brb@rhi.hi.is (Bjorn R. Bjornsson) (02/15/90)
In article <7368@hlborl.UUCP>, h_les@hlborl.UUCP (les brown) writes: > What happens is that (apparently) randomly, the keyboard on my console > locks up. Try hitting the ALT key, if that doesn't work try hitting the CONTROL key, any one of your sessions may have missed the break scancodes for these keys. I personally think VP/ix works rather well on a console, but I have quite a few questions and complaints for VP/ix use on serial terminals. I almost have the feeling that I must be the only person that has battled VP/ix through serial terminals. 1. Why are input and scancode mappings limited to 7 chars. This makes "enhanced keyboard" emulation impossible on many ASCII terminals, even if they have more or less the right number of keys. Good limits are: 0, 1 and infinity (or a reasonable facsimilie, thereof) 2. Why is there no screen refresh function for PC compatible terminals*? It's present for ASCII terminals but goes away for PC compatible terminals. Why isn't refresh in the VP/ix menu? This is rather important since there seem to be a number of problems in VP/ix video emulation for serial terminals. 3. Why isn't there support for ANSI color escape sequences. Really? A lot of folks have these (on there PCs for instance). 4. EGA or VGA emulation with user accessible hooks would be real nice instead of the MDA emulation. 5. A program to set the BIOS data area keyboard type should come with VP/ix. A program to synchronize CapsLock, NumLock, ScrollLock for PC-compatible terminals should also come with VP/ix. *A PC compatible terminal is a terminal that is capable of sending PC keyboard scancodes (make and break) instead of ASCII characters. Bjorn R. Bjornsson brb@falcon.is
allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) (02/17/90)
As quoted from <1519@krafla.rhi.hi.is> by brb@rhi.hi.is (Bjorn R. Bjornsson): +--------------- | I personally think VP/ix works rather well on a console, but I have | quite a few questions and complaints for VP/ix use on serial terminals. | I almost have the feeling that I must be the only person that has battled | VP/ix through serial terminals. +--------------- I used VP/ix daily for a month on an Altos Series 1000 (well, yes, it was the console---but the Altos 1000 is *not* a PC-compatible, and its console is a serial port) via a Falco 5000 terminal. I've not seen any problems beyond those in getting the order of the escape sequences right to make the Falco expand the window to 80x25 instead of 80x24.... The 5000 was run in scan-code mode; I have not yet gathered sufficient masochism to attempt VP/ix on an ordinary terminal. [ ;-) ] +--------------- | 2. Why is there no screen refresh function for PC compatible terminals*? | It's present for ASCII terminals but goes away for PC compatible | terminals. | Why isn't refresh in the VP/ix menu? | | This is rather important since there seem to be a number of problems | in VP/ix video emulation for serial terminals. +--------------- I suspect that VP/ix terminal descriptions out of the box are about as usable as termcaps/terminfos right out of the box. I wrote and debugged the Falco 5000 description myself, and made d*mned sure it *works*. I suggest you find someone to write a *correct* description for your terminal. +--------------- | 3. Why isn't there support for ANSI color escape sequences. Really? | A lot of folks have these (on there PCs for instance). +--------------- Don't you want ANSI.SYS for this? Or does VP/ix not handle color at all? I can't find out, since the current Altos 1000 version supports neither color nor graphics. Nor COM1/2 emulation, which I would have thought to be relatively easy. [Had I source, I might attempt it myself.] [NOTE: the 1000, not being PC-compatible, has neither memory-mapped console nor scancode console keyboard nor COM1/COM2. It comes with 8 serial ports on the mother- board and slots for two 8-port "SIO" boards or an ACPA (5 serial ports, one RS-422 multidrop port, and thick and thin Ethernet ports).] +--------------- | 5. A program to set the BIOS data area keyboard type should come | with VP/ix. A program to synchronize CapsLock, NumLock, ScrollLock | for PC-compatible terminals should also come with VP/ix. +--------------- Not sure I understand this one. But the Falco has some bugs in this area, and I'm not sure that any amount of coaxing by VP/ix would help. ++Brandon -- Brandon S. Allbery allbery@NCoast.ORG, BALLBERY (MCI Mail), ALLBERY (Delphi) uunet!cwjcc.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery ncoast!allbery@cwjcc.cwru.edu
michael@fts1.uucp (Michael Richardson) (05/03/90)
In article <15422@bfmny0.UU.NET> tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) writes: >The only reason I bother to suggest sticking with UNIX 'vi' instead of >the excellent MKS port (that truncate bug aside) is that sitting in VP/ix >interactively all day long really sucks up cycles. I prefer to save it I can second that statement... >for compile passes. Although I must admit the load latency for repeated >VP/ix one-shots is pretty bad. (It pays to keep a spare vpix.cnf around >with NOTHING defined except what you need to get a compile done; and It seems to me leaving a VP/ix around idle is just as bad as using it --- e.g. it still uses all the CPU it can get. Hitting the sysreq key and popping into a Unix shell seems to stop that sillyness. /bin/csh is already loaded, so the hit should only be for the data space and .cshrc startup time. (alias vpix '(setenv SHELL=/bin/sh; vpix !$)' should solve that.) >lighting the sticky bit on the fastload image seems to help.) I also Can anyone tell me what EXACTLY rundos does? (In the autoexec.bat file of VP/ix.) It seems to be involved in starting up whatever it was that you had wanted to run under VP/ix: e.g. vpix start [where start.bat exists in the current directory] causes start to be "fed" into command.com when autoexec.bat gets to rundos. RunDos also seems to want to do dospath, and set the drive to z. (I finally had to add unixpath to the beginning of start.bat...) (btw start.bat sets up a number of drives current directories, and brings up foxplus because foxpro doesn't like the networked (Unix) drives and my database file exceed 10meg each and 20 meg total [not that we can find the old 20meg C: drive anywhere.]) -- :!mcr!: | Tellement de lettres, si peu de temps. Michael Richardson | If Meech passes, no one will understand that. Play: mcr@julie.UUCP Work: michael@fts1.UUCP Fido: 1:163/109.10 1:163/138