TSU Meeting SUNDAY — March 15, 2026

David, Tim Swenson, Adam Trionfo, Joe, John, Mark, Greg, Carl Miles, Mogli, Paul, Ryan Gray

David opened by reporting that he has finished indexing the last of his scanned newsletters and magazines — 15,731 articles across 1,753 issues of 170 periodicals (92 of which are Timex/Sinclair-specific). He did the last batch using a Claude "skill" that walks each OCR file and emits CSV with title, summary, tags, and people. The group dug briefly into the QL-era backstory of the New England Sinclair QL User Group, which split off from the Boston Computer Society around 1990 when most of the remaining SIG members were QL users.

On the archiving side, Joe described his current process for the hardest cassette tapes: Audacity to capture clean waveforms, separate utilities to measure individual bit widths, then Excel to flag bits whose widths fall outside spec so he can hand-patch them — he has recovered several previously unreadable SynchroSet tapes and is working through more 2068 BBS tapes. David then demoed his new build of FUSE on Mac with a TS-Pico peripheral module: he had Claude port Gustavo's MicroPython Pico code to C, disassembling the XROM along the way, and FUSE now does directory listings against the emulated Pico. Discussion of Linux distros, apt-get, and the alternative emulators (Zesarux, WarajeVo under DOSBox) followed.

John shared a ZX81 program that does 64-bit binary↔decimal conversion using the Z80's BCD add, poked into a REM line at 16514 and cross-assembled with z88dk + appmake. That led into a discussion of why the ZX81 ROM's CLS clobbers so many registers (it has to handle the collapsed-vs-expanded display file and does an effective memory test each call — documented on p.16 of Logan's ROM disassembly). Tim recapped the work of Boyd Drago — three TS2068 machine-code books, his Barbarossa port, and the 1993 Conquest strategic war game — and the broader Mark Stuber war-game line (War in the East on the 1000/2068/QL, Ardennes, Fall of the Third Reich, Britain Invaded). Greg said his Chris Seavey type-in is almost ready to ship with NTSC/PAL and color auto-detection, and he has a Wordle build that needs the larger TS-Pico-hosted word list.

Mogli reported hauling away eight boxes of already-scanned paper from David's attic for redistribution, which led to a long thread on legacy planning — Bite Delight's Ben Verstieg passed away in December, taking the DivMMC, the Spectrum diagnostic cartridge, and a lot of repair work with him. Carl noted he got that diagnostic cartridge's ROM running on a TS2068 via the ROM-swap on his in-progress Microdrive board; the cartridge already knows about the 2068 variant. The group floated a VCF Midwest talk ("So you're dead, now what?") about willing collections to specific people or institutions rather than letting families discard them. Scheduling: next Monday meeting April 6 at 9pm Eastern; the April Sunday meeting moves to the 26th because David will be at VCF East (April 17–19).

Highlights

David finished indexing 15,731 articles across 1,753 newsletter/magazine issues using a Claude skill
FUSE now builds on Mac with a working TS-Pico peripheral module (MicroPython→C port)
Joe is recovering previously-unreadable SynchroSet and 2068 BBS tapes via Audacity + bit-width analysis in Excel
Ben Verstieg of Bite Delight passed away in December — DivMMC, Spectrum diagnostic cartridge, and repair work are now orphaned
Carl got the Spectrum diagnostic cartridge ROM running on a TS2068 via his Microdrive board's ROM swap

Projects discussed: Library Tape Archiving Process · TS-Pico · The Bill Miller Collection Topics: Newsletters & documentation · Tape & library archiving (TAP/TZX) · Tape, cassette & loading · Spectrum emulation & software · Machine code, Z80 & assemblers · Games

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