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A terminal emulation is the method that RemoteAccess uses to
communicate with the user's software. The most basic of
these is straight ASCII. The ASCII terminal emulation can
only display normally visible characters plus a few others,
such as backspace, linefeed and clearscreen.
RemoteAccess supports two additional emulations - ANSI and
AVATAR. ANSI is currently the most popular terminal
emulation in the bulletin board world; it has the capability
to change text colour, cursor position, and can do simple
animations. Some implementations of ANSI can even play
simple tunes at the user's end. ANSI does have some
drawbacks; each special control code is several characters
long. To change the text colour for example, requires a
control code of up to 8 characters. These lengthy codes can
severely slow the user's display, and for this reason the
usefulness of ANSI at speeds of 1200 baud and lower is
limited.
AVATAR, on the other hand, uses control codes that are
typically a quarter to a third of the length of their ANSI
equivalents, making it usable at lower speeds. Not only
that, but AVATAR has much more advanced screen control,
making possible relatively complex animations and screen
displays. AVATAR is a newcomer - there are comparatively few
terminal programs that support it, even fewer that support
it properly. At this time there are no utilities for
creating AVATAR screens. You can however convert your ANSI
screens to AVATAR with the supplied utility.
RemoteAccess uses AVATAR level 0+ (AVT/0+). The only
terminal programs which have been tested successfully with
AVT/0+ are Joaquim Homrighausen's FrontDoor and Adam
Stanislav's TinyTerm. If you make use of AVT/0+ you should
make it clear to your users that they should be using one of
these two, until more terminal programs implement AVATAR
support.
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Written by Dave Pearson