Just as a curveball, although many on this list will know of its' existence, I 
believe the circa 1995 terminal emulator vtstar for windows used the VT320 ROM 
and emulated the hardware. Would be interesting if anyone can definitely answer 
that question. Certainly it uses windows fonts rather than direct rendering, so 
if there is emulation via ROM methods it doesn’t extend to display rendering.

 

My classic test these days is to try VAX APL for any VT220/VT320 terminal 
emulators and see how well they cope with soft-font downloads. Even the 
emulators that say they support soft fonts tend to do a pretty poor job. 
Once-upon-a-time I did write a java based terminal emulator that would use the 
original fonts, but rapidly came to the conclusion that even a control-code 
level emulation such as xterm implements is a nasty nasty beast. Stepped slowly 
away from that one…

 

vtstar still runs - more or less - on modern Windows:

 



 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Simh <simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com 
<mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com> > On Behalf Of Lars Brinkhoff
Sent: 03 July 2020 13:55
To: simh@trailing-edge.com <mailto:simh@trailing-edge.com> 
Subject: Re: [Simh] MAME and simh

 

Johnny Billquist wrote:

>> Oh, and just for the people who don't want to read a lot of 

>> documentation, the smooth scrolling is essentially done by the 

>> terminal by changing where the source of the video signal generation 

>> picks up font information [...] I hope that made sense... :-)

 

Thanks, I think it does.

 

Emulation at this level of detail really isn't that uncommon now.

 

> And to take this one step further. Emulation of this then means you 

> need to start emulation the video signal generation. And that in turn 

> means you are going to do emulation of the CRT phosphor.

 

I have no idea how MAME works, but SIMH does that for vector displays.

The current implemenation may not be suitable for raster displays, but it 
wouldn't be a huge step to add this.

 

_______________________________________________

Simh mailing list

 <mailto:Simh@trailing-edge.com> Simh@trailing-edge.com

 <http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh> 
http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh

_______________________________________________
Simh mailing list
Simh@trailing-edge.com
http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh

Reply via email to