SULLIVAN@suny-bing.CSNET (04/16/87)
Nick DiMasi writes: > I have managed to get CDY's OmniCom (some call it Omniterm) VT100 > emulator that uses his OMNIVIEW 80-column chip to work OK, except > that I am having a problem. When I login to this UNIX system > (essentially System V Rls 2.0, actually UTS 5.?.? on an Amdahl) > and bring up vi, as soon as the editor clears the screen, OmniCom > "locks up" on me (no cursor or response to keys). The same > problem occurs when I'm in "more" and I type 'q' to quit. I use OmniCom on an model 800 dinosaur, so I don't know if the following is relevant. I don't have a problem with lockup at the beginning of vi, or after 'q' in more, but I do experience (infrequently) a lockup if the machine sits for a few minutes, or sometimes (seemingly) at random. I discovered that when this happens, doing option - b unlocks things, and everything is back to normal. This is somewhat comforting. Option - b is supposed to send a break, but doesn't send anything which is recognized as a break by either Unix or our resident IBM main-pig. I guess it's only reasonable that it be good for something. Since your problem occurs when using vi, it may be that the vs and ve entries are doing it. vs is "visual start" (send by vi to initialize) and ve is "visual end". My termcap entries for vt100 don't use these, but maybe yours do. It seems strange that more would send something like this, though. I suggest that you look at the termcap to find these, and experiment if they're defined. You may be able to put in a new termcap entry without whatever the offending string is. One comment on termcaps -- the only problem I've had is using GNU-Emacs at 2400 baud. When scrolling up, OmniCom just can't keep up. For those who aren't in the GNU, Richard Stallman thinks that x-on x-off is a stupid method of flow control and refuses to use it. If I ever do anything half as impressive as GNU-Emacs, I'll feel qualified to take issue with this viewpoint. In fact, ctrl-s is the key binding for a search. Since I really didn't want to change that key binding, I had to fix things so the old 800 could keep up. I did this by putting reverse-scroll delay in the termcap. A comment about monitor hookups. It is crucial that the monitor output be hooked to the luminance pin and not the composite pin. This causes some problems with other programs -- you can't distinguish colors at all any more (colors show up as patterns on a green screen with monitor output hooked to composite), but it makes Omniview usable. (The display is terrible otherwise). Despite any problems or complaints that I have, I still think that Omni... was well worth the $49.95 (yes, dinosaurs are more expensive) I paid for it. Fred Sullivan Dept. Math. Sci SUNY at Binghamton sullivan@suny-bing.csnet "At last I'm a person rather than a number!!!"