hoffman@pittvax.UUCP (10/22/84)
I have a DEC VT132-AA terminal at home and I really like it, especially now that I have replaced the original CRT with an amber phosphor model. The only complaint I now have is that runs so doggone slow. While the baud rate is selectable up to 19.2K, it is pointless to go above 4800, since it must handshake to keep in sync. What I'd like to do is to somehow speed up the processor inside the VT100. A similar experiment with a Z19 produced decent results when the CPU speed was doubled. All of the baud rate and video timing inside of the VT100 is derived from a single crystal-controlled source, so this speedup must leave those clocks untouched. I envision a daughterboard that might contain an 8085 with its own 5 MHz clock that would replace the 8080 currently inside the terminal. Has anyone else ever tried this? I can think of at least two potential problems: the video RAM might not be fast enough. I would accept having to upgrade the RAM to get the speed increase. Likewise with the PROMs that contain the 8080 program. If I had to, I could probably burn their contents into some faster EPROMs. Any ideas will be greatly appreciated. -- Bob Hoffman, N3CVL Pitt Computer Science
phil@amd.UUCP (Phil Ngai) (10/25/84)
Incidentally, I heard a funny rumor that DEC managed to lose the
source to the VT100 firmware.
--
just a poor rice eater
Phil Ngai (408) 982-6554
UUCPnet: {ucbvax,decwrl,ihnp4,allegra,intelca}!amd!phil
ARPAnet: amd!phil@decwrl.ARPA