The May 4 meeting opened with a hands-on look at the N-Go, a compact Spectrum Next-compatible machine from Spain. The acrylic wedge case drew immediate attention — laser-cut tabs and external support struts visible by design, with inlaid colored ribbon stripes across the front. The keyboard keycaps looked finished and engraved rather than stickered. The hardware spec included HDMI out, ear and microphone jacks, a PS/2 mouse port, an expansion bus, and ports for an optional Raspberry Pi Zero module — plus a power switch, which prompted a brief digression about why original Sinclair machines lacked one. (British wall outlets have individual switches; Sinclair considered the wall the appropriate off switch.)
VCF East produced an unusual find: a PC-8300, a ZX81/TS1000-style clone with white and green styling, rubbery keys, composite video, a joystick port, and sound. The giveaway that it was a licensed clone rather than an outright pirate was the Ferranti ULA inside. The ROM included extra special characters — Space Invaders and racing cars among them — and the manual was in Chinese. It came boxed with original power supply and cables and cost forty dollars. Distribution in the US likely ran through mail-order channels like Computer Shopper; color modules were apparently an option, though they output PAL.
On the TS-Pico front, Jon Becker has been developing a TS2068 extended-color image viewer that worked correctly on real hardware and in emulation but locked up consistently on a TS-Pico system. The symptoms — a handful of scrambled one-by-eight color attributes and a freeze — pointed toward a firmware issue rather than anything in the viewer itself. A known early bug in the TS-Pico ROM related to extended color handling was identified as the likely culprit, and updating to a newer firmware image was proposed as the next step.
A more detailed debugging story involved Gustavo Pane’s TPI protocol, a scheme that lets the TS2068 communicate with a CP/M machine acting as a file server using port 14 for data and port 15 for flow control. David fed Claude the protocol documentation and implementation notes; Claude proposed handling both port numbers within a single PIO using internal register tricks instead of trying to coordinate multiple PIOs. The fix was applied, and a command that had previously failed consistently now worked consistently — though it opened downstream work in related functions like file loading. The group considered it a significant step given how hard the original bug had been to reproduce.
The image conversion discussion centered on a web-based tool for generating ZX Spectrum and TS2068 graphics formats. Most of the code had been built with Claude through feature requests and corrections, with Josef Jelinek handling more technical dithering algorithm fixes that were merged after review. The group also explored Dithertron, a conversion tool supporting a wide range of classic targets from the Spectrum to the Game Gear. Several members noted that Spectrum palette conversion remains genuinely hard for arbitrary photographs — attribute clash and low color resolution make hand-drawn title screens look great while automated photo conversion continues to struggle.
Keyboard hardware came up in the context of Ingo Schmied’s custom keycap Kickstarter. Several modern keyboards were compared for potential Sinclair-style reuse — Keychron low-profile and tenkeyless models, Cherry MX LP boards, 8BitDo retro units, and a Geeky-branded wired board with RGB lighting.
The meeting closed with emulation. Michael Hart had attempted running ZEsarUX on a Raspberry Pi Zero, but performance was poor and mode-switching appeared to stall. Alternatives discussed included SZ81, Clock Signal (which identifies the target platform automatically from the file being loaded), RetroPie, and a bare-metal Pico-based ZX81 emulator. The underlying goal was something more appliance-like than a desktop emulator: a dedicated device where a user could select a game from a menu and boot straight into it.