12 Jan
2007
12 Jan
'07
1:50 a.m.
On 1/11/07, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
In article <45A617DD.15753.7E3E1D3 at cclist.sydex.com>,
"Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> writes:
How common is that in vintage terminals? I know some of the HP 264x
series terminals have an escape sequence that allows code to be
downloaded and executed in the terminal. Somewhere on the net I
believe there is a version of Pong for the HP 2644A. I don't have any
8008 CPU HP 264x terminals such as the 2644A, only 8085 CPU ones.
On 10 Jan 2007 at 21:48, der Mouse wrote:
Cool! Another nice little tidbit to look for! :-)
Reminds me of something I did with a TeleVideo
955 once. Turns out
that model has a custom-firmware ROM socket, with an escape sequence in
the stock firmware to execute it. I disassembled enough of the various
pieces to work out much of the interface to the hardware, and wrote a
small video game to run in the custom firmware ROM as a
proof-of-concept exercise. This promptly started a friend asking me
when I would release NetBSD/tvi955....
When I wrote the firmware for the Fortune Systems text terminal, I
added a special escape sequence that would allow one to load a
program into RAM via the host and execute it. It was used for
terminal QA, but the code stayed in as far as I know. If anyone has
one of these animals and wants to know the escape sequence, drop me a
line and I'll dig it out of my files. IIRC, there's not a lot of
RAM there, but enough to goof around with.