Full vt100 emulation

[Bruce Becker]

In article <26488 at cup.portal.com> thad at cup.portal.com (Thad P Floryan) writes:
|[...]
|If one wishes to (logically) "cu" OUT from one's system, THEN the need for a
|proper VT100 (or whatever) emulation package becomes painfully evident; no
|termcap or terminfo will help under this condition.
|
|As I replied to someone else in e-mail, the areas in which most terminal
|emulations fail miserably (on any system (3B1, Amiga, Mac, IBM PC, Atari ST,
|etc.)) include:
|
|	double-wide and double-wide/-high characters

	Not provided in 3B1.

|	VT100 alternate and graphics character sets

	This is provided! The 'SO' (0x0D) character
	selects font 1, which can be loaded from the
	stock set to be a DEC-style line-drawing font.
	What's missing is the "ESC-(" and ESC-)"
	character-set loading commands.

|	scrolling regions

	Not provided.

|	video attributes (bold, blink, underline, reverse, etc.)

	This is provided! (except for blink)

|	80 and 132 column displays

	Not provided.

|	other "DECPRIVATE" functions

	Linewrap is provided, except the code
	sequence is different.

	On the other hand, VT102-style editing
	is supported.

|Even expensive commercial products such as Mirror II for the IBM-PC fail
|miserably ... they just don't work properly when calling INTO other systems
|that insist on a "proper" VT100 emulation.
|
|This is NOT a trivial concern.  A *LOT* of commercial applications REQUIRE
|proper emulation.

	Certainly DEC VMS products seem to require
	full compatibility, it's true.

	I've seen a very nice FULLY-compatible
	emulation only once, on an Amiga shareware
	package called "Handshake". It provides
	full VT-220 emulation, and is a superior
	product. (Details on request)

|For the record, NO version of PCOMM emulates a VT100, and NO claim was made
|by the author that it did.

	My apologies, what I assumed was the
	VT100 support of Pcomm must have been
	underlying console window support only.



	Some questions to anyone:

	How can I get "cu" (the HDB version)
	to actually talk even parity?

	How can I get "async_main" to work
	with HDB?

	Doesn't "async_main" provide better
	"real" VT100 emulation?

-- 
  (__)	 Bruce Becker	Toronto, Ont.
w \@@/	 Internet: bdb at becker.UUCP, bruce at gpu.utcs.toronto.edu
 `/v/-e	 BitNet:   BECKER at HUMBER.BITNET
_/  \_	 Well I didn't want to mention it cause it's so silly, but you know how