Commander X16

The bug is not in ROMTerm, but most likely in ZiModem. We've been aware of it for some time, but Bo Zimmerman hasn't found a fix yet. Basically, the bug occurs when data is travelling in both directions simultaneously. This is one of the reasons I haven't really made any announcements about the wifi card, we need to get this fixed before we sell 1,000 of them.

Jay Crutti wrote: ↑Thu Jul 11, 2024 11:04 pm Then hold UP and DOWN arrows...

Did you mean UP /or/ DOWN arrows?

mortarm wrote: ↑Sat Jul 20, 2024 4:51 am
Did you mean UP /or/ DOWN arrows?

Sorry, you are correct. I didn't mean you should hold both at the same time, merely to use each one to navigate around the ANSI file viewer. The data corruption will occur easily when scrolling UP or DOWN while it's trying to redraw and transmit the UP or DOWN keys at the same time.

I've been keeping an eye on the network card for quite a while ... I'd love to tinker with it, though I think I want to wait until the last wrinkle or two is ironed out. If I were smart enough I'd offer to help. Until then ... just lurking some more

Just an update here... Lots of bug fixes and new features.

The 8-Bit Guy wrote: ↑Mon Aug 26, 2024 5:17 am Just an update here... Lots of bug fixes and new features.

Cool...um, what are they?

For folks like me that are silly enough to want to run a Linux terminal over serial, I've compiled some basic steps to get it to work mostly correct so far. I can't get hardware flow control working and I'm not yet sure why. While the high baud rates seem to mostly work, I'm finding 9600 is the most reliable without flow control as the higher ones can seem to get things in a weird state when running things like `ls`.

Steps are roughly:

1. Start romterm, set your baud and card port and enter the terminal (press enter)
2. Press ALT-F to set flow control to OFF
3. Press ALT-F1 to go back to the configure screen (otherwise flow control isn't properly set, which I'm guessing is a bug in romterm) and press enter to get back to the terminal.
4. Then on Linux, you can fire up agetty manually by running `/sbin/agetty -L -o '-p -- \\u' ttyUSB0 9600 pcansi`. This is using Linux Mint though most Linux flavors likely put agetty under /sbin. You can amke this auto-start via grub too but since I use ttyUSB0 for other stuff, I thought that unwise.
5. You should see a login prompt on your X16 and can now login as you would normally (I am finding the first login attempt seems to always fail for me, but subsequent ones work fine)
6. To fill the screen to the status bar, run `stty rows 29` if using 80-column mode in romterm to fill the screen when using full screen terminal tools like top or vim.
7. To tear down the agetty session, simply logout from the x16

Most basic command line apps seem to work including top, vim, ls, etc. Some are a bit finnicky such as nano, irssi, mutt. I think this may have to do with romterm and/or Linux not sending expected ANSI commands back and forth.

I'm not sure why hardware flow control isn't working. Seems like the signals are being sent back and forth but I'm not sure if it's a software issue or something perhaps with my FTDI to rs232 adapter. Also don't know how to wrangle some of the misbehaving apps (notably irssi) but still, pretty fun!

EDIT: Update, CTRL commands do not work. Not super surprised there as those aren't needing for normal BBSing, but they can become a problem with terminal apps (such as `watch`)

Neat-o!

Another application: I've connecting the X16 up to a modern-day HP server, that still have an RS-232 connection and support VT100. You do have to know what baud rate the HP was set at, but can just try them one by one. Mass-servers are generally headless and maintained remotely - but in a pinch, you can terminal in via that RS232.

So, if you see a kid wandering into your server room with an X16, be warned - it could be John Conor, trying to hack the planet


@mortarm: some of the new features are capturing inputs to a file and fixing obscure ANSI handling.

Nice! Interestingly I tried vt100 and it kinda worked, but romterm didn't handle some things ansi/pcansi did (like vim clearing the screen, and top looks weird on vt100). My goal is to be able to get a curses app (mutt, irssi, maybe a command line activity pub or matrix client if these exist) working. But until then, just watching top steadily refresh is both fun and actually somewhat useful!

Quick update, I got hardware flow control working. Required trying a few cable solutions out. It fixed the irssi rendering bugs (not sure how/why) but I can use ircssi mostly error-free now!