The best emulation for a vt I've found is decterm. Stands to reason, I guess. After that is Procomm, after that is the emulator that came with pathworks. Anyone using a PC to run a dec box that speaks decwindows, you can get a *free* x-server for your win95 machine called mix-95. You can also get it for both powerpc and 68000 macs. It's at tucows - www.tucows.com -- Jim Strickland jim(a)DIESPAMMERSCUMcalico.litterbox.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Vote Meadocrat! Bill and Opus in 2000 - Who ELSE is there? -----------------------------------------------------------------------

On Sun, 22 Nov 1998, Max Eskin wrote: Two problems: hardware mapping (e.g., keyboard differences, screen mode differences, etc), and incomplete specs. No spec is ever complete. The hardest part of emulating another machine is testing all of the possible cases (sometimes unbounded) and emulating the incorrect behavior as well as the correct. Having said that, I don't recall having many problems using VT100 emulators with VMS as long as you SET TERM/NOWRAP and maybe another setting which now eludes me. -- Doug

Actually, I would say the specs aren't really available. The _manual_ is available, but it may not be enough information to write a really complete emulator. There are a couple of reasons for that: - The manual is usually ambiguous, or doesn't tell you what happens in all cases under all conditions. I have a copy of the VT220 programmer's pocket guide, and I've seen the VT100 and VT220 user's manuals, and this is true of them all. What happens to quantity X when I do thing Y? What happens when the characters of an escape sequence are read in? The character and line attributes on the VT220 are a good example of this. - The manual doesn't tell you about undocumented behavior. If you were writing a complete emulator, you would want all the undocumented behavior. (e.g., the VT100 "turn on the bell and never turn it off" sequence) Otherwise, you might want some of it. - The manual doesn't tell you how the terminal is implemented. How many pixels on the screen? How are video attributes stored? This isn't usually applicable to behavior, but it could be (in some rare circumstance which I don't know about). And it is important if you want to write a complete emulator. I would be happiest to have a complete description of the real terminal. Other than that, I would be happy to have a complete description of the emulator. (It may lack some features from the real terminal; it may add features.) I've never seen this for any emulator. It's easy to claim that your emulator emulates a particular terminal. The vtWeb plug-in supposedly emulates VT125. Well, sheesh, they simply see the VT125 as a slight variation on the VT100, while my reason for getting a VT125 emulator is to see ReGIS graphics. (No, the plug-in doesn't do ReGIS. I'm still looking for a VT125 or Gigi emulator!) But only a description will let me find out for certain. -- Derek