[comp.sys.amiga] Troubles with VT100

cosell@bbn.com (Bernie Cosell) (12/29/89)

I'm having a spot of trouble getting vt100 2.9 to work right for me.  What I need
to do is be able to do ASCII capture/ASCII send.  Now, I have several problems
here:
  a) canyou set up the default to be ASCII?  It seems to come up with Kermit as
  the default, but the XPROTO command doesn't list 'ASCII' as one of the
  available choices.
  b) The Menu list clains that A-^ and A-V are the send/receive controls, but
  I A-S and A-R are what seem to be compiled in.

those two are just baby stuff... here's the real problem:
  c) I tried to upload a file.  So I selected ASCII protocol, and then I
  selected SEND and it popped up a window and I typed in my file name.  And
  nothing happened.  So I ctrl-C'ed out of the script I use on my SUN to
  receive the ASCII uploads and *then* vt100 started sending the file, which,
  of course, caused a LOT of trouble as my shell tried to digest all of the
  stuff.  So I tried again, this time without running my receive-script and I
  noticed two things: 1) it started sending right away [thereby not giving me a
  chance to type receive<cr> and pissing me off :-)], and 2) it didn't ask me
  for a file name.

How *do* you start and stop an ASCII send?  [as a side annoyance, somehow in
the course of blundering around to try to turn OFF the ascii send so it'd ask
me for a new filename, I managed to hit the CAPTURE menu item... well it didn't
ask me for a filename either: it just used the same old filename... yup,
trashing the file I was trying to upload...:-(].


Another littler question: how do you get a script to make vt100 go away.
I have a little guy that does
   DELAHY 2
   SEND "+++"
   DELAY 2
   SEND "ATH^M"
   EXIT VT100
but that last doesn't really exit the program, but apparently goes and tries
to find a script "vt100" to run... 

Thanks!
  /Bernie\

riley@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Daniel S. Riley) (12/31/89)

In article <50143@bbn.COM> cosell@BBN.COM (Bernie Cosell) writes:
>How *do* you start and stop an ASCII send?  [as a side annoyance, somehow in
>the course of blundering around to try to turn OFF the ascii send so it'd ask
>me for a new filename, I managed to hit the CAPTURE menu item... well it didn't
>ask me for a filename either: it just used the same old filename... yup,
>trashing the file I was trying to upload...:-(].

There is a long standing "problem" in vt100's ASCII send code--when you
select ASCII send, it still waits for all the normal events that it usually
waits for.  The net result is that it doesn't start sending until it sees
an event (I think a mouse click will do).  With a full duplex connection,
one event will do, since the echoed characters keep the stream going (but
a few mouse clicks will speed it up).  With a half-duplex connection, this 
is a real problem.

My opinion is that vt100 should not wait at all in ASCII send--it should
just dump the data straight over the line.  I included a trivial change
to do this in a *big* list of bug fixes I sent Tony after 2.8 came out,
but I think my list must have been lost in the mail--none of my fixes 
appeared in vt100 2.9 (worst example:  vt100 is still doing a Wait() 
followed by a WaitIO() after every AbortIO()...the Wait() is redundant, 
and it *will* occasionally hang).

-Dan Riley (riley@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu, cornell!batcomputer!riley)
-Wilson Lab, Cornell University