Decmate Owner's Guide (or equivalent experience)

[Brent Hilpert]

On 2015-Oct-16, at 4:14 PM, David Gesswein wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 12:02:26PM -0700, Brent Hilpert wrote:
>> On 2015-Oct-14, at 3:40 PM, Robert Ferguson wrote:
> 
>> Eventually, we?d like to find or construct some solution for 
>> mass storage, but we?re still at the point of checking out the VT278 itself. 
>> 
> If you haven't seen them these may be of use.
> http://www.chdickman.com/rx02/
> 
> (Doesn't have decmate support though shouldn't be too hard to get to
> work with the printer port)
> https://github.com/drovak/os8diskserver
> 
>> Found some more info about SETUP mode in the Decmate System 
>> Architecture manual. Between the idiosyncrasies, I'm beginning to wonder 
>> if there's something funny going on in the keyboard scanning sequence 
>> or keyboard management from the 278, we'll have to investigate the 
>> keyboard communication in more detail.
>> 
> I pulled mine out and it seems to do the first couple things in that
> manual. If you want me to do to specific tests I can.

Pressing 2 & 3 do something, 2 causes the system to go away - presumably looking for the disks; 3 causes a flashing cursor/underbar across the screen - presumably the 'print screen' scan, 
other operations don't work. Thanks, I don't think we need more specific tests until we've investigated the keyboard communication.
I was looking at the VT100 tech manual (we're using a VT100 keyboard) and the keyboard signalling is quite complex, there's a fair bit that might go wrong there on either end that might subtly interfere with the keycodes, or the scan sequence might be messed up in some idiosyncratic way.

Yes, Rob had found the chdickman RX02 emulator and if other things work out, I think the plan will be to adapt it for the decmate.