sdyer@bbncca.ARPA (Steve Dyer) (10/19/83)
I tried using the external terminal option of OS-9 this evening with my CRT. Good news and bad news. First, if you have the Radio Shack modem cable which is used with Videotex and Colorcom/E, it will work as is with a 300 baud modem. For a direct connection (which is what I used) just do the obvious and swap pins 2 & 3 in the RS232 connector going into your terminal, or get a null modem. The problem is that the option is practically unusable at speeds above 300 baud. The software UART routine garbles input about 40% of the time at 600 baud, and doesn't work at all at higher speeds. This may be in some part an interaction with my H19 terminal, but I doubt it. It IS nice to see clear, crisp text when using the CoCo, but at 300 baud, it hardly seems worth it. Also, although there is a TTY option to set page length, there doesn't seems to be a corresponding column width command. The OS-9 equivalent of "ls -l", "DIR E", apparently has its output "hard wired" to wrap at 32 columns. Pretty unreadable. My intention is to get a REAL UART-based RS232 card soon, and to write an OS-9 driver to support my terminal at a more reasonable baud rate. Anyone else have anything interesting to say from their experience? /Steve decvax!bbncca!sdyer