... I hooked a real serial terminal up to my Ruby816 system. I have a Wyse terminal otherwise doing nothing, so prompted by a friend locally, I hooked it up.

Of-course - my first 6502 experience was an Apple II, so this isn't "true" (and were there any consumer 6502 systems with a terminal back in the day?)

Anyway, (with apologies for the rubbish mobile phone photos)





As for the physical connection.. Well, terminal goes to RS232 USB serial goes to my desktop goes to a utility called socat which bridges that USB serial port to the other USB serial port to the TTL serial on the Ruby board. It's a bit of a mess but it worked.

Cheers,

-Gordon

_________________
--
Gordon Henderson.
See my Ruby 6502 and 65816 SBC projects here: https://projects.drogon.net/ruby/

Does that speak something like VT100 commands?

I have a VT320, but never so much as powered it up. I also have a Minitel which I have had a play with, but that was connected over a phone line rather than as a serial terminal, IIRC. I don't think I ever have used a serial terminal in a directly connected retrocomputing sense - as yet. So, well done!

The terminal is a Wyse-60 - apparently the most popular serial terminal on the planet... It dates from 1986, so just a couple of years after the 65816 but who's counting

It emulates a VT100 and many others. It's almost ANSI which is what my Ruby host is expecting to use, so I can mostly use the editor which uses my generic "vdu" library - although that actually sends the Acorn MOS VDU commands up the wire to the host processor which knows it's talking to RubyTerm (My desktop SDL application) where it passed them up without change or to a "real" terminal which is usually an ANSI terminal emulator on my Linux desktop. It's all just plumbing!

But it was just a bit of fun on an otherwise dull Saturday afternoon!

Cheers,

-Gordon

_________________
--
Gordon Henderson.
See my Ruby 6502 and 65816 SBC projects here: https://projects.drogon.net/ruby/

Just for some fun, I did a little video of it too:

https://youtu.be/Bg-DcjrJ8g0

Cheers,

-Gordon

_________________
--
Gordon Henderson.
See my Ruby 6502 and 65816 SBC projects here: https://projects.drogon.net/ruby/

I have a VT-420 that I dig out and hook up to one of my projects. However, it's just for fun as I have never built any kind of storage device into my machines.

I'd really like to get my hands on a Q-BUS PDP-11/93 with RTST-E and BAISC Plus-2, or a MICRO VAX 4000 series with one of the later (and faster CPU's) with VMS and VAX BASIC. Then my VT-420 would have a real purpose.

BTW, If you ever get the change to use VAX BASIC, jump at it. That is the way BASIC should be, and it complied to run faster that VAX C. BASIC Plus-2 wasn't half bad either, but the RSTS-E environment only let each user have 32K of memory, so you had to be a bit of a wizard at doing chaining and overlays.

Ah, the memories....

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Bill