what's funny is the terminal emulators work fine
with teco/vt. I
suppose vt50dpy makes more use of the terminal control codes.
Judging by the name of the program... what you really want is a VT50
emulator? IIRC VT50 is a subset of VT52.
though they say they are vt100 compatible, they still
spew garbage
A real VT100 does a good job of emulating a VT52. Kermit does a pretty
good job too, but you may have to specifically set it to VT52 mode.
Tm.