Introduction

The mupid was an early home computer and terminal for the Austrian Post's BTX (Bildschirmtext) service, a variant of Videotex.

The BTX system has been switched off, so the hardware is only usable with a floppy disk station or something that emulates the "BTX-Zentrale" (server).

The motivation behind this project is to demonstrate the awesome technology developed at TU Graz in the early 1980s.

mupid has a Z80A CPU (8 bit, 4 MHz), 128kB RAM, and multiple I/O ports. It can run CP/M on a dedicated floppy disk subsystem with a dedicated Z80A CPU, where the actual MUPID only acts as a terminal.

Prior art and references

• This thread has a ton of very useful information. VzEkC e. V. is dedicated to classical computing.
• The idea by RobertK in the abovementioned forum to run an emulator and to extend z88dk with a mupid target
• The idea by RobertK to write a MAME driver for mupid
• Client and server implementation for the German BTX system
• Lots of documentation still available at ISDS

What do we have at r3?

• Floppy disk images: ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/cm/mupid/
• A few original mupid C2A2, floppy drives, floppy disks, and tons of documentation on paper

What else did we find online?

• There is preliminary mupid support in MAME
• There is a dockerized version of MAME called DAME which could be useful
• There are Debian/Ubuntu packages of mame, and even a PPA with the current stable version
• https://computermuseum.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/dev/mupid/
• https://austria-forum.org/af/AEIOU/BTX_und_MUPID
• https://much.isds.tugraz.at/projects/mupid_9/13.htm/

What do we need?

• digital copies of manuals, schematics, all the floppy disk images we can rip using GreaseWeazle
• images of the EPROMs on the mupid

What do we want?

• ideally, emulate an entire mupid accessible via WWW, either using something like noVNC, RustDesk or even running entirely in JavaScript on the client
• a "BTX server" that can serve CEPT encoded BTX pages to a mupid. This could be a standalone Raspberry Pi, or a serial-to-https adapter requesting CEPT pages from a webserver.
• eventually, an IP/SSL stack like [WolfSSL] (https://www.wolfssl.com/)