mdavis@pro-sol.cts.COM (Morgan Davis) (10/06/88)
A number of participants have reported problems with AE Pro not handling terminal emulation properly. AE Pro does lack a few features, namely some advanced screen handling abilities (insert/delete char/line -- which makes using some editors impossible with *some* of the terminals). AE Pro relies solely on the firmware ability of your terminal or video card. Apple's 80-column firmware didn't provide some of these features, so they cannot be mapped to any of AE Pro's terminal emulation tables. MouseTalk, on the other hand, can emulate all the characteristics of a VT-100 terminal. So the ability to do line and character inserts/deletes is available for Heath 19 (H19), Televideo 912, and many of the other non-ANSI terminals that provide those functions. MouseTalk was extensively tested under UNIX BSD 4.3 with all of its emulation selections. The DEC VT-100 selection was tested with a UNIX program called vttest and passes all passable (and possible) tests. The ones it couldn't pass were those which are just not even possible with the Apple II video system. Surprisingly, MouseTalk does an admirable job of compensating for these problems (D o u b l e S p a c i n g is used to mimic double-width characters, and MouseText is used for some of th e special VT-100 characters). Please note that MouseTalk is not a mouse-ized version of AE Pro. The two programs are extremely different. If anything was taken from AE Pro to use in MouseTalk it was some of the low-level modem driver code, even then quite a bit of streamlining and improvement was done to those routines. AE Pro is primarily a "kitchen sink" telecom package when it comes to supporting virtually all hardware and peripherals known to the Apple II. MouseTalk is more specific about which hardware it works with and concentrates more on being an "everyday" telecommunications tool with a cleaner user interface. I hope this clarifies things for those who were confused about the differences between the two programs. --Morgan Davis United Software UUCP: crash!pnet01!pro-sol!mdavis ProLine: mdavis@pro-sol ARPA: crash!pnet01!pro-sol!mdavis@nosc.mil MCI Mail: 137-6036 INET: mdavis@pro-sol.cts.com APE, BIX: mdavis