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Improved terminfo for Model 100, 102, and 200

hackerb9

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Jul 14, 2015
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Earth, currently.
Hello! I created an improved terminfo so that I could use my Tandy 200 as a proper serial console to my UNIX boxes. I thought I'd share what I've got and ask a few questions.

https://github.com/hackerb9/Tandy-Terminfo

Here are some of the unanswered questions I've come upon that I'd appreciate help with:


  1. Is there a document that explains what all the glyphs in the Tandy Extended ASCII set are supposed to be? One person who's using my terminfo on his Model 100 has started making a mapping to Unicode but there are some characters that neither of us is quite sure of.
  2. Has anyone decompiled TELCOM, the built-in terminal emulator? I'm curious if there are any more undocumented escape codes, beyond the ones I've already found. I'd like to have a complete set before submitting my terminfo to Thomas Dickey for inclusion in the official terminal database.
  3. On a related note, does anyone know what the escape sequence ESC r does? When sent to my Tandy 200 using echo $'\er', TELCOM responds with 7A tua.
  4. Are there any differences (besides screen size) between the Model 100, 102, and 200 versions of TELCOM?
  5. While my terminfo is able to show some of the Tandy Extended ASCII codes, such as box drawing, from UNIX, I'd like it to seamlessly convert Unicode characters for me so that when I view a web page I'll get all the lovely accents this machine can show. Is this a solved problem?

    It looks there are ways to define a new character mapping for the locale or iconv or luit. However, I haven't found a good How To on doing it and my simple attempts have failed. Does anybody have any tips or suggestions?

Thank you for any help you may have.
 
You might want to ask on the Club100 (Bitchin100) mail list; there is a terminal program for use with Linux that does Unicode conversion.
 
NO! :) there are many m100 fans. I'll put a link to your github page in the June edition of TRS8BIT if OK with you

Of course! Please do. As you can see, I've got it so the builtin TELCOM program works with ncurses applications for inverse, box drawing characters, and a few of the "extended ASCII" characters like £.
acschars.jpgI'm working on automatic unicode support, but that will have to be a separate gconv module. In the meantime, Dawidi, a person using my terminfo on a Model 100, has shared tandytranscode.c, a program for UTF-8 conversion. (In the same message, you'll see that Dawidi also wrote some handy scripts for quick upload and download without the slow down of screen scrolling).

P.S. I just tried looking up TRS8BIT and I'm getting 404 Not Found.
http://www.fabsitesuk.com/tandy/TRS8BITindex.zip (link from fabsiteuk)
http://www.fabsitesuk.com/tandy/trs8bit1302.pdf (link from Adafruit)
 
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Note that (at least) one character in the M100,M10 and KC85 is different from the T102 and T200: CHR$(136), originally a sort-of-stretched tall i, later changed to pi.
 
Note that (at least) one character in the M100,M10 and KC85 is different from the T102 and T200: CHR$(136), originally a sort-of-stretched tall i, later changed to pi.

Yikes! Was this all US M100s? I checked the source code for HTERM and you're right. It says \x88 is ¡"inverted exclamation point"!

So they changed the character set between the Model 100 and 102 in the US?

I got feedback from someone with a Model 100 with the European “A” series ROM who said all the characters are exactly the same as on my US Model 200, which looks like this:

td200-charset.gif
 
There are two ROM types for the M100 but AFAIK the actual contents of the US versions are identical; yes, the 102 and 200 have the pi symbol instead of the inverted exclamation mark.

Regarding the non-US ROM versions, I'd ask on the Club100 list; dumps of various non-US ROMs are available but I can't find them at a quick look. Keyboard layouts definitely varied among countries and I'd assume that there might also be character set differences.

Nice work BTW!
 
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