A Father’s Day meeting full of AI-assisted experiments, hardware repair news, and a giant plastic mystery from the Bill Miller collection.
David opened with a string of weekend rabbit holes run with the help of Claude: getting Gustavo’s TS-Pico TPI protocol working across both ports (now on GitHub), running ZmakeBas in the GitHub environment to compile BASIC text files into tap files, exploring a Pascal for the 2068 that offloads work to the Pico, and generating a “Defender meets Choplifter” video game that ran in the Timex 8×1 high-color mode. Mowgli offered a timely caution about the copyright uncertainty around AI-generated code and art.
David also demoed a searchable web archive of the group’s history, built with Claude Code: roughly 13,000 groups.io and Yahoo-group messages going back to 2001, plus Whisper transcripts of all 109 Zoom meetings, indexed into topics and projects pages. It surfaced work — like Carl’s 1068 board — that lives mostly in the meetings rather than the mailing list.
Carl Miles confirmed a genuinely bad SCLD in David Laffineuse’s 2068, and reported that a developer in Europe was adapting a TC2068 SCLD replacement into a pin-for-pin, socketed drop-in for the TS2068. Carl’s own 1068 motherboard was down to a memory issue he planned to revisit soon.
Jeff Burrell showed version three of the 2060-compatible board, plus a smaller, cheaper variant.
VCF Midwest planning (September 13-14, Chicago): David had reserved 24 feet of table space and invited members to send projects to display.
Joe reported on ZX81/TS1000 machines David sent him from the late Bob Swoger’s estate (via John Mobley), including a lucite-cased 1000 with rack handles and a “dead bug” custom build.
Greg Bennett synced music to a ZX81 “music video” using the ZX-Spand Plus joystick port and a cheap Arduino.
Carl shared his method for reproducing Timex nameplate labels — answering Greg Bennett’s question about a missing TS2068 nameplate.
A tour of Paul Farrow’s Fruitcake devices: the Chroma 81, Chroma 80, and Spectra FPGA add-ons with color, sound, cartridge ports, and SCART RGB output.
Jeff Kuhlmann distributed a box of Timex gear from VCF Southwest, possibly once owned by CATS member Joan Keely of Bracketville, Texas.
Mike’s question about a color ZX81 led to Dan Roy’s Colorsin 81 (Sync magazine, 1983) and the later John Oliger/Fred Nachbaur TI-9918 interface.
The meeting closed on Bill Miller’s massive molded-plastic Timex “control center,” now with Tim Swenson.
Recurring members and guests included hosts David Anderson and Adam Trionfo, Tim Swenson, Carl Miles, Jeff Burrell, Jeff Kuhlmann, Greg Bennett, Joe VandeZande, John Mobley, Ryan Gray, Ricardo Calcagno, Gustavo, and Mowgli Assor.