Tuesday, July 5, 2016

VT-100 with SimH. Hope for Starwriter?

This page is a part of the "Understanding IRIS" collection.  Many thanks to David Takle, for figuring this out, and sharing this with us:

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See the most updated version of this topic at:

http://nova-iris.net/simh-simulator/running-vt100/

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I finally figured out how to connect the telnet session to the nova.exe,
setup the VT100 emulation, and all the cursor addressing, etc, is working great.

However ..... Starwriter seems to have its own ideas about this, and probably has some debug info displaying as well, so it seems impossible to make it work right.
I gave up on it and poked around in the DOC.00000 files long enough to figure out how they are formatting their text there (ok, I have about 80% of if figured out).
Looks like they gave the user the ability to set different text characteristics, like underline, bold, dim, etc.
By stripping all that out, I can glean the basic text and display most of what was intended.

Also noticed that the document numbers are unique by LU. So both LU1 and LU2 can have a DOC.00012.

I have attached an updated Drive 0 for the CC system, which contains some new stuff on LU0.
You should replace your existing Drive 0 with this one.
If you have added any new files to your LU0 or LU1 you should copy them to LU4 before swapping drives so you can recover them later.

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Added a new driver to LU0.
$LPT.SIM allows you to export data from the nova emulator to Windows. The steps are:

1. escape to sim> and ATTACH LPT <newfilename>
2. resume nova ( CONT )
3. run a BASIC program that prints to a printer
    i.e.  10 OPEN #0,"$LPT.SIM"
           20 PRINT #0; "My name is Bob"
          30 CLOSE #0
4. escape to sim> and DETACH LPT

The 'newfilename' now contains the printer output and is treated like any Windows text file.
Always DETACH the file before trying to use it in Windows.

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Attached are two text files as well.
DOC.LISTING is a complete list of all DOC files on LU's 1-2-3.
It was created by a new program 0/ DOC.LIST

DOCS is a sample of 3 documents, created by new program 0/ DOC.READ
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DOC.READ allows you to display documents on the screen or print them to $LPT.SIM

You will be prompted for an LU and then a DOC #.
For the doc, only enter the 5 digits.
The program will open the file, display the doc, and ask you if you want to print it.
If you just hit <return> at DOC., it will go back and ask for LU again.

You can print multiple docs to the printer file before you DETACH it.

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What Chuck Harriger recently said on Star*Writer now seems relevant:

"Part of the magic of Star*Writer and Star*Calc was the dumb terminals that we added a circuit board to which added 2 pages (screens ) and native word processing capabilities. Recreating the software does not give you Star*Writer or Star*Calc since the program acted as a server to the word processing terminal."

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This page is a part of the "Understanding IRIS" collection.  

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