[HECnet] Writing a VT220 terminal emulator

[Mark Wickens]

On 06/01/2014 18:35, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2014-01-06 18:32, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:
Sure, that would make sense.   Color; sixel; other good things.   But the first requirement would be strict conformance to the spec.

Yes, which pretty much rules out everything except xterm. :-)
xterm had DEC people involved, so I have at least some confidence that they might have checked it against some specs, and not just made up their own assumptions.

I had a good look at the xterm source code to see how difficult it would be to use it as the basis of a decent java-based terminal emulator.

'There be dragons' was as far as I got...

My second thought would be to write an simulation of a VT320 which was capable of running the VT320 ROM. That seems like a pretty good idea, but that's as far as it's got. There is an terminal emulator called VMSTAR in the Freeware V5.0 archive which some of you may remember - apparently this takes that exact approach.

SLAVE::ARCHIVE$:[MEDIA.DECUS.FREEWAREV50.VMSTAR]

Regards, Mark.

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