Jon Becker demonstrated an image viewer he built for the TS2068’s extended “high color” mode — the 8×1 attribute mode — showing photographic pictures of Venus, a blue marble and a butterfly running from a TS-Pico, each revealed with a machine-language transition wipe (left-to-right, curtains, blinds). Becker traced the work back to David’s TS2068 machine code book and the Lloyd Dreger articles, correcting OCR errors he found in the published listing against the original archive.org scan, and leaned on ChatGPT and Claude to get the viewer going first under Fuse emulation and then on real hardware.
The demo launched the longest thread of the night: a hardware brainstorm about whether the 2068’s BASIC drawing commands (PLOT, DRAW, LINE) could be made to work in the extended color mode by swapping in a modified ROM on the TS-Pico — much as the OS64 cartridge completed 64-column mode. Carl Miles and Jeff Burrell pushed it much further into offloading the drawing itself (and the math) to the TS-Pico or the PicoVideo board, using ULAplus for more color depth, and replacing the aging SCLD to kill video-RAM contention. That led to talk of moving from the RP2040 to an RP2350, and ultimately a modern 2068 mainboard — Jeff’s “2068E” concept — that could drop into an original or 3D-printed case, output VGA (or DVI), and support a USB keyboard and 3D-printed keycaps from Ingo and Loic’s project. Jeff pointed out his 2060 board was already designed to work both as a peripheral and as a standalone that could be adapted into a 2068 case; as David put it, Jeff has been waiting for the group to catch up.
Greg Bennett showed a “cheap yellow display,” a roughly $20 ESP32 board with a touchscreen, which he’s using to trigger audio remotely over a serial link from his ZXPand Plus after adding a 3.3-to-5-volt level shifter.
Tim Swenson reported grinding through a scan of a 300-plus-page VuCalc guide — page 217 of it — and marveled that the author expanded Timex’s roughly nine-page manual into hundreds of pages of keystroke-by-keystroke, all-ASCII examples, having written similar spreadsheet books for VisiCalc, SuperCalc and half a dozen other platforms. Tim is also drafting a Z80 assembly troubleshooting guide.
David had opened the meeting with two curiosities. He flagged the ongoing work of Greg Harder, including a color conversion of Dan Tandberg’s ZX81 shooter Time Blasters. And he shared a coincidence: Lou Champagne, who wrote 1980s Toronto user-group articles on building a 6850-based MIDI interface for the ZX81, turned out to be the same Lou Champagne behind a 1984 one-man guitar-synthesizer record now surfacing on Bandcamp.