[net.micro.amiga] Terminal program stuff...

wutka@gitpyr.UUCP (Mark Wutka) (01/03/86)

  I agree that developers should put a break option on their terminal
programs. I did that when I wrote mine on a Commodore 64 and I am
doing the same to the one I am using now. Another good thing to add
is a bell. Right now I have mine doing the screen flash accompanied
by a verbal "BEEP" (kinda funny, huh?)
I have noticed that I lose alot of characters when I am going at 1200
baud. I am taking one character at a time from the serial driver and
sending one at a time to the console driver.
I don't know if this is the same problem I saw mentioned in an earlier
message...anybody got any suggestions ??
Also, what's the story on the condition of your request block coming
out of a request. Do some drivers change things like your io_Command
or io_Length or io_Data (I know that input ones change data and length
but I am referring to things like doing a CMD_WRITE to the console).
Another thing...I seem to only have 77 characters across the screen...
is there something I am not setting properly ?


-- 
Mark Wutka
Office of Computing Services
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Ga.

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Official member of NERDS (NERDS Existing in a Recursively Defined System)

louie@trantor.UMD.EDU (01/08/86)

From: Louis A. Mamakos <louie@trantor.UMD.EDU>

I asked the question a few days ago about the terminal program.  It seems
that it is relativly expensive to call the console.device to do I/O to
a console window.  If you read a character from the serial.device and
write it to the console.device, you can't keep up at 1200 baud.  What you
should do, and this helped me considerably, is to read as many characters
as are present from the serial.device, and write them all to the console
device.  You can use the SDCMD_QUERY command, which will return the number
of characters in the input queue in the io_Actual field of the I/O request.

I got 80 characters by 25 lines in my terminal program.  I created my own
screen, and then a borderless, backdrop window on it.  Not having any window
bar or sizing gadgets gives you plenty of room.  All of that stuff I'll do
with menu items; or I'll just type AMIGA-N or AMIGA-M to switch back to the
workbench screen while the terminal program is running. 

I like the spoken bell;  if I can figure out how to read the sound samples
from the instruments demo disk, I'd like the Power Chord as my bell.

Louis A. Mamakos  WA3YMH    Internet: louie@TRANTOR.UMD.EDU
  University of Maryland, Computer Science Center - Systems Programming

joemu@nsc-pdc.UUCP (Joe Mueller) (01/13/86)

> From: Louis A. Mamakos <louie@trantor.UMD.EDU>
>
> ... If you read a character from the serial.device and
> write it to the console.device, you can't keep up at 1200 baud.

I fail to see what you're talking about, I am working on a version of amigaterm
that was posted to the net that I have changed the output to go to the console
device so my amiga's a smart terminal rather than dumb glass. This way I can
do usefull things while in terminal emulation mode like enter vi or read
netnews. I am also adding kermit protocols and fixing up the xmodem download
facility so that if I'm downloading an ascii file, it's not padded with nulls
at the end (ed gets very upset with nulls). As soon as I'm done, I'll post
it to the net. Even if it does slow things down a bit, you can use the various
handshakes (mine is XON/XOFF) to keep things straight. I may be missing
something, but so far everything is working fine.