VT100 emulation

Al Kossow aek at bitsavers.org
Thu Sep 6 12:29:13 CDT 2018



On 9/6/18 10:10 AM, Andrew Nesbit via cctalk wrote:

> Second, does there exist anything like a “VT100 operating system”, that emulates the VT100 directly on the bare metal of the machine?  In this case you’d use the external serial port to connect to the target machine.
> 
> One example use case I have in mind here is connecting a serial cable to a server’s BMC serial port for maintenance purposes, if it supports the VT100 protocol, in crash cart scenarios.  Is it possible to do something like this by using the server’s PS/2 keyboard port and VGA monitor port?  So, essentially a KVM without the “M”?  Is there some obvious constraint that I’ve missed?
> 

Really late serial terminal designs are essentially that, x86 cpu and chipset running a dedicated program from rom.

Spare Time Gizmos built a pcb that was a VT100.
http://sparetimegizmos.com/Hardware/VT.htm

If you REALLY want VT100 accuracy, put MAME on a RTOS emulating the VT100

I had given some thought over the last day or two about making a really tiny video terminal.
A while ago, I had bought a couple of tablet ARM SOC LCD notebooks to try doing that.





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