psuedo-documentation whipped up so people arent completely baffled by the program.

Multi-station-320 0.92b
5/3/90
by Christopher Lloyd
Copyright 1990, Christopher Lloyd
Portions Copyright 1989, THINK Technology


This program is not to be distributed in an altered form.  The 
program is not in the public domain. You may not sell or make 
money off of it it any way shape or form, or I will hunt you down 
and do nasty things to you.

I am in no way libel for any damage, harm or any sort of headaches  
generated from this program.  

All code is my creation except for the Mac toolbox interface and the 
function key palette window definition, which is part of the THINK C 
package.

If feel compelled to send me money, go ahead!

Ok, on with the info.

First order of business.  This is a 7 & 8 bit terminal emulator, so you 
must be careful if you are using 7 bit communications, The Vax 
systems I have used with this assume that if you are a vt320 you are 
on a 8 bit line, be sure to inform the operating system that you are 
running in 7-bit mode. on a Vax system: set term/noeight

What is this? This is a vt320 emulator with multi-session capabilities 
and resizeable terminal windows.

The vt320 terminal emulation is near completion.  There a few rare 
device control strings that I have left to do, the soft character sets 
and the status line code isnÕt done.  I have tried to finish all the 
important sequences. I have tested it out with various editors and 
full screen utilities and it works fine.

Escape/Control/Device Control sequences are parsed up to the final 
character without error. This means that undocumented sequences, 
alien or any sequence that has not been totally garbled will be 
parsed without error.  This pretty much guarantees the program will 
work with any full screen application made for a vt series text 
terminal, up to the 320. Unless there is undocumented sequences 
which do not follow the correct format (but I doubt it).  Error 
recovery for sequences is probably better than the vt320, it will 
distinguish similar sequences through minimum uniqueness and as 
long as the sequence is decipherable and does not contain extraneous 
characters it will recognize it. In other words, it tries to perform any 
sequence that comes in.

As for vt320 character & line attributes it does ALL of them: double 
width, double height lines, bold, underline, blink and reverse or any 
combination.  And the cursor is correctly represented on double wide 
or double height lines.

All the vt320 character sets are present, the two graphics sets, ASCII, 
ISO Latin, the Multinational set and the display control set.

Programmable function keys work.

Currently the multi-session capabilities are limited by the serial 
ports.  I will hopefully be getting my hands on multi-session 
protocols very soon for various environments.

The terminal window is sizeable to 200x100, if anyone thinks this 
should be bigger, please tell me.  This means if you have a nice big 
screen you could set your display to 80x100 lines and do a set/term 
page=100 on a Vax and would be able to use all the editors and such 
at 100 lines.

Scrollback is currently fixed at 70,000 bytes, this will be 
customizable in byte increments from 500 bytes, as soon as I do the 
interface for it.  If the 70,000 bytes can not be allocated for a session, 
the session will not have scrollback.

The top part of the split screen only shows the scrollback.  The 
bottom shows the active terminal window and the scrollback.

The character generation routines are hand coded 68020 
and 68000 assembler that produce all the character attributes except 
blink, which is done separately.  Currently the font is fixed at 9 point 
vt320, I might add other sizes in time.  The difference in the 68020 
routines is that they use 68020 specific instructions that boost 
performance on 68020 machines.

There are 6 levels of scrolling. The first three are degrees of 
smoothness. the fourth one is a standard jump scroll and the last two 
are custom ones specific to this program.

The custom scrolling routines look like normal jump scroll until more 
than one line of information is read from the serial port at any given 
time.  The first one ÒSuper JumpÓ will scroll the screen one line at a 
time but not update the characters in the scrolled up part until it is 
done receiving a packet.  The second one ÒMega BlastÓ is very similar 
to the behavior of the terminal windows on a Vaxstation, the screen 
is scrolled up to a whole screen at a time, this produces a jumpy 
effect, but is perfect for high speed lines or if the user was delaying 
the emulator.  I would recommend turning these scrolling features 
off in a terminal window that does have scrollback, as the screen 
might flash before your eyes.

Pretty much all the dialog features work, if it doesn't respond, it 
doesn't work, and a couple little check 
boxes here and there.  Break (command-enter=short & command-
shift enter=long) really doesn't work too well, have to look into this.

Keep in mind that this is made for multi-sessions, the serial port 
configuration dialog DOES NOT decide which port your terminal is 
hooked to. The comm dialog decides this.

This is a emulator.  There is no file transfer, no macros, no scripting 
or other niceties.  These will be added as soon as the emulation is 
near perfect and bugs have been worked out.  I have already started 
design on some of these features and hope to have the beginnings of 
them in future releases.

Low memory: ugh. you could probably crash this program if you sat 
and crammed memory, then went and caused an alert or large region 
to be allocated.  I will be fixing this very soon, but for now, if it 
doesn't work its Ôcause it needs memory. I have tried to make as 
much of the programs resources unpurgeable so the segment loader 
and resource manager don't crap out with system errors. Just don't 
push it.

I'm sure I haven't covered everything as this was whipped up and I 
would like to spend more time developing the program than writing 
pretty docs.

Please direct all bug reports to me, especially emulation bugs.

Any comments, suggestions, hate mail or job offers send to the address in the about box.:


