RE: Terminal feedback -> Terminal update / Packaging help wanted

Hi Michael,
thanks for your feedback.

I have now added a term.bat file to terminal.zip which allows the human-
readable parameters that you have recommended, for example:

term com2: 19200

I prefer to leave the actual parameters to terminal.com as is.

Feel free to improve the help screen of term.bat, I know that the help of
terminal.com is very short and the animation is not optimal. But the good
thing about the current state is that terminal.com is < 4k and the ROM image
version easily fits 8k.

There is indeed no KEY to clear the screen, but terminal.com interprets the
ANSI sequence for clear screen when it receives it.

When you press F1, you get the next status line out a cycle of three:
A short key help, the interface status and the current settings. As I only
intercept F-keys, I do not provide an "escape to command mode sequence"
(like the minicom Ctrl-A-Z one). I think this makes using terminal.com
easier, but yes, it gives you troubles when you want to SEND an F-key.
Maybe it would be possible to have some "compose arbitrary char" built in.
I would, however, prefer to use Alt-F1 (and so on) to SEND the F1 code
(hm, QUESTION: which code should be sent to encode F1 (and so on) the way
that VT100 expects it? Is the ALT key fine or would you prefer another one?).

Michael also writes that he got "strange chars from line 80" - did you
really mean LINE 80 ? The status lines are currently not padded, so if your
screen is wider than 80 COLUMNS, you will see garbage right to the status.
However, not having exactly 80 columns will give you a warning message
anyway, so you have been warned :-). The ANSI engine is, of course, limited
to 256 columns. The screen size is probably limited to 30k chars or something.
However, I only state that 25..60 lines should be okay, please test anything
else yourself.

By the way, in case you have troubles leaving with F8, you can also use the
leftshift-rightshift "two finger salute" that is built into terminal.com


PS: The header/loader to make a ROM image of terminal.com was provided by
[email protected] - he has just given me his okay to pack both
the ROM and the normal version into a single GPLed package. For now, the
ROM image binary and header/loader sources (without sources for terminal
itself) are one package, while the terminal sources and binary are another
package, which contains just a copying.txt with the GPL. Would be nice if
some shell-wizard could do some "for every file, remember the file date,
prepend some GPL disclaimer as a comment, restore the date" to the *.asm
files and send back the new ZIP (which should then include the ROM stuff
as well), preferrably using directories bin\ source\terminal\ and help\
and doc\terminal\ as recommended for FreeDOS packages. Thanks a lot!

PPS: Here some example disclaimer. You would need to adjust it to NASM
comment syntax first, of course.

  FreeDOS serial TERMINAL with partial ANSI/VT100 support
  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002  Eric Auer <[email protected]>

  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
  modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
  as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
  of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
  GNU General Public License for more details.

  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
  along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
  Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307, 
  USA. Or check http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt on the internet.


Greetings, Eric