[Simh] FW: MAME and simh

[mark at wickensonline.co.uk]

Just as a curveball, although many on this list will know of its' existence, I believe the circa 1995 terminal emulator vtstar for windows used the VT320 ROM and emulated the hardware. Would be interesting if anyone can definitely answer that question. Certainly it uses windows fonts rather than direct rendering, so if there is emulation via ROM methods it doesn’t extend to display rendering.

 

My classic test these days is to try VAX APL for any VT220/VT320 terminal emulators and see how well they cope with soft-font downloads. Even the emulators that say they support soft fonts tend to do a pretty poor job. Once-upon-a-time I did write a java based terminal emulator that would use the original fonts, but rapidly came to the conclusion that even a control-code level emulation such as xterm implements is a nasty nasty beast. Stepped slowly away from that one…

 

vtstar still runs - more or less - on modern Windows:

 



 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Simh <simh-bounces at trailing-edge.com <mailto:simh-bounces at trailing-edge.com> > On Behalf Of Lars Brinkhoff
Sent: 03 July 2020 13:55
To: simh at trailing-edge.com <mailto:simh at trailing-edge.com> 
Subject: Re: [Simh] MAME and simh

 

Johnny Billquist wrote:

>> Oh, and just for the people who don't want to read a lot of 

>> documentation, the smooth scrolling is essentially done by the 

>> terminal by changing where the source of the video signal generation 

>> picks up font information [...] I hope that made sense... :-)

 

Thanks, I think it does.

 

Emulation at this level of detail really isn't that uncommon now.

 

> And to take this one step further. Emulation of this then means you 

> need to start emulation the video signal generation. And that in turn 

> means you are going to do emulation of the CRT phosphor.

 

I have no idea how MAME works, but SIMH does that for vector displays.

The current implemenation may not be suitable for raster displays, but it wouldn't be a huge step to add this.

 

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