DEC VT102

From: D. Peschel <dpeschel_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Mon Nov 23 08:42:29 1998

> Generally UDOCO is outside spec. forexample a line of 123 chars and what
> happens when you switch to Dwide Dheight.

Well, yes, that's the definition of undocumented, but it's still interesting
to know about (at least to me). Besides, some programs may depend on un-
documented or very specific borderline behavior, and if you want to keep
running them, what are you going to do?

(I was thinking of VMS -- which I thought was pretty strict. You mentioned
that it was tolerant. That must mean that my emulators are even worse than
I thought. Or perhaps the editors are stricter than the os itself.)

If I were writing a spec, I would try to cover all the cases.

> Considering the prints for Vt100, technical specs and all were available
> NONE of those were secret! If all else fails you could crank up the
> Vheight and Hwidth and count them!

One of the admins here mentioned that we have a big secret binder of VT100
stuff. I haven't seen it yet. Was the firmware source code ever available?
That would be neat to look at.

> Vt125 is a big variation. The board to do it was a seperate 8085 and
> ran it's video in parallel with VT100 base logic (yes chars and graphics).
> The GIGI was obscure and uncommon enough to not be a viable reference.
> most of the later terminals (Vt330/340) did however do regis.

If the two sets of circuitry ran in parallel, that explains how a rather slow
CPU could provide characters and graphics at the same time. :)

Unfortunately, I have two specific programs I want to see. One of them is
DECRITE from DECUS (a ReGIS text editor -- runs on VMS). The other is Empire
(The Wargame of the Century), version 5.0 (?) which is on magica.update.uu.se.

Even DEC's terminal emulator for DECWindows (which I would *hope* would be
very good, and actually does seem to be very complete) barfs at DECRITE.
I think I need a VT125 for that.

As for Empire, the source (and binaries?) were actually commercial, I think.
And the source I've seen is for the previous version. The new version has
two modes (VT125 and Gigi) neither of which works very well. I think the code
uses nonstandard ReGIS, since (as a magica person told me) even a real VT340
won't work with the program.

I guess this is a longwinded way of agreeing with you, and explaining why
I'm looking for a ReGIS emulator (or terminal).

-- Derek
Received on Mon Nov 23 1998 - 08:42:29 GMT