Raspple II / A2CLOUD + Twitter

[Alistair Ross]

Hi Everyone,

Just set up Raspple II and I can wholeheartedly confirm that it is all
the amazing things that Ivan details on it's website. I have a CFFA3000
card so setting it up was even more of a synch than the website guide
is.

After playing around with lynx, cftp and the usenet tools I took it to
more modern thoughts - twitter to be precise.

I apt-get'ted ttytter and presto, I can now tweet from my Apple II.
Ivan - Maybe worthwhile adding this to the Paspple II bundle if you
think that this would be beneficial.

Ivan - I am thinking about trying out ANSI-BBS/ANSI or Proterm
emulation to see if I can get colour and the use of the cursor keys etc.

I have copied the termcap file for ProTerm over from the GNO FTP to the
Pi terminfo folder, but I'll try ANSI first.

Do you/anyone else have any experience with other terminal emulation
methods - or did you choose VT100 after experimenting and find that
VT100 worked best.

Cheers,

Alistair

[Ivan X]

I chose VT100 because I was using ProTERM and Z-Link as my term programs for A2CLOUD, and didn't think there were better freely available alternatives for 8-bit Apple II's. I did play around with a couple of other termcap settings but since ProTERM and Z-Link don't have color anyway and the other emulations didn't work as well I stuck with VT-100.

If there are other terminal emulations or programs you find work better, I'd certainly like to hear what you find. I know Spectrum for IIgs has ANSI and I feel like I tried it but it had issues I can't remember now. You might want to change the term in /etc/inittab if you find a good one.

As for arrow keys with VT-100, on ProTERM and Z-Link, they work correctly if you hold down solid-apple (not necessary with ProTERM on a IIgs, or Spectrum).

Twitter as part of A2CLOUD is a great idea I hadn't thought of, will consider it for a future release. Any other suggestions are welcome too.

[Ivan X]

On Tuesday, January 7, 2014 7:25:27 PM UTC-5, Alistair Ross wrote:
> I apt-get'ted ttytter and presto, I can now tweet from my Apple II.
> Ivan - Maybe worthwhile adding this to the Paspple II bundle if you
> think that this would be beneficial.

ttytter is now included in the new A2CLOUD and Raspple II I posted
this morning. Very nifty. Thanks for the idea.

> I am thinking about trying out ANSI-BBS/ANSI or Proterm
> emulation to see if I can get colour and the use of the cursor keys etc.
>
> I have copied the termcap file for ProTerm over from the GNO FTP to the
> Pi terminfo folder, but I'll try ANSI first.
>
> Do you/anyone else have any experience with other terminal emulation
> methods - or did you choose VT100 after experimenting and find that
> VT100 worked best.

I did some playing around with this yesterday. What it comes down is
that VT100 is the most likely to work under the most circumstances, but
unfortunately causes many Linux programs to omit the color codes, even
if you are using a terminal program which can handle color
(e.g. Spectrum's ANSI emulation).

It seems that some (many?) Linux programs, even though ostensibly
abstracted from the terminal codes, anticipate VT100-drived
emulation and don't seem well-adapted to anything else; a simple
example is the default "ls" command in Debian Linux, which is always
going to send VT-100 type terminal codes regardless of what TERM is
set to.

A worse example is the Tin newsreader included with A2CLOUD
(the "a2news" command); if you set TERM=ansi, Spectrum will show you
color, but the formatting is disastrous. But irssi ("a2chat") works and
looks great. Lynx looks good until you need to display another page
and it doesn't clear anything before it properly. ProTERM, in any case,
won't display color, so I don't think you're missing much there.

What seems like it would be ideal is an emulation you could specify in
TERM which is fully VT-100 compatible, but would still encourage
Linux programs to display in color. I was hoping this might be
TERM=xterm, but you get a lot of non-interpreted characters with VT-100
or Spectrum's ANSI emulation. So I don't know if it's a possibility.

As for the arrow keys on VT-100, as I mentioned, hold down solid-apple
if you're not on a IIgs with ProTERM or Spectrum. I believe Z-Link
actually lets you program them to send whatever you want, meaning you
could "fix" them to not require solid-apple, but I haven't actually
tried to do this.

[iv...@ivanx.com]

Ivan X <iv...@ivanx.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, January 7, 2014 7:25:27 PM UTC-5, Alistair Ross wrote:

>> I am thinking about trying out ANSI-BBS/ANSI or Proterm
>> emulation to see if I can get colour and the use of the cursor keys etc.

Ok, actually came up with this. If you type 'TERM=pcansi' at the Linux
prompt, you can connect with Spectrum's ANSI online display and it works
with pretty colors and everything, though baud rate needs to be 9600 or
lower to use 'a2news' (as I am doing right now) because it can't
keep up with clearing the screen at higher rates.

However, ProTERM won't display the highlight bar if TERM=pcansi, even if
you choose its ANSI BBS emulation, so I am leaving vt100 as the default.

[Steven Hirsch]

On 01/14/2014 12:00 AM, Ivan X wrote:

> It seems that some (many?) Linux programs, even though ostensibly
> abstracted from the terminal codes, anticipate VT100-drived
> emulation and don't seem well-adapted to anything else; a simple
> example is the default "ls" command in Debian Linux, which is always
> going to send VT-100 type terminal codes regardless of what TERM is
> set to.

Indeed. I had quite a battle getting the 'z80pack' CP/M emulator working
properly on Linux in terms of display codes, key codes and arrow-key handling.
This stuff is all quaint and ancient by today's GUI-centric standards and
probably not all that well tested anymore.

Steve

[iv...@ivanx.com]

I think it's fair to say that VT-100 and its derivatives have become a
standard for fullscreen terminal communications, and others are regarded
as obsolete and thereby not worthy of supporting. I mean, I think
this was even becoming the case in the 80's, which is why a comm program
for the Apple II that actually supported VT-100 well was such a big
deal when it finally arrived. (What was the first one? ProTERM is the
only one I remembered; I know ASCII Express, or at least whatever
version I was using, didn't do it.) So I'm sure it's not well-tested.
Who'd want to?

On a side note, I have a vague memory from a Unix sysop back then that
Datamedia codes were very close to the Apple II's own cursor movement
keys, and his supporting that in his BBS made it very nice.

Also, this whole line of inquiry led me to discover an interesting
problem, and resolution, when using an Apple II to log into my Pi. I
noticed that when I used Lynx with ANSI emulation, I'd sometimes see
consistent sequences of non-ASCII characters where punctuation should
go.

I saw the same thing in man pages sometimes, and it had an effect of
causing characters on the right edge of the screen to persist because
when their lines were later wiped by spaces, not enough were used. I
went back and looked at its VT-100 emulation, and also ProTERM's, and I
noticed that while the character count was right, there'd still be a
random ASCII character (e.g. 'b') where punctuation should be.

I thought it had something to do with the VT-100 emulation in the
terminal programs, but then I saw that it happened even with TERM=dumb
(that is, no terminal emulation, just output). Finally, I turned on
ProTERM's "control show" emulation and saw that there were indeed three
characters being sent in the place of one.

Then I figured it out -- the Pi's was outputting UTF-8, where characters
above ASCII 127 are represented as multiple bytes, e.g. a hyphen, or a
smart quote. I changed its locale and language to en_US ISO-8859-1,
which is a common "Latin-1" one-byte-per-character and everything worked
perfectly, and Spectrum's ANSI emulation even appears to support PC
graphic text in programs like raspi-config, which is sweet. I figured
out how to make this change programmatically so I will provide it in an
A2CLOUD update at some point.

In fact, I'm now suprised at how much I'm enjoying Spectrum's ANSI
emulation. I'm mostly an 8-bit guy, but the color makes a big
difference. The A2CLOUD web page (which is WordPress based) is actually
totally readable in Lynx. It looks better with "High Intensity" in
Settings->More Display Options; remember to type "TERM=pcansi" on your
Pi if you try. I mean sure, at some point I have to just ask myself
why not use Safari on my Mac, but that's not the point, is it.

Posted using "a2news" in A2CLOUD from my Apple IIgs. Just gotta say it!
Sorry about the hard wrapping. That was how we rolled back then.

[Steve Nickolas]

On Wed, 15 Jan 2014, iv...@ivanx.com wrote:

> I think it's fair to say that VT-100 and its derivatives have become a
> standard for fullscreen terminal communications, and others are regarded
> as obsolete and thereby not worthy of supporting. I mean, I think
> this was even becoming the case in the 80's, which is why a comm program
> for the Apple II that actually supported VT-100 well was such a big
> deal when it finally arrived. (What was the first one? ProTERM is the
> only one I remembered; I know ASCII Express, or at least whatever
> version I was using, didn't do it.) So I'm sure it's not well-tested.
> Who'd want to?

I know Apple Access // could do vt100, more or less...it wasn't the best
emulation and running through "screen" really helped, but it was vt100.

> Then I figured it out -- the Pi's was outputting UTF-8, where characters
> above ASCII 127 are represented as multiple bytes, e.g. a hyphen, or a
> smart quote. I changed its locale and language to en_US ISO-8859-1,
> which is a common "Latin-1" one-byte-per-character and everything worked
> perfectly, and Spectrum's ANSI emulation even appears to support PC
> graphic text in programs like raspi-config, which is sweet. I figured
> out how to make this change programmatically so I will provide it in an
> A2CLOUD update at some point.

Yeah, most stuff's UTF-8 nowadays. When I wrote an IRC client for MS-DOS,
I added code to interpret UTF-8 because of the need to see accents and
such, since my chat rooms are "UTF-8 by convention". That gave me enough
of a subset to follow, and to use accented characters myself.

-uso.