Progress report No. 0

Some small progress with the first of three research projects:

I have hunted high and low to solve the problem of the password protected Siements/Telenorma Minitel terminal. However, another Minitel I bid for on eBay under £20 arrives, no password this time to deal with! This one has the all important function key and is monochrome. An Alcatel Minitel 1.

My attempts at written French are laughable but I have sent this call for help to some Github developers running Minitel projects – mostly are French speakers…

“Bonjour, je suis Anglais et je ne suppose pas que je peut te parler courrament, enfin…
J’ai achete un Minitel Allemaigne produit par Siemens/Telenorma. Le BT 81 it il y a un petit probleme, car le mot de passe est installe. J’ai obtenu le bin file de le Fujitsu EPROM, mais je ne peut pat trouver le mote de passe. Si il y a un method de le trouver ca sera magnifique! Donc, je peut te le envoyer si tu veux? Mon email est james@tregaskis.org (www.tregaskis.org)

Merci en avance!
James”

TL866

Inside the Telenorma/Siemens Minitel (TSM for short) I extracted the EPROM and wired it up to the TL866 EPROM reader. The chip I had was unlisted and I had to swap ins 2 and 24 to make it work. (ref. https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-411-minipro-tl866-universal-programmer-review/575/)

The binary code is shown on the TL866 software. I save the EPROM image and examined it carefully, looking for a password to try. Nothing seemed to work but here is a screenshot.

Perhaps decompiling the binary code might help, yet to do this:

Ida Decompiler by Hexcode :

I think the next step is to simply link it to a raspberry pi via the RS232 port at the rear of the machine. Other projects on Github show the way. One such excellent post is found here.

Next Steps:

Using the program on Linux getty , I will use this to implement a simple tty terminal to the MInitel and then run a text based “something” on the pi.

Possibilities are:

linking via OSC (using python) to sensor(s)
The other Minitel(s?)

Using Wekinator to facilitate an extra machine learning component between the Minitel and sensor. ideas might be to use this to call up Twitter and strip the messages into ascii and display them on the Minitel

TTL cable made and installed