https://github.com/mmastrac/blaze
It's prerelase and I haven't pushed the experimental graphical interface yet but you can actually use it, configure it and run everything using a TUI mapper that renders the text framebuffer on your terminal.
There's one or two memory mapper bugs that seem to break multi session mode but those are somewhat obscure and will probably require some experimentation with real hardware to solve.
Do you have more literature on the SSU? Do you know if the roms tolerate more than two sessions being available (or can be trivially patched to support more?)
I am 100% certain a VT420 will never be able to support more than two sessions, as the ROM explicitly has a ton of checks that look like "if session1 { ... } else { ... }". Unfortunately your best bet here would be putting a more advanced terminal multiplexer behind your VT420 and then making the F4 key a full passthrough (disabling the native session switcher).
I haven't had a VT420 in a few decades, but I remember wondering about its built-in multisession support (I never saw it in action)
I would call the splitscreen multisession... gimmicky at best? The two-session version is alright, but juggling windows is not great in general.
But there is one thing, the noise. I very much hear that super high pitched sound and it makes running it just as a 2nd monitor almost impossible.
Also I haven't quite found a good way of integrating it into my setup yet, raspi+tmux+ssh is the easiest but it'd be much cooler having it as an actual 2nd display.
(In case you’re wondering, I had no sane reason to do this.)
I bought a vt510 and hooked it up to my raspberry pi. My intention was to get some kind of VAX VMS OS on there, but as i played around on linux i realised something.
It really really sucks.
I had been dreaming of such a set up since i had been at the centre for computing history[1] and got so much nostalgia for the old DEC VMS setup they had. There is so much emotion brough back from just touching those machines, from the way your muscle memory kicks in as soon as you put your hands over the keyboard.
I was so damn excited for this.
but it was awful, the lag was the big one, but this wasn't from my set-up, this actually was how it was, the previously suppressed memory came back, sat in the computer lab at college, that lag was there - but yeah after years of iterm2, tmux and the advancements in the cli space - going back to vt510 really really sucked.
But it was a pretty horrible experience[2], and really affected me actually, it made me think a lot about nostalgia and how we remember the past.
---
[1]https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/
[2] please, these things are relative, it wasn't that bad, it just kinda sucked
While I still maintain an interest in computer history, i.e. in a literary sense rather than maintaining hardware, it is from an entirely different perspective. I like thinking about how things would have been different if we, say, focused upon energy efficiency or if we minimized the number of layers of abstraction of if main memory was non-volatile. Of course these all involve trade-offs. The interesting thing is how these trade-offs would change the path of technological development.
Of course, it is entirely possible that there was only one viable path. It is nearly impossible to sell operating systems based upon technical improvements, so the emphasis is upon a bunch of end-user visible ephemeral trash. Similarly, it would have been nearly impossible to sell more energy efficient computers so the emphasis was on performance. (Even today, a laptop battery that lasts a day and a mobile phone battery that lasts two is considered good enough.) And, of course, the sale of those high performance processors financed the development of improved fabrication processes that enabled the development of even higher performance processors - and more energy efficient ones. It is unlikely that pursuing energy efficiency would have financed the development of processes to perpetuate itself.
Why not? On anything made in the last 20 years it's going to be faster to render and simpler to implement.
You could do it in software if your processor didn't have anything better to do.
On the emulator from Lars in the below comment, that's a good approach; but for the physical CRT effects, as I said, XanalogTV did a great job.
But kudos for allowing a GL-less option for legacy systems.
Because it wasn't doing much else.
> even under legacy systems with no OpenGL support at all
If it's as legacy as all that, it probably doesn't have graphics that are particularly enjoyable to use. Are you trying to run it on a Sun IPX or something?
Even a Raspberry Pi can handle this stuff at low power consumption today.
I don't think I've owned anything PC-like that didn't have hardware OpenGL acceleration since the late 90s.
[1] http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/dettaglio_mame.php?game_name=vt1...
Is there any way to slow things down in a terminal?
http://artscene.textfiles.com/vt100/
EDIT:
I just found this command from here and it's awesome to see these after 30 years!
https://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/cbp3eo/playing...
cat "/path/to/file.vt" | pv -q -L 2000
https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/Ann_Arbor_Ambassad...
>A special shout-out to vttest which does try to exercise a bunch of corner-cases of VTxxx emulation. Unfortunately, it can only really be used interactively, so it's not useful for automated testing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vttest
https://invisible-island.net/vttest/
>Vttest was written in 1983-1985 by Per Lindberg at the Stockholm University Computing Center. The last version was 1.7b (1985-04-19). Per Lindberg later distributed 1.7b via the Usenet mod.sources group (Volume 7, Issue 16, September 2, 1986). It became an established part of the Unix source archives, e.g,. as noted in these postings from 1988.
It even tests for obscure commands like ESC # 8: video alignment test-fill screen with E's
http://www.braun-home.net/michael/info/misc/VT100_commands.h...
(I know that because I wrote a VT100 emulator in PostScript for NeWS that passed vttest.)
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/utilities/term...
/hash-prefix {
56 eq {
test-pattern
} if
reset-termulator
} def
/do-hash {
/termulate-char //hash-prefix def
} def
/test-pattern {
Columns 0 ne Rows 0 ne and {
Columns string
0 1 Columns 1 sub {
1 index exch 69 put
} for
0 1 Rows 1 sub {
Lines exch get 1 index exch copy pop
} for
pop
} if
slow-refresh
} def
/shape-error-cursor { % - => -
gsave
ClientCanvas setcanvas
cursor-can /Mapped false put
newpath
CharWidth CharHeight scale
.2 0 moveto
0 .3 lineto
.1 .5 lineto
.2 .5 lineto
.2 .55 lineto
.3 .6 lineto
.4 .55 lineto
.4 .95 lineto
.5 1 lineto
.6 .95 lineto
.6 .55 lineto
.7 .6 lineto
.8 .55 lineto
.8 .5 lineto
.9 .55 lineto
1 .5 lineto
1 .3 lineto
.8 0 lineto
closepath
cursor-can eoreshapecanvas
cursor-can setcanvas
0 fillcanvas
cursor-state { cursor-on } if
grestore
} def
gnabgib•3mo ago
2024 (40 points, 16 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40590353
2020 (117 points, 30 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23662907