knudsen@ihnss.UUCP (03/04/84)
I just bought the RS RS232 UART/program pack today, and boy is it great. The built-in firmware is really great for turning your coco into a terminal instatnly. I7m using it right now to input this note. Can't you tell by the short lines?!? But it even has "word wrap", which makes your screen look neat but it's harder to remember how many lines of coco screen you've filled since the last <ENTER>. Must try it with Rainbow-Writer sometime. Supports no cursor controls, excpet ctrl-H for backspace. Also, it doesn't correct spelling errors.... Oh well, for $80 bucks, not bad. A friend already wrote an OS-9 driver for the critter, but I haven't cajoled it out of him yet. WOW! evne tabs work ... mike k
dyer@wivax.UUCP (Stephen Dyer) (03/04/84)
The "Deluxe RS232 Pak" does support cursor controls, the same ones as in the Videotex cartridge. That is, it's sort of a VT52 with only 16 lines by 32 characters. I have a Videotex termcap entry (created when my H19 was dead and all I had was Videotex) if you want it. All in all, I think it's really a crock. The program is VERY limited, especially as regards concurrent connection of a printer--600 baud only, and no automatic XON/XOFF to the host when the printer is busy. Unless you have a fast printer, connecting to the host at 1200 baud with the printer running will lose characters. Nice defaults on power-up, too (HALF-duplex?!?) Would that they had added a second RS232 UART instead of this useless terminal ROM. As far as using this with OS9, well it's not clear how you can do it. The Multi-Pak and cartridge ports only support NMI and CART (FIRQ thru a PIA)--no IRQ. I have received conflicting info about what this Pak uses. I wrote to R/S product support and they said NMI, but a quick disassembly of the Pak indicated that it now uses CART. Problem is that in the Multi-Pak interface, only the "selected slot" passes CART to the CPU. I would be interested to hear what your friend has done. Clock polling is possible, too, but I fear that this would only allow rates up to 600 baud (someone tell me I'm wrong, here, please.) /Steve Dyer decvax!bbncca!sdyer