font and codepage for retro bbs's?

[Robert Kincaid]

I've got my second ACIA board up and running so I'm using it with Kermit to log into some retro telnet BBS's. I'm using Serial as my terminal in VT100 mode. Several BBS's have ANSI settings, but for the life of me and can't find a font/codepage pair that properly displays whatever graphics they are up to with their "ASCII art". Does anyone have any advice on this or should I just live with it. Cursor control and layout are working fine, but there seems to be something missing with respect to the graphics mapping. Or maybe it's just really crummy ASCII art *grin*.

BTW, if you didn't know there is a BBS running (barely) on an RC2014 system (rc2014.ddns.net:2014). It's kind of fun keeping it "all in the family" with RC2014-to-RC2014 bbs'ing.

Thanks for any help,

Robert

PS Quick update on my SC114 project. Since I've been able to test my bitbang code against a proper two ACIA system I discovered I did mess up the IOBYTE with respect to the second ACIA. I have that fixed and will update the GitHub code soon. I'm sure everyone is on the edge of their seat for this (*grin*). In the meantime, if you only have one ACIA the old code works fine. The problem is that I shouldn't have gotten carried away and implemented the PUN: and just stuck with LPT:/LST:

[Douglas Miller]

Maybe not helpful, but the thought I had was related to the H19 terminals (which have an ANSI mode). Their "graphics characters" are probably not any particular standard mapping, so perhaps the output is "ANSI" but with a specific graphics character set in mind? A sample of the output might help (complete with ESC sequences).

[Alan Cox]

On Wed, 29 Sept 2021 at 22:51, Douglas Miller <durga...@gmail.com> wrote:

Maybe not helpful, but the thought I had was related to the H19 terminals (which have an ANSI mode). Their "graphics characters" are probably not any particular standard mapping, so perhaps the output is "ANSI" but with a specific graphics character set in mind? A sample of the output might help (complete with ESC sequences).

You want IBM code page 437 for the high bit characters and the ANSI X3.64 escape codes (which is  what VT100 uses with extensions) plus some oddities that don't usually matter (except maybe insert/delete line). It's the ROM font for the old PC video card text modes. The whole lot actually is the MSDOS "ANSI.SYS" driver rather than specified from the standards directly.

Amusingly Windows dropped ANSI.SYS support until Windows 10 - which added it back via a Win32 console option.

Alan

[Rob Gowin]

Syncterm (https://syncterm.bbsdev.net) is a cross platform terminal program specifically meant for use with BBS systems. It has lots of options for setting fonts and code pages, etc.

Rob