TSU Meeting SUNDAY — May 17, 2026

David, Mike, Jeff Burrell, Jeff Coleman, Joe, Ingo, Roland, Ryan, Adam, Michael Kutzner

Jeff Burrell gave a full status on the 2060 Bus Expansion Unit: an FPGA-driven board with 1MB SRAM, VGA output, stereo audio, SD card, USB keyboard/gamepad/mouse, WiFi, RTC and a serial port, designed to host swappable cores (2068, enhanced 2068, Spectrum, possibly Spectrum 128) and to run standalone as a CP/M or 2068 emulator machine as well as plugged into a 2068. Version-2 boards are with the hardware-group testers; the rev-3 layout (a joystick-connector and minor placement rework) ships to fab in June, with first boards expected back late fall/winter. Joe showed off the 3D-printed enclosure he designed — the 2068 inserts under an overhang, echoing the original Timex stack picture — and confirmed it's sized to support a 13-inch CRT on top. The whole package will ship with a ~16V laptop-style brick that powers the BEU and the 2068 together.

Roland asked whether FUSE's bundled "TC2068" ROMs are really identical to the TS2068 ROMs. The group sorted out that the real TS-vs-TC difference is the SCLD (YUV vs RGBI video) rather than the ROM, that 2068 ROM chips are sometimes socketed and sometimes soldered, and that Joe will dump the ROMs from a 2068 he repaired and post them to the list for a binary compare. David then demoed an AY-chip music tracker he's written for the 2068, layered over an existing Spectrum playback engine. He walked through his workflow with Claude — keeping a local directory of 2068 reference material (disassembly, technical manual, Gustavo's ROM work) to compensate for the LLM's shallow Timex knowledge, and iterating via FUSE plus a telemetry log of 2068→Pico commands. Tim Swenson's testing surfaced a tap-file load bug that turned on emulator-vs-real-tape behavior, now fixed by loading songs by filename.

David ran through a wave of new ZX81/TS1000 software: Don Crawford and Dave Spinett's "Zoust" (a Joust port that needs a ZX Band for extra RAM, posted on Sinclair ZX World and several Facebook groups, ~32K compressed into 16K), Walter Ariel Recy's "Legend of Zed" roguelike sequel on itch.io, and a turn-based Tetris for the ZX-80 that works around the lack of an INKEY$. He explained how the ZX Band maps RAM into the 8–16K and 32–48K spaces (needed for WRX16 hi-res routines), noted the OpenSpan as a community-built clone, and pointed at a Slovakian Tindie seller with seven ZX Bands in stock (~$119 + $31 shipping). Separately, Joe rescued a Risk-helper program written by member Alexander's grandfather: the WAV had 60Hz mains modulation that was confusing 81's decoder, and Joe fixed it in Audacity by converting to mono, amplifying, normalizing, and zeroing out the lead-in/lead-out noise.

Jeff Coleman showed his Baudot corded-key teletype keyboard, now in a five-unit batch from the wood shop. He's wiring it through an Atari-style joystick port via an iCode USB adapter and writing short machine-code drivers per host (2068, Lambda 8300, C64, Spectrum Next planned) so it can run as a teaching/demo tool with tutorial and free-type modes — an homage to the early-80s Computer Controller Cookbook joystick-port projects. He'll bring 2068, TS1000, TS1500 and Jupiter Ace gear to VCF Southwest (end of May, shifted earlier this year because of the World Cup). Ingo dropped in briefly to announce his project landing page is live with a subscribe link; GitHub repos for STL files and PCBs, plus keyboard-kit ordering, will follow. Mike (a former National Semiconductor microlithography technician) joined for the first part, sharing background on the Fort Worth Timex user group connection. Next meeting is June 1 (Monday).

Highlights

Jeff Burrell: 2060 BEU rev-2 in testers' hands, rev-3 to fab in June, first boards back late fall/winter
Joe demoed the 3D-printed 2060 enclosure with overhang for the 2068 and CRT-on-top support
Don Crawford & Dave Spinett released "Zoust" — a ZX81/TS1000 Joust port (needs ZX Band)
David demoed an AY-chip music tracker he built for the TS2068 over a Spectrum playback engine
Joe recovered a member's grandfather's Risk-helper tape by normalizing out 60Hz mains noise in Audacity

Projects discussed: FPGA "Advanced 2068" · TS-Pico Topics: TS2068 / TC2068 · TS1000 / ZX81 / TS1500 · Pico / modern interfaces (UnoDos, etc.) · Hardware projects & new boards · Games · Tape & library archiving (TAP/TZX)

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