jhs@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA (02/14/88)
As usual, the net subscribers have provided a good survey of the available options. My comments don't add much, but maybe will help to confirm some of the impressions you have received from other mailings. The 800 can be used as a vt100 terminal quite successfully. The Atari 850 interface and the ICD P:R:Connection are the most widely accepted choices for interfacing to an RS-232C device. The serial bus in the Atari is a TTL bus, so needs TTL to RS-232C level converters to run a normal modem. Also, the "handshake" signals would be absent, but you could do a trick like using the cassette motor control line to signal DTR or something. There is a device called the R:Verter that used the serial bus in this way. I don't know if it is available any more. The 850 is hard to find. This leaves the P:R:Connection as the best choice, unless you want to hack together an interface or buy one of the Atari modems with built-in interface. As for terminal emulators, the clear choice, given your requirements, is CDY's OmniCom. This does a pretty good vt100 emulation (the adjective "halfhearted" that someone used doesn't seem to me to be justified -- it handles the graphics and cursor commands from my screen editor just fine), and also supports kermit, xmodem, and ascii transfer. Ascii transfer can go to a file or to the printer if you wish. Also there is an instantaneous "print screen" function that is very handy. John Dunning's kermit65 is a very good choice for vt100 emulation, but at last report lacked some of the features you specifically mentioned. It also lacks macro key definitions, and so far as I know this means you have to do any keypad operations as sequences of three or so keystrokes. Dunning will, I am sure, fix all this one of these days, but right now OmniCom is really what you need. It's available as a "shareware" program, which means copies of it are available free, but the author requests a contribution if you wish to keep on using it permanently. I have a copy which I'll be glad to send if you wish. -John Sangster, jhs@mitre-bedford.arpa