To: Shane O'Neill
Re: PETSCII w/DOS doors
By: Shane O'Neill to digital man on Tue Jul 27 2021 12:33 pm
> I have been working with Mike over at PCMicro.com on trying to get DOS games
> to display ok under PETSCII on Synchronet.
It seems strange that you'd go to Mike for Synchronet support. This is the place to ask for Synchronet support questions.
> After many test and
> configurations where we used NetFoss, Doorway or just Synchronets Fossil
> (which turns out to be the best bet) there are still screen codes being
> passed to the PETSCII
> user making the games unplayable. We tested with Frotz, .com games etc..
Did you try using cioxtrn? I think I suggested this already:
https://wiki.synchro.net/howto:cioxtrn
> After all this testing the past week plus, Mike said "Your best bet would
> probably be to contact Deuce and see if he would add an option to Syncterm
> to allow it to convert ANSI codes to PETSCII codes when it's in PETSCII
> mode."
I doubt very much Deuce would do that.
> I guess my question is could this be done in Synchronet being it is already
> converting other ANSI to PETSCII?
Synchronet converts CP437 characters to PETSCII, not ANSI.
> I know myself and Bucko would be big
> users of this to allow Commodore users the ability to enjoy DOS games on
> Synchronet using a Commodore!
Are these 40 column DOS games? Most Commodore users are 40 columns, so that could also be a problem.
> If you would like to see our back and fourth emails and screen captures
> isolating the cause and effects I can forward them on to you.
I intend to port a Z-Machine engine to Synchronet in the future to make the playing of those Zork games seamless (no "DOS" or any other programs involved), but that's not going to happen right away (gotta update our JS engine first). If a DOS games sends WWIV color codes, those could be converted to PETSCII color codes I suppose - that might already just work, I don't recall. But if the DOS game sends ANSI sequences directly to the user, I don't intend to do any "translation" of that to PETSCII on the fly. This is where it's advantagous to use JavaScript ports of popular DOS doors (e.g. LORD, LORD2, tw2, etc.) as they render fine for PETSCII users too.
--
digital man
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