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1991-01-22
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This is st52, a vt52 terminal emulator for the Atari ST computer.
This program is by Nick Castellano (entropy@ai.mit.edu) and is released
as freeware. (C) 1991 Not Proud Programmers. Developed in GNU C, a product
of the Free Software Foundation.
You might ask, why did someone bother to write such a useless piece of
software? There are countless terminal emulators with all sorts of features
and capabilities. The answer is simple: MiNT. In case you don't know, MiNT
stands for MiNT is Not TOS, a multitasking operating system by Eric R.
Smith. One of the programs you can use with MiNT is mgr, a windowing
interface developed by Bellcore or use on Sun workstations. I wanted a
terminal emulator that could run in an mgr window. Unfortunately, all the
emulators I have want to hog the whole screen and make GEM calls and such,
so none of them work well with mgr. Since you can emulate the ST's standard
vt52-compatible text display inside a window with vt52.prg (distributed with
MiNT) I decided to write a very simple vt52 terminal emulator that would
work under mgr as well as TOS with or without MiNT.
This program is actually not a vt52 emulator at all--it is a dumb terminal
program that does (almost) no processing on transmitted or received text.
However, as I mentioned earlier, the standard ST display is vt52-compatible,
so the net effect is that you get vt52 terminal emulation. Of course you
can also use it as a "dumb" terminal to call bbs's and such.
To start st52:
From GEM: Double click on st52.ttp and press return when the parameter box
comes up. You may rename it to st52.tos to avoid the dialog box, as this
preliminary release doesn't take any parameters.
From a shell: Add the directory st52 is stored in to your PATH environment
variable, then type "st52" or "st52.ttp", depending on what shell you use.
From mgr: Open a terminal window and type "vt52". When the mgr vt52 window
is ready, type "st52" to start the communications program. Alternately,
type "vt52 st52" to do it all in one step.
I have swapped the Backspace and Delete keys. That is, the Backspace key
will send ASCII 127 to your host, and Delete will send ASCII 8. This will
be an option in future releases.
There are only three special keys in st52:
Alt-C: Configure. Basically self-explanatory. Just press Alt-C and follow
the prompts. Currently the only option you can set is communication speed
(bps rate). In future releases you will be able to set other RS-232 options
such as parity and stop bits.
Alt-Q: Quit.
Alt-Z: Stop. Works only under MiNT.
A few useful termcap entries from various sources are included in the file
termcap.st (including entries for mgr, which might allow st52 to be used in
an mgr window without vt52.prg, but I haven't tried it yet). I've been using
the first entry with no trouble; your mileage may vary.
Make sure when using MiNT that you only have one process at a time talking
to the modem, otherwise characters from the modem will be distributed
randomly to each of the processes.
Note that the arrow keypad and function keys don't do anything useful in
this program.
Send questions, comments, and modifications to entropy@ai.mit.edu (Internet)
or Sinkhole!dEADHEAd (Citadel).