<html><head></head><body>Hi all, <br><br>This is getting a bit silly. Compared to some of the other things MAME emulates the vt100 and other terminals should be downright easy.<br><br>As to why, well there is not much reason to run simh either, except that it pleases us. I guess the same applies here. More power to whoever wants to do this. Let's help them instead of explaining why it is useless. <br><br>For the connection to simh the quickest way may be to start with the tcp connection to the console / serial line cards. <br><br>Peter<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On July 3, 2020 12:05:39 AM GMT+02:00, Johnny Billquist <bqt@softjar.se> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<pre class="k9mail">Just a couple of comments...<br><br>On 2020-07-02 13:16, Peter Allan wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;">Well my request for help getting MAME to talk to simh has generated a <br>lot of replies, so let me deal with them in groups.<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #ad7fa8; padding-left: 1ex;"> Why not use PuTTY for the VT emulator?<br>What is the point of trying to use MAME for VT emulation?<br></blockquote><br>My reason for being interested in using MAME is that it is NOT a <br>terminal emulator program All terminal emulator programs such as PuTTY, <br>xterm, SecureCRT, etc, are pieces of software that aim to emulate the <br>functions of a particular type of terminal. While all of them are useful <br>(I use putty and xterm quite a lot myself), all of them fail to <br>implement some features of the physical terminal. Usually this is not a <br>problem, but occasionally I find it really annoying. The point about <br>MAME is that, rather like simh itself, it simulates the hardware and <br>runs the real firmware from real VTxxx ROMs. In the case of the VT <br>terminal configuration, MAME simulates an 8085 microprocessor and <br>executes the code from the original ROMs. Hence all the features of a <br>physical terminal should be present automatically.<br></blockquote><br>I can understand the need/interest/fun of running the actual firmware <br>instead of some emulation. But of course you then have the question of <br>how accurately that hardware emulation is. It's more than just a <br>question of emulating the CPU that is inside the terminal. DEC was doing <br>some pretty nifty things in hardware to allow some features to work.<br>You really should check out of smooth scrolling on the VT100 is <br>accomplished... <br>(<a href="http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/terminal/vt100/EK-VT100-TM-003_VT100_Technical_Manual_Jul82.pdf,">http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/terminal/vt100/EK-VT100-TM-003_VT100_Technical_Manual_Jul82.pdf,</a> <br>page 4-97, section 4.7.9 - "Split Screen Smooth Scrolling". Emulating <br>those hardware tricks are not going to be easy...<br><br>Anyway, to also point out something else, the VT100 have an 8080. The <br>VT220 have an 8051, while the VT240 have a T11 as the main processor, <br>and an 8085 for the video logic.<br><br>This should tell you a little bit about the futility of trying to run <br>the wrong ROMs on the emulator...<br><br>As for getting MAME to talk to simh, I think you need to start with just <br>MAME playing a terminal at all. Once you accomplish that, then you can <br>start looking at how to hook them up. If the VT simulation in MAME was <br>fully accurate, you would have a serial connector on the back, which the <br>terminal uses. So then you need to run a cable to a serial port used by <br>simh. But of course, you probably do not want an emulation down to that <br>level, but are expecting to simulate the serial ports...<br><br> Johnny<br></pre></blockquote></div></body></html>