Two new members join the group this month, and the conversation ranges from teenage BASIC hustles to modern Pico-based hardware.
Charlie Day, a retired systems analyst from the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, grew up writing BASIC on a Timex Sinclair 1000 and sold programs locally to fund his way up to a 2068 and then a Sinclair QL. Some of his 2068 work was picked up by Hawg Wild Software after he found a bug in their Fig-FORTH. He was active in the Triangle-area Timex group — home to Doug Dewey, who built one of the first Spectrum ROM emulator cartridges for the 2068 — and still has his original hardware, including an unfinished 2068 windowing system he recently pulled back out.
David Laffineuse, founder of the Florida Retro Computer Club, introduces himself as a broad 8-bit collector with close to 80 machines. He came to the group after frying a 2068 with a DivMMC, and walked the group through a second machine showing flashing black blocks over stable copyright text — traced to the lower 16K video RAM at U6/U7 and lifted traces rather than the SCLD.
Other topics in this meeting:
- Jeff Kuhlmann’s VCF Southwest recap: two Timex-Sinclair tables, a rescued box of material including preliminary TS-2000 design drawings, and a D&D Software TS-1500 running Robotron on a wireless D-pad
- The TS-Pico: the Raspberry Pi Pico + micro-SD cartridge that gives the 2068 full tap-file storage from native Timex BASIC (Ricardo Calcagno, Gustavo, and Ryan Gray)
- A Raspberry Pi Pico replacement for the 8251 UART in a Westridge 2050 modem, so ZX Term 80 runs unmodified — headed to VCF Southeast in July
- OpenSPAND: 50 community-built PCBs, an open-source redesign of the ZXSpand for the ZX81/TS1000 using a Pico 2350 on an Olimex carrier
- A mystery ZX81 board identified as a Paul Hunter NV CMOS design, its lineage to Fred Nachbaur’s SCRAM and Wilf Rigter’s WRX16 hi-res graphics (still used by Greg Harder)
- The Virtual OS Museum (virtualosmuseum.org): pre-configured VM images including the QL via SQLUX and Urs Koenig’s QLE — plus IRIX, Solaris, MINIX, Ultrix, Tops-20, and a GE 200
Recurring members and guests include hosts David Anderson, Tim Swenson, Gustavo Pane, Ryan Gray, Joe VandeZande, Michael Kutzner, John Stroebel, and Jeff Kuhlmann.