17 Dec
2023
17 Dec
'23
11:55 a.m.
On 17 Dec 2023, at 13:02, KenUnix
<ken.unix.guy(a)gmail.com> wrote:
-8<—
I have tried vt100, vt100-am, vt100-nam and none
work as expected.
I have a long-ago recollection that using vt100 had rendering issues with emacs, but vt102
was fine. Maybe worth a shot?
d
17 Dec
17 Dec
2:08 p.m.
New subject: Compatibility question
I have tried
vt100, vt100-am, vt100-nam and none
work as expected.
-Ken
I have a long-ago recollection that using vt100 had rendering issues with emacs, but
vt102 was fine. Maybe worth a shot?
d 
18 Dec
18 Dec
12:04 a.m.
New subject: Compatibility question
Wow, an actual VT-100! Have you tried "smooth scrolling" (aka "barf
mode")? AFAIK none of the emulators (or "VT100-compatible" iron, for
that matter) ever bothered to replicate this (for which hackers prone to
motion sickness remain grateful 🤢)
/Frew
P.S.: Fond memories of the USENIX where Rob Pike, in a talk describing
the Blit, announced "and [pause] it is NOT VT-100 compatible", to
thunderous applause. A lot of termcap tweakers in that audience...
On 2023-12-17 00:08, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
secured a VT100 for a reasonable price
12:18 a.m.
New subject: Compatibility question
James Frew wrote:
Wow, an actual VT-100! Have you tried "smooth
scrolling" (aka "barf mode")?
AFAIK none of the emulators (or "VT100-compatible" iron, for that matter)
ever bothered to replicate this (for which hackers prone to motion sickness
remain grateful 🤢)
I made one which simulates the VT100 hardware and runs the original ROM.
There are two more emulators like that.
1:14 a.m.
New subject: Compatibility question
Lars Brinkhoff <lars(a)nocrew.org> writes:
James Frew wrote:
That is really very neat and honestly not something I would have thought
of.
--
Brad Spencer - brad(a)anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org
Wow, an actual VT-100! Have you tried
"smooth scrolling" (aka "barf mode")?
AFAIK none of the emulators (or "VT100-compatible" iron, for that matter)
ever bothered to replicate this (for which hackers prone to motion sickness
remain grateful 🤢)
I made one which simulates the VT100 hardware and runs the original ROM.
There are two more emulators like that. 
12:48 a.m.
New subject: Compatibility question
One problem that the VT100 emulators may have is that they behave
according to the published VT100 specifications rather than the actual
hardware behavior.
The VT100 had notoriously buggy firmware. Alan Kotok, one of DEC's
early engineers, encountered some of these and was annoyed enough
about it that he wrote a program to generate a complete list of escape
sequences--legal and illegal--which he fed to his VT100 terminal. The
results were highly entertaining. Some perfectly valid escape
sequences were mishandled by the firmware and had behavior that didn't
match the documentation. Even worse, some illegal escape sequences
caused catastrophic behavior, such as the terminal freezing with the
alarm continuously on--the only way out was to power-cycle the
terminal. One particularly nasty escape sequence caused corruption of
the EPROM such that the terminal crashed on power-up or restart,
resulting in an infinite crash-and-restart loop that could only be
fixed by sending the terminal in for a factory reset.
Kotok published his results within DEC engineering and shortly
thereafter "email bombs" containing escape sequences that triggered
some of the milder of the bugs started circulating. The VAX/VMS mail
utility had to be changed to filter out escape sequences by default.
-Paul W.
12:59 a.m.
New subject: Compatibility question
On Sun, Dec 17, 2023 at 11:48 AM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
One problem that the VT100 emulators may have is that
they behave
according to the published VT100 specifications rather than the actual
hardware behavior.
They behave like the author of the emulator thinks the documentation
describes.
But often, ambiguity in descriptions lead to bad decisions here,
especially when
you go to the far right of the screen, the bottom right corner, etc.
There's several
quirks of VT100 behavior that just aren't clearly documented. They aren't
bugs,
per se, but people depend on that behavior.
The VT100 had notoriously buggy firmware. Alan Kotok,
one of DEC's
early engineers, encountered some of these and was annoyed enough
about it that he wrote a program to generate a complete list of escape
sequences--legal and illegal--which he fed to his VT100 terminal. The
results were highly entertaining. Some perfectly valid escape
sequences were mishandled by the firmware and had behavior that didn't
match the documentation. Even worse, some illegal escape sequences
caused catastrophic behavior, such as the terminal freezing with the
alarm continuously on--the only way out was to power-cycle the
terminal. One particularly nasty escape sequence caused corruption of
the EPROM such that the terminal crashed on power-up or restart,
resulting in an infinite crash-and-restart loop that could only be
fixed by sending the terminal in for a factory reset.
Kotok published his results within DEC engineering and shortly
thereafter "email bombs" containing escape sequences that triggered
some of the milder of the bugs started circulating. The VAX/VMS mail
utility had to be changed to filter out escape sequences by default.
Yea... Those are fun... I wonder how many got fixed in later versions?
I'd also read somewhere that VT220 development was slowed by
having to behave exactly the same way as the VT100s (the above
example was one given)... But at least they had the benefit of being
able to look at the old firmware code... At least I'd suppose that was
a benefit...
Warner
2:24 a.m.
New subject: Compatibility question
On Sun, 17 Dec 2023, Paul Winalski wrote:
One problem that the VT100 emulators may have is that
they behave
according to the published VT100 specifications rather than the actual
hardware behavior.
DEC did pretty much the same thing with the Unibus to keep out 3rd-party
boards; the published specs didn't match the implementation, so your
non-DEC board would have subtle timing issues.
DEC of course just shrugged and said "Our boards work just fine, so yours
must be faulty"...
-- Dave
1:26 a.m.
New subject: Compatibility question
On Sun, Dec 17, 2023 at 1:13 PM James Frew <frew(a)ucsb.edu> wrote:
Wow, an actual VT-100! Have you tried "smooth
scrolling" (aka "barf mode")? AFAIK none of the emulators (or
"VT100-compatible" iron, for that matter) ever bothered to replicate this (for
which hackers prone to motion sickness remain grateful 🤢)
HDS terminals could do that. I rather liked it, honestly. I don't
recall it ever making me feel sick, but it definitely led to character
overruns. :-/
- Dan C.
/Frew
P.S.: Fond memories of the USENIX where Rob Pike, in a talk describing the Blit,
announced "and [pause] it is NOT VT-100 compatible", to thunderous applause. A
lot of termcap tweakers in that audience...
On 2023-12-17 00:08, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
secured a VT100 for a reasonable price
2:08 a.m.
New subject: Compatibility question
On Sun, Dec 17, 2023, 12:26 PM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Dec 17, 2023 at 1:13 PM James Frew
<frew(a)ucsb.edu> wrote:
Smooth scroll was good for 1 application I had. There was a 30 line message
with instructions and info about a group. You then hit a hit to fill out a
form for more info. The smooth scroll prevented burnin... though the
terminal was only active a few months...
Every other time, though, I disabled it post haste.
Warner
- Dan C.
Wow, an actual VT-100! Have you tried
"smooth scrolling" (aka "barf
mode")? AFAIK none of the
emulators (or "VT100-compatible" iron, for that
matter) ever bothered to replicate this (for which hackers prone to motion
sickness remain grateful 🤢)
HDS terminals could do that. I rather liked it, honestly. I don't
recall it ever making me feel sick, but it definitely led to character
overruns. :-/
/Frew
P.S.: Fond memories of the USENIX where Rob Pike, in a talk describing
the Blit,
announced "and [pause] it is NOT VT-100 compatible", to
thunderous applause. A lot of termcap tweakers in that audience...
On 2023-12-17 00:08, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
secured a VT100 for a reasonable price
17 Dec
17 Dec
8:07 p.m.
New subject: Compatibility question
David Arnold <davida(a)pobox.com> writes:
Unless you are actually using a real VT100 physical serial terminal
there is very much a non-zero chance that the terminal emulator that you
are using is not really vt100, vt102, or any such thing, but some
subset, superset or variant that isn't quite like a real physical VT100,
close but not exact. You may try 'ansi' or 'xterm', if either of
those
are available in the Unix you are using. If not, try a different
terminal emulator.
Example.. a long time ago in a university far away, there was Data
General systems mostly and lots of DG211 terminals. The DG211 have a
ansi mode that is very close to vt100, but not quite. Along comes
various Unix systems, in particular, a RS6000. Wanting to play Moria
(successor to rogue), I found that the ansi mode didn't quite cut it and
ended up hacking up a TERMCAP / TERMINFO entry to deal with the issue as
best as it was possible. I could never come up with a native DG211
entry that worked any better than my hacks. If I recall, the terminal
*MAY* have supported VT52 as well (or that might have been the MV10000
that did some sort of DG211 to VT52 translation) I know I ended up
writing a VT52 terminal emulator (for some reason or other... it was a
long time ago) and I know I used it on the Unix systems that started to
appear around the university as time went on. VT52 was pretty simple
and it tended to work pretty well.
--
Brad Spencer - brad(a)anduin.eldar.org
On 17 Dec 2023, at 13:02, KenUnix
<ken.unix.guy(a)gmail.com> wrote:
-8<—
I have tried vt100, vt100-am, vt100-nam and none
work as expected.
I have a long-ago recollection that using vt100 had rendering issues with emacs, but
vt102 was fine. Maybe worth a shot?
d 
8:47 p.m.
New subject: Compatibility question
On 17 Dec 2023, at 15:08, Brad Spencer <brad(a)anduin.eldar.org> wrote:
ansi mode that is very close to vt100, but not quite.
Along comes
various Unix systems, in particular, a RS6000. Wanting to play Moria
(successor to rogue), I found that the ansi mode didn't quite cut it and
ended up hacking up a TERMCAP / TERMINFO entry to deal with the issue as
best as it was possible.
The number of times I have heard “I couldn’t run {nethack, rogue, Moria} so I tweaked the
termcap / terminfo for the terminal”… I had a similar issue with a WY-180 fixed by the
local termcap wizard (not me, I abandoned all hope quite rapidly).
Definitely agree that trying “close” terminals is a viable route.
Arrigo
154
days inactive
154
days old
11 comments
10 participants
participants (10)
-
Arrigo Triulzi -
Brad Spencer -
Dan Cross -
Dave Horsfall -
David Arnold -
James Frew -
Lars Brinkhoff -
Paul Winalski -
segaloco -
Warner Losh