CP/M + Z80 + Terminal Emulation - Rapid Text issues? Ie- CP/M Applications - Ladder, Catchum?

[Derrick Green]

All,

I was curious if anyone had been able to run CATCHUM or any text based non-roll playing applications successfully? I have been able to run applications such as BBCBASIC and CP/M 2.2 appears to work. I suspect that a dedicated graphics adapter would be required. It appears to be an issue with most terminal emulation applications and the Raspberry Pi appears to have the same issue. I am also curious about a vector based graphics schematics. I have see some posts online regarding schematics but suspect the programming is quite intensive in getting the chip set to work. There are still a lot more applications to test and I really like the simplicity of Grant S  Win9x package program (drag and drop) file to hex converter. Its easy to paste in to a terminal emulator I use. IE Cool Win Term (OPENSOURCE) windows application using the download command. Putty has limited ability to upload huge files but the display is better. I still have to play around with X-modem applications. 

Interesting Read:

https://tldr.fi/2014/09/27/zc160-vga-adapter1/

[Spencer Owen]

Disclaimer: I've not tried Catchum so this is just speculation

It looks like one of two things is happening here.  Either the game is expecting a certain terminal width, or, more likely it is not sending a carriage return and linefeed (CR+LF), but just a CR.  Have a look to see if Cool Win Term has the option to assume a CR+LF when CR is sent.

(Also, that VGA adapter looks very interesting.  I'll have to check that out in a bit more detail when I get the chance)

Cheers

Spencer

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[Derrick Green]

I will give that I try next and update this thread. I also have been setting Coolterm - Transmit character delay to 90 and transmit line delay to 2 to allow for more reliable text uploads. I like putty though as it will display ASCII text color. Putty had the same problem with the default settings. I am also going to try this on the ri pi board. 

I am also happy to report I am able to use the RI pi terminal board with the smaker ram boards, sio rev 2 board and cf board. For some reason it would not work until I connected the RX and TX pins directly to the SIO board and disconnect pins 35 and 36 of the board from the backplane. 

[Derrick Green]

No luck on this. I suspect due to the nature of computer terminal emulators you cannot have a menu for example displayed static in text and simply update. I suspect actual terminals during that time period were able to do specific tasks. I remember a terminal I used during the 90s that would always display text in a specific spot on the screen. Since the terminal emulator always scrolls I suspect this is were the problem is.  

Example  the - would always display static without moving but the x would change on the screen. 

--------------

-     x     -
-            -

--------------

[Spencer Owen]

Hi Derek,

The terminal does not have to be continuously scrolling.  Most terminal emulator software (including the Pi Zero module I supply) are ANSI compatible, which has escape codes for things like setting the cursor position or changing the text or background colour.  So ESC[H for example, will set the cursor back to 0,0.  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code for a bit more info.

However, the application on the RC2014 needs to know that it is talking to an ANSI terminal, and I'm not sure how much control you have with that on Catchum.

Hope that helps

Spencer

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[Spencer Owen]

Yes, I know I'm reviving an old thread here... but I've made progress :-)

It turns out that CatChum.com uses CatChum.dat for its settings.  And there's another optional file called CatConf.com which allows you to set things like the terminal type and the keys.  So you can set it to DEC VT100 (VT-52) and it works fine with PuTTY :-)  However, it is very very fast if you're running at 115,200 baud!

I found CatConf.com here http://www.classiccmp.org/cpmarchives/cpm/Software/rlee/C/COMPUPRO/GAMES/

Also worth noting that Ladder has a similar LadConf.com file so you can play Ladder on your RC2014 too.

Now... back to my research...

Spencer