Argentina) gave the back-story on the TS2068 storage stack: when Timex Portugal closed the factory in 1984 he was left without support for a brand-new 2068, so he wrote his own TPI command extension and ROM patches to drive a CP/M host as a storage backend — work that long predated the AERCO he eventually owned, and which Ricardo later adopted (with minor port changes) as the software base for the TS-Pico. Gustavo also explained how patching the OS lets the TS-Pico put XROM in the lower 32K and DOCK bank in the upper, enabling true AROS-style cartridge programs to be built from BASIC saves on the Pico hardware (where the original SCLD will not allow it).

Side topics included Jim's plan to build an RS-232 / TNC interface for the TS1000 using an 8251 (David pointed him at Will Richter's 2050-modem-derived ASCII schematics on archive.org and existing terminal programs), Paul Anderson putting a custom TS1000 — built into the original Timex plastic carrying case with a full-size TI keyboard cut into the lid — up for sale on the groups.io list, and a tour of modern ZX81/TS1000 peripherals (ZX-Wespi/Wespi-Nano for clean video, ZXpand for SD-card + AY sound, Carl's "super 1000" with 64K + sound + Wespi). David announced the next Sunday meeting has been moved up to Sunday the 10th because of his vacation.

Highlights

  • Guest interview: Steven Reid (Read for Fun blog) on 20 years of monthly ZX81 posts, learning Z80 as an adult, and his in-progress Ultima clone "Jim Quest"
  • Ryan Gray demoed a new Norton-Commander-style TS-Pico file browser written in 100% TS2068 BASIC, bundled into the Pico's "no file mounted" TAP so LOAD "" auto-presents it
  • Gustavo recounted writing his TS2068 TPI storage protocol and ROM patches in 1984 after Timex Portugal closed — the codebase Ricardo later built the TS-Pico software on
  • Recommended Z80 learning path: Toni Baker's ZX81 machine-code book + Rodney Zaks' Z80 reference, plus TI-calculator forums for worked Z80 examples
  • Paul Anderson listed a custom TS1000 mounted in the original Timex plastic carrying case with a TI full-travel keyboard for sale on the groups.io list

Projects discussed: TS-Pico · ZX-Wespi / Wespi-Nano · "1068" — Enhanced TS1000 · TS1510 Cartridge Interface Clone · TAP-to-Cart — TS2068 Cartridge Conversion Topics: Pico / modern interfaces (UnoDos, etc.) · TS1000 / ZX81 / TS1500 · Machine code, Z80 & assemblers · BASIC programming · Cartridges, EPROM & dumping · User group meetings & events

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