[Coco] OSTerm with DriveWire 4

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 21 September 2015 20:36:11 Travis Poppe wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 07:30:08PM -0500, Dave Philipsen wrote:
> > The ANSI support of Supercomm should be at least a subset of VT-100.
> > What doesn't work?
>
> I'm currently using it to connect to a Linux machine on my network.
> I've fiddled with various TERM environment variables, but can't quite
> get things to display exactly as they should. I frequently have to
> press CTRL-L (redraw screen) to get something of an accurate display;
> otherwise things simply get overwritten in place.
>
> By comparison, I've managed to get V-Term (VT100) working okay under
> RS-DOS, but not over DriveWire, and at a grueling 2400 baud. It
> actually doesn't look as nice as SuperComm, but I believe it was
> accurately drawing the screen with TERM=vt100 set under Linux.
>
> Best regards,
> --
> Travis Poppe
> IRC: tlp on irc.freenode.net

There is a VT-220 on my web page that runs nicely on the real coco3 
running 0s9, again at 2400 baud.  This is the VT100 code with a few 
relatively minor adjustments to make it conform to the VT-220 std as set 
by D.E.C.

One of those instances where we had lost the only terminal for a PDP 
11/23a that was running our 7 meter C band dish to get the CBS 
programming. I forget which, but either the deflection yoke or the H.O.T
had smoked, DEC wanted $3950 we didn't want to spend for a VT-550, and 
would not make any guarantees that it would work in place of a failed 
VT-220.

I don't like guarantees that aren't, particularly for $3950 in 1993 
dollars.

DEC never did me any favors as that machine was a crash-o-matic, several 
times a day.  We had a maintenance contract & I drove them to drink over 
it, their field techs were dummies but they changed everything but the 
frame rail with the seriel number riveted to it without affecting the 
crash frequency.  And because were weren't doing the progamming switches 
when it was crashed, it was costing us several hundred a day when we 
carried a toothpaste commercial instead of a dog food that belonged in 
that time slot.

So I took Brian Marquettes VT-100 code part and put in some switches to 
add what it took to make it into a VT-220, and needing to send data to 
that machine from time to time, I needed an rz/sz facility, so I added 
those triggers to it so it would send the auto rx codes to the PDP, and 
conversely I could make the PDP send my coco3 the rz triggers and call 
the coco's rzsz, about Version 3.16 at the time.

IIRC there is a launch option to make it work like the VT-100, or the 
VT-220.  The major diff is that the VT-220 handled a full 8 bit byte, 
whereas the VT-100 was limited to a 7 bit byte, so it took two 
keystrokes to send a control code on the VT-100, whereas with the high 
bit of the byte available, the VT-220 only needed a $9B to initiate an 
esc sequence.

I have no clue if it will work better for you, and its been 20 years 
since I last used it, but it might be worth a try

Its on my web page at the link below.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>