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Homebrew Equipment A place to show, design and discuss the weird and wonderful electronic creations from the hands of individual members. |
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29th Nov 2020, 12:35 am | #1 |
Heptode
Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Stockport, Greater Manchester, UK.
Posts: 827
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ASCII VT100 video terminal emulator (from a kit)
At work, there is sometimes need for an ASCII terminal to test old equipment.
The original terminal wore out or blew up long before I joined and was replaced by a laptop computer running Hyperterminal under Windows 2000. It died (I suspect the HDD) and our IT department didn't want to know, suggesting a new one on a 3-year lease as per current policy and an external serial-to-USB converter, and it wouldn't have had a terminal emulator program on it anyway... I wondered whether there might be something more suitable available and found this: https://www.budgetronics.eu/en/build...kit/a-25776-20 which was designed by Geoff Graham https://geoffg.net/terminal.html It needed a VGA monitor and a PS/2 keyboard, which we had. It was easy to construct, worked first time, boots almost instantly, and does the job required. (I selected the green output for text.) |
29th Nov 2020, 4:38 pm | #2 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Aug 2011
Location: Newcastle, Tyne and Wear, UK.
Posts: 11,586
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Re: ASCII VT100 video terminal emulator (from a kit)
A nice project, although I think if that 2014 project were being designed today it would probably have to use a USB keyboard and have HDMI-out, an indication, I suppose, of the rate of change in the modern IT world.
Still, at the moment there are plenty of old PS/2 keyboards and CRT / LCD VGA monitors dodging landfill and looking for a new purpose in life. For comparable (or less) cost, you could use a £5 Raspberry Pi Zero running your Linux terminal program of choice - there are additional costs, the price of a MicroSD card, any necessary converter / adaptor leads for the USB and HDMI ports, a £2 MAX3232 based RS232-TTL level converter PCB for the serial port and so on - but it might still weigh in at less than the cost of that kit. https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero However, it wouldn't have the instant-on convenience of this hardware project. |
29th Nov 2020, 7:47 pm | #3 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: Wiltshire, UK.
Posts: 14,007
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Re: ASCII VT100 video terminal emulator (from a kit)
in the times I used to have to support such stuff, my "Go-to" was invariably Kermit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_(protocol) If you can't getr Kermit to do your terminal-emulation-thing, then you __really__ have problems. Kermit flavours run under every version of legacy MS-DOS, Windows, Apple's Unix-under-the-GUI-gloss, Android and suchlike. Apart from the terminal-emulation [which includes IBM3270 and Tek4010/4014 graphics as well as DEC VTxxx, Lear-Siegler ADM, H-P 29xx and pretty much anything 1980s/1990s Unix systems had in /etc/termcaps] - it does a sterling job of error-free file-transfer [with mappable character-set transliterations]. |