TSU Meeting SUNDAY — September 21, 2025
David Anderson, Adam Trionfo, Ryan Gray, Carl Miles, Stewart Newfeld, Peyton Bratton, Gustavo, Tim Swenson, Evan, Peter
The meeting was a debrief of Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 2025 in Schaumburg, Illinois, which much of the group had attended the previous weekend. The host walked through photos table-by-table. Carl Miles showed his TS1510 cartridge-interface replicas (16- and 32-program versions, the latter with a 16-position rotary switch) along with REV1 and REV2 boards of his enhanced TS1000 — which he is now calling the "TS-1068" — a single board that integrates the Westby (ZX-Wespi) video output, sound, and a programmable joystick controller. Jeff Burrell, Ricardo, Gustavo, Ryan, and Joe displayed their "Advanced 2068" expansion (FPGA-based, eventually destined for a 2068-shaped case). Ingo and his brother brought their KiloZ ZX81 builds; Jeff Feta ran a high-res Boulder Dash clone on a ZX81 with a Zonix sound clone and showed a CompactFlash adapter driven by a custom TS1000 ROM; Mark Martin exhibited a real Sinclair QL plus a B-Box and a sheet-metal Bill Miller 1000 expansion with hand-wire-wrapped 16K static RAM.
Stewart Newfeld walked through the two products he ships from his eBay store: drop-in replacement keyboards for the TS1000/ZX81 (sourced through Kurt at Ginger Electronics in Germany — micro-switch board behind a membrane, double-stick-taped into the original case) and a small video-output adapter. He's sold roughly two hundred of each over two and a half years. He also flagged Tim Horner's ZXPS — an Arduino-Uno shield that drives the Sinclair 2040, Alphacom, and silver-paper printers and doubles as a serial print server (~$15 as a kit, code on GitHub) — and Horner's follow-on "virtual printer" Pico that sniffs the ZX81 bus and exposes printer output over Wi-Fi via a web server. Adam confirmed his end-of-show Timex/Sinclair history talk was recorded and should appear on the VCF Midwest YouTube channel in about a month. Peyton recapped the off-grid mesh net that ran across the show floor, including a Commodore 64 wired up as a relay node.
Two new members introduced themselves. Evan demoed Lantern, his long-running adventure-game engine that cross-compiles to native Z80/6502 code for the Spectrum, Apple II, TRS-80 Model 1, and CoCo; he's currently adding Z-machine compiler/assembler output so the engine can target any platform with a Z-code interpreter, including the ZX81 — for which he was given one of Stuart's keyboards. The chance encounter at the table turned uncanny when he produced a 1983 Timex/Sinclair User magazine showing himself as a kid in a New Haven workshop run by Chris Baldwin (an Apple II / ZX81 teacher whose widow had mailed Evan the magazine after he tried to track Baldwin down). Peter (Chicago) recounted his TS1000 → TS1500 → TS2068 → QL path, the Aramaic/Assyrian word processor he wrote for the 2068 using its remappable character-table pointer (with a custom font editor saved to TAP), and his role as a coauthor of the Assyrian addition to Unicode 3.0 in 1997.
The practical tail end of the meeting was Peter's incoming TS-Pico, arriving Thursday: the group walked him through the modern tape-conversion workflow — record the cassette as WAV (Audacity), load the WAV in Fuse, type LOAD, save the result as a TAP, and copy it to the Pico's SD card — and explained why the 2068's notoriously "deaf" ear input usually needs a hot period-correct cassette deck (TS2020, Radio Shack Mini Set 9, or the equivalent GE/Tandy units, all from the same OEM), an outboard op-amp, or swapping R12 from 6.8K to a lower value. Gustavo (joining the call) noted the TS-Pico keeps the original tape routines wired through, so a TAP can in principle be written straight from the ear port. Adam shared an Amazon source for thermal paper that works in the 2040 printer. The next meeting is Monday, October 6 at 9 PM; one suggested agenda item is a roundup of TS-era robotics articles and home-built projects.
Highlights
- VCF Midwest 2025 debrief: Timex/Sinclair group ran a multi-table exhibit in Schaumburg with attendees from across the US plus Tim Horner from New Zealand.
- Carl Miles showed TS1510 cartridge-interface replicas and both revisions of his enhanced TS1000 ("TS-1068") with Westby video, sound, and joystick integrated on one board.
- Jeff Burrell's "Advanced 2068" FPGA expansion (with Ricardo, Gustavo, Ryan, Joe) was on display; Adam's TS history talk was recorded for the VCF Midwest YouTube channel.
- New member Evan introduced Lantern, his adventure-game cross-compiler (Spectrum/Apple II/TRS-80/CoCo, Z-machine output in progress), and turned out to be the kid pictured in a 1983 Timex/Sinclair User article.
- New member Peter (TS2068 Aramaic/Assyrian word processor, Unicode 3.0 coauthor for Assyrian) walked through the WAV → Fuse → TAP → SD-card workflow for his incoming TS-Pico.
Projects discussed: TS1510 Cartridge Interface Clone · "1068" — Enhanced TS1000 · FPGA "Advanced 2068" · TS-Pico · ZX-Wespi / Wespi-Nano · The Bill Miller Collection Topics: User group meetings & events · TS1000 / ZX81 / TS1500 · TS2068 / TC2068 · Hardware projects & new boards · Tape, cassette & loading · Pico / modern interfaces (UnoDos, etc.)
Summary generated from the meeting recording; the full transcript is kept in the group's private archive.