Dox written by The Red Flame on September, Friday the 13th, 1991
(Updated 09/24/91)
History...
One day I got a PC Transporter and loved the ANSI.. that's about all I loved, but that's besides the point... I figured the Apple world needed an ANSI emulator.. Proterm's vt-52 and 100 series were ok for positioning but when you tried to figure out what the heck it was you were looking at... that was a different story...
Well, Agate was released.. it was pretty impressive, had all the IBM high-bit characters (the first program I had seen to sport such a feature) and it was also pretty legible...
I would have stopped right there, but there was one thing I didn't like about Agate, it was black and white... how many people out there choose black and white over color? Exactly...
Well, I was pretty good in assembly (still am, in fact) and Bluetamon was a veteran from the 65C02 days. Unfortunately he moved to Arizona a while ago. But what are modems for? Needless to say we both spent too much on long distance during this project...
It was then decided that I would write the part of the program that actually handled the ANSI and he would write the terminal program... so that's what we did.. the only problem was the excessive switching betwixt 8 and 16 bit.. I wanted to use 16 bit mode for the ANSI, but the firmware was all 8 bit (don't ask me why, it's lame)... anyway, Bluetamon was getting kind of sick of working on it, and I myself was getting sick of just letting it sit on the hard drive.. I mean, we conceived this idea about a year ago and could have had it out several months earlier. But we were just lazy and it's basically sat around until I figured we'd better get it out... so here it is...
Installation
MEGATERM is run under Prodos 8 (YES!!)... why? GS/OS is slow-loading, slow-executing, and uses tools. Prodos 8 was not included, if you can't find it, check your system folder for a file called P8.
You can put all 3 files in any directory you want as long as you have the prefix set. If not, the program will try to set the path to /MEGATERM/.. if that is gone, it will finally ask you what path you are at...
ANSI.SYSTEM must be run to get ANSI... if you are on a ][e and want to run this, then you can just run TERM.RUN.. that is legal.. but since this program uses color palettes that we feel should be available for the user to modify, it needs to load the file INITPIC... BTW, there are 3 color palettes in this file, if you want to change them then you had better use a quality paint program like DreamGrafix or you can forget about retaining the other two...
NOTE: There are about 2 easter eggs in ANSI.SYSTEM.. they are 1 key each and caps lock should be set... if you hit the wrong key then it will just continue the program.. this isn't exactly an easy method of finding them, but ohwell, hahaha...
_ New User Menu _
When you first run MEGATERM you will be greeted with a new user menu where you set all of your defaults, such as speed, emulation, etc. The configuration you use here will automatically be set every time you run MEGATERM subsequently...
If you are dis-satisfied with your configuration, try deleting MTERM.DATA... if you already have a dialing directory, then don't worry about it, since all emulations are saved in the specific entries anyway...
_ Main Menu _
Unfortunately not all the commands are included in the main menu... here they are:
@-A - Get an "About"...
@-H - Drop DTR (ie Hangup by setting AT&D2)
NOTE: there are no easter eggs in the main program as of this date...
_ Modem Misc _
Set all of your init strings with @-M...
The program is designed specifically for the ][gs port ONLY but we suspect (not actually tested) that it will also work with a SSC since the firmware is almost identical. About the only things it might not do correctly are buffering and some of the ^A generics since THEY are different.. (baud rate should be identical as well)...
All of the modem options can be edited with @-O...
_ ANSI Support _
Megaterm has about 223 different characters defined in its font.. the ones that were not included were everything under 32 (which is a spacebar) because they are ctrl-characters and a lot of terminals out there don't include them either.
If you want to print a high-bit character, hold down the option key and hit a key.. type option-0,1, or 2.. those are some of the more used ones... also ESCape is accepted (of course) so you can fool around with all the ANSI escape sequences...
You know how some people actually upload ANSI screens to the transfer sections? Well, either you have a lot of credits, or you don't have anything better to leech if you took the time to download one of these. Well, how do you view them? If you've by chance run across an ANSI screen and want to see what it looks like, type @-L when in the ANSI mode... if will ask for a filename... if you type it in correctly it should display the file in ANSI... NOTE, this will not work if you've made the text file itself since all Apple text editors SET the high-bit (you'll get a bunch of garbage basically)...
SPECIAL NOTE: I was just toying with this function.. it has been known to lock up on occasion after it's finished displaying ANSI, and I never bothered to fix it.. one good thing about this program is it loads FAST.. you only need to run ANSI.SYSTEM once.. every subsequent execution will work fine by running TERM.RUN..
HITTING RESET: Don't be afraid to use the reset key. Hitting reset will re-run the program from the first, as we anticipated that problems might occur. BTW, the reset vector is invaluable, if you don't know how to use it, learn...
Line Feeds will move the cursor down, but not to the left-hand side of the screen.. carriage return will move the cursor over, but not down... if you want to move over and down, hit carriage return then the down arrow (or ^J)... it's not a big hassle unless you are talking terminal-to-terminal and that usually isn't a problem... all BBS's out there, even GBBS, send both carriage returns and line feeds... (NOTE, only in ANSI, regular mode masks line feeds completely)
This program supports ALL ANSI escape codes (including [6n) except the keyboard modifying ones, and the mode change (like from 80 column to 40 column). None of the IBM terminals support it either, the only thing that does is ANSI.SYS itself...
_ Fonts _
Well, you might complain about the fonts... take out a calculator and start figuring... 320 / 80 = what.. 4? plus 1 for a space between each letter and you get 3 pixels across!!! Why didn't I use 640 mode you ask? Well, 640 mode supports 4 colors per line (real colors, dithering is a joke, sorry to those TML Pascal enthusiasts) and we need to have the potential for 16 colors per line...
Needless to say, I'm sure you will think, "Hey, I can draw better fonts than this guy"... I welcome you to try, if you think you are up to it, I also have a font editor (comes separately) available...
_ Other Notes _
There is a cursor and scrolling speed has been increased.
HITTING RESET: Don't be afraid to hit reset; doing so will re-start the program, and you will still be able to quit back to the finder if you are one of those poor souls who likes GS/OS.
_ Future Releases _
Well, we can't really predict anything at this stage of the game... if you want to get ahold of Bluetamon or me, we both have accounts on this board:
The Iron Grid - (801)-486-0929 - 14.4 HST/v.32 DUAL STANDARD Modem
PCPable /UTSLC/ - 24 Hours - 170+ Megs
I am on there regularly and will give information about any of the routines I used (sorry, can't give out Blue's stuff, after all it IS his)... this program was written completely in assembly language using Merlin 8/16/16++ and there are a ton of source code files that go into it...
Programmer's Note: If you are sick of waiting 5 hours for your program to assemble, put a LST OFF at the beginning of your program.. using it in this program will get a full assembly time of 22 seconds!! With listing on, it assembles in about 3 minutes.
