We talked about Ingo Schmied’s KiloZed keyboard. The first Kickstarter run shipped with a flaw: Jay Mundy noticed six keys missing their gray fill and a stray dollar sign on the V key, and also argued the gray should be the original dithered checkerboard. Ingo and Loïc reprinted the corrected checkerboard set and sent replacements to every backer at no charge.
Ingo also redesigned the keyboard PCB in KiCad. His brother Misha reworked the case to use threaded inserts so the screws come up from the bottom, and Ingo respaced the mounting holes to match. He plans to clean everything up into a GitHub repo linked from the KiloZed landing page, order larger quantities of the keyboard PCBs and ZX-Wespi-V carriers so buyers can get a single unit.
David then showed the Timex Sinclair 1526, Don Crawford and Dave Spinnett’s build around the OpenSpand board. The cartridge is nearly the exact size of a 1510-series Timex cartridge but hides a micro SD card, with the edge fingers simply routing the card to the connector; it ships with Zoust, Zonkey Kong, and Robotack 2024.
Stewart Newfeld (Zebra Systems) supplied the night’s history. He unearthed a six-chip Zebra Talker (C-130 rev A, dated 1984), and revealed he still has 23 SC01 phoneme chips. He wants Zebra’s full documentation put online and open-sourced. Joe VandeZande will try to get the six-chip Talker running to show at VCF Midwest.
Carl Miles updated the group on the 1068, his modernized TS1000 motherboard. He plans to strip it to a bare 16K machine, confirm that boots, then add back the ESP32, VGA, joystick ports, sound, and Wilf Rigter’s ‘251-based 64K bank-switching circuit. He hopes to have it at least partly working for the show.
Ryan Gray gave an extended demo of ULAplus running on Jeff Burrell’s Pico Video. ULAplus, originally designed by Andrew Owen, extends the Spectrum palette, and Ryan has been building an alternate palette aimed at text and programming rather than games.
Willie is selling some of his hardware, including Oliger Kempston joystick boards that work across the TS1000, TS1500, and TS2068, and is building more Oliger disk drive sets. The group compared Oliger’s cleaner slash-command BASIC extension to Larkin’s clumsier RANDOMIZE USR approach.
Mowgli Assor showed of a couple of pc boards from Bob Swoger’s estate, including a bare Zebra Talker, a 1988 SMUG video digitizer, and Doug Dewey’s Enter Lingua “Twister”. Mowgli also brought a German-language QL book found on the freebie table at VCF Europe in Berlin.
Much of the back half was a VCF Midwest roll call for the mid-September Chicago show: Carl, Joe, Mowgli, and Peyton Bratton are confirmed, Stewart is a maybe.