TSU Meeting MONDAY — November 4, 2024

David, Hugo Pinto, Johnny Red, Adam Trionfo, Ryan Gray, Stuart, Gustavo, Peyton, Paul, Robert Fischer, Mark

The Monday meeting was dominated by a guest presentation from Hugo Pinto of the Load ZX Spectrum Museum (Portugal), who walked the group through the museum's multi-year recovery of TENET — a classroom networking system designed by Timex Portugal in 1986. TENET was pitched at the Chinese railway-system schools and aimed to undercut PC-based networks by tying together a TC2048/Spectrum teacher station (with an FDD 3000 floppy system) and up to 24 student stations over cheap 2.5mm audio jacks, with an 8031/8051 co-processor handling polling and packet routing transparently to the Z80. The project shipped a demo to China but the deal collapsed (Sinclair sold to Amstrad; Timex Portugal's finances) and the system was effectively lost until the museum reverse-engineered the PALs (brute-forcing the truth tables with an Arduino and re-deriving the logic), disassembled the Z80 and 8051 ROMs, rebuilt the board, and — via a chance Timex-Portugal employee reunion — recovered the original teacher software (master-control program, demo geography lessons, etc.).

Hugo connected live hardware to the call and demonstrated TENET running: pinging stations, sending overlay messages to a pupil's screen, broadcasting messages, remotely viewing a pupil's screen (~33 KB/s grab), resetting a pupil (or all pupils), broadcast-loading TS-Word onto every station, playing Mozart on multiple machines simultaneously, and enabling pupil-initiated file-server access for saving back to the teacher's floppy. He contrasted TENET's master/slave, transparent-to-the-Z80 design with the slower, peer-to-peer, blocking Interface 1, and showed both the rebuilt full-size board and a newer SMD/CPLD shrink that will be released to the community along with the ROMs and a draft manual. Roadmap: a v2 smaller board people can buy and tinker with, then a v3 with an ESP/Wi-Fi side-channel that would tunnel TENET over TCP so US and Portuguese machines could share a virtual classroom.

David then gave a TS-Pico status update (Ricardo absent): Ricardo has added the ability to load a .dck file from SD card into either Pico SRAM (volatile) or a flash-ROM slot (always-resident, instant access), and a way to ship firmware updates via SD card rather than reflashing. Ryan Gray is building a menu front-end so users can browse and launch programs instead of typing TPI load commands, and — to deal with BASIC's limited error feedback — he and Ricardo added a "Pico, are you busy?" handshake so the menu code can wait cleanly instead of guessing whether an error means file-not-found or device-busy. Ryan also flagged that some .dck files in the wild (snapshot-style packagings of Spectrum ROM + program) have headers the Pico refuses to load.

Stuart returned after a long absence to introduce Tim Horner's Arduino Uno shield for driving the TS2040 / Alphacom 32 printer from an Arduino: an Uno-format board with three built-in fonts, bitmap printing, and an optional Qwiic/STEMMA I2C header for sensors. The board, schematic, assembly notes, and Tim's open-source firmware are going up on a new (soon bilingual EN/ES) site; Stuart will mail boards to anyone in the group who wants one. Brief side-discussion noted the TS2040 and Alphacom 32 are essentially the same printer in slightly different cases, and the Timex joystick is a rebadged Zircon controller originally for the Fairchild Channel F.

Highlights

Hugo Pinto demoed the museum's restored TENET classroom network live — teacher TC2048 controlling pupil stations over 2.5mm jacks
TENET history: 1986 Timex Portugal design (David Karlin lead) aimed at Chinese railway schools; collapsed with the Sinclair/Amstrad sale
Museum reverse-engineered PALs by Arduino brute-force, disassembled the Z80 and 8051 ROMs, and rebuilt the board from one surviving unit
Roadmap: TENET v2 SMD/CPLB board for community sale, v3 with ESP/Wi-Fi to tunnel TENET over TCP for cross-Atlantic virtual classrooms
TS-Pico update: .dck-to-flash-slot loading, SD-card firmware updates, Ryan's menu front-end with a new 'Pico busy?' handshake

Projects discussed: TS-Pico Topics: User group meetings & events · Hardware projects & new boards · Prototypes & rarities · Pico / modern interfaces (UnoDos, etc.) · Timex Computer (European: TC2048/3256) · Printers & plotters

Summary generated from the meeting recording; the full transcript is kept in the group's private archive.