Building a serial and VGA "everything console"

oldvcr.blogspot.com

63 points·classichasclass··6 comments

This post describes how to take an off the shelf VT100 serial console emulator and connect a USB keyboard and VGA monitor. This device https://www.tindie.com/products/retromodem/dec-vt100-mini-te...

This post spends a lot of attention on how to fasten, glue and adapt a specific existing keyboard and monitor from a 1U rack mounted console. If I would need a similar serial console, it will end up differently - just because my parts are different.

Might keep this in mind if you go to tindie:

> URGENT

> Tindie has not paid me for the last month. They take your money for your order and then require me to ship product to you, but they do not pay me. Temporarily, please place your order through the tattlersolutions.com website. See below

Is that bullshit still going on with Tindie?

The VT-100 emulation seems very accurate, down to the pixel level.

I wonder if there is anyone doing VT-340 emulation like that - shouldn’t be impossible to transpile the ROMs to something modern (I guess this is what was done here) and fill in the hardware support gaps.

Specially if they used less memory constrained device like a RPi Zero instead of an esp32 and HDMI instead of VGA.

The terminal firmware is VT132 from TheHighNibble. It claims to support more than a VT100, but from looking at the reference doco that is not very much actually added (a handful of SCO and XTerm control sequences, and colour), and nowhere near what one had with the later DEC VT models.

* https://thehighnibble.com/vt132/

* https://thehighnibble.com/vt132/operation/vt100/programmer/

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