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TSU Meeting MONDAY — September 7, 2026

David, Charlie, Ryan, Tim Swenson, François, Joseph, John, Jeff, Paul, Carl, Peyton

This Labor Day meeting opened with Charlie describing his new replacement ROM for the TS2068. It provides a structured, QL SuperBASIC-style BASIC built on a reusable kernel. It uses labels instead of line numbers, with a label table for jumps, has a full-screen editor and is integer-only for now. He built it with help from Claude and Codex, using the 2068 technical references to check the work. The same kernel now runs a Forth ROM, already public on GitHub, with integer and floating point fitting in the home ROM. Charlie is working on a Forth/BASIC hybrid that lets new keywords be added from a library, and is about to wire up the hardware layer.

Joseph demoed his browser-based TS2068 emulator, TS Run. It is hooked up to archive.org, includes Charlie's ROM and has WebGL CRT and scanline filters, clock-accurate AY/beeper sound with optional stereo, and a turbo-load mode that runs about 100 frames per displayed frame. It also supports 64K RAM-in-dock cartridges, which the TS-Pico ROM developer plans to use to test a CP/M build for the 2068. Joseph explained how he used Claude, Codex and Grok together, and how he had to keep the agents from falling back on ZX Spectrum assumptions, for example on the Timex color palette. David pointed to the reference folder he published on GitHub (ROM disassemblies, the technical manual and more, mostly in Markdown) as material for AI-assisted 2068 work. The group also discussed the ROM's extra cursor/delete delay loop.

John released a playable conversion of the arcade game Berserk as a cartridge. It runs in extended color mode, uses XOR redraw to remove flicker and reproduces the speech on the AY chip by fitting square-wave harmonics plus noise to the original audio, played back at 60 Hz. That speech-to-AY work is now its own project, with an embedded TS Run demo comparing codecs and channel counts. Joseph suggested a linearized multi-channel volume approach for sample playback. Paul shared the news that Frank Davis died in July and recalled their company Mechanical Affinity, the Indiana Sinclair users group and their QL inventory purchases.

Much of the rest of the meeting covered events. Jeff reported on VCF Southeast, where his exhibit ran a ZX81 online through a 300-baud modem and he found a modem carrier-detect glitch. Members planned the group's 24-foot table at VCF Midwest, including a Friday exhibitor dinner, Openspand boards, a cased board shown bare last year, a custom plexiglass ZX81 from Bob Swoger's estate restored by Joe, and a Pico slideshow chain-loading demo (John's slideshow plus the Blade Runner slideshow). François will exhibit Timex and QL machines, including the Pico, at VCF Montreal on November 7–8. John mentioned a small retro fair in Albuquerque on the 19th and 20th.

Highlights

  • Charlie's new structured-BASIC replacement ROM for the TS2068, plus a public Forth ROM on the same kernel
  • Joseph's TS Run browser emulator: archive.org integration, CRT filters, turbo loading, 64K dock RAM support
  • John released a playable Berserk cartridge conversion with AY-chip speech, and a separate speech-to-AY project
  • Paul remembered Frank Davis (died July) and the history of Mechanical Affinity
  • VCF Midwest table and dinner plans; François exhibiting at VCF Montreal Nov 7–8

Projects discussed: TS-Pico · Openspand · "1068" — Enhanced TS1000 Topics: TS2068 / TC2068 · BASIC programming · Spectrum emulation & software · Games · User group meetings & events · Cartridges, EPROM & dumping

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