Controlling the GUI

[John Kennedy]

I successfully added a 7 inch screen behind the speaker panel. I am having a hard time working out how to resize and control the components that make up the display. Part of the problem is that I connect via Raspbery Pi Connect, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to send Function keys to the remote system, so F11 doesn’t work. It would be great if there was an alternative set of keys, or even a discrete menu on the screen to trigger the customization of the view.

An option to add a second Type30 that would displaying some period correct information would be neat. Or did PDP-1s ever have power gauges or similar? An ashtray? A train set? A CRO screen?

-john

[Angelo Papenhoff/aap]

Oh damn, i had assumed that users would have a keyboard at least. hm, that complicates things. the programs reads its layout from pdp1_layout.txt if it exists. this isn't very pretty but maybe you can try to rearrange things manually by editing it? try starting with:

```

layout 1024 640 fullscreen
bgcol 6e8b8e
display 595 155 330 330
reader 15 45 480 80
punch 15 155 480 80
typewriter 15 275 480 300
```

the 4 numbers in each line are x y width height of the region. i definitely want to have a better user interface, also for mounting tapes and such. so maybe i can think of something, but if you can, attach a keyboard.

aap

[John Kennedy]

Thanks, I will try this approach. A keyboard makes sense except when you have a giant rack-based computer from 1960 propped against the wall looking awesome, but you're logged into it from across the room!

[Oscar Vermeulen]

On Wednesday, September 17, 2025 at 8:28:30 PM UTC+2 johntk...@gmail.com wrote:

Thanks, I will try this approach. A keyboard makes sense except when you have a giant rack-based computer from 1960 propped against the wall looking awesome, but you're logged into it from across the room!

A (another) mixed mode setup would perhaps makes most sense for that setup (which will be a fairly normal one):

Using the web server to comfortably work with the PiDP Rack hanging on the wall, but with a comfortable switch letting you have the Type 30 display both on the 7" HDMI *and* the web interface at the same time... thinking about that...

Kind regards,

Oscar.

[John Kennedy]

Editing that config worked really well for me: I have a wonderful set-up now. I changed the background to black (to hide any parallax misalignment), and shrunk the paper tapes to lie across the other panel. Maybe I'll swap in the typewriter there, but I suspect I'd need a larger view for that so will be remoting.

Really looking forward to some docs-for-dummies to help me start coding. The ground-truth doc for the LLM chatbots has been very helpful.

[Angelo Papenhoff/aap]

Great to hear! Maybe we can even have ready-made configs for the most common 7" displays so people don't have re-do the work of configuring the same kind of screen all the time.

The intro to programming book is indeed a bit desideratum right now. I promised to work on it, but still haven't started, yikes. Currently yak shaving by trying to see how the cross-assembler situation can be improved to support extended memory.