Viewdata terminal software: Any available to download?

[janbredenbeek]

@janbredenbeek is there a way to change the baud rate your terminal uses? I'm wondering if even the Hermes is failing to keep up. I'd like to drop the rate down to at least 2400 baud.

Just use the S*BASIC BAUD command to set the baud rate. QVIEW doesn't set it by itself.
It looks like you're losing characters due to a missing handshake. You should either connect the DTR line from SER2 to RTS from the modem, or lower the speed.
(QVIEW should work OK without handshake at 2400 baud, probably also higher, but 19200 will overflow the Hermes receive buffer without handshake).

[stephen_usher]

Thanks!

[stephen_usher]

Well, took the baud rate down to 1200 and no change.

P.S. Connected using my terminal emulator (VT52) at the same speed and although it couldn't interpret the data correctly for the screen display all the text was correct.

[stephen_usher]

Hardware flow control: Check
1200 Baud connection: Check
Data OK on VT52 emulator: Check
QView able to show ATI6 data from modem: Check
QView able to decode pages: Fail.

This is the NxTel landing page:

Without the source code to see what's happening I've hit the buffers.

Hardware: BBQL (with Hermes and JS ROM) + Super Gold Card + US Robotics Courier v.Everything

P.S. QView isn't hard coded to use Even parity is it, i.e. 7E1?

[stephen_usher]

Got it... Had to use the ser2e device as the feed is 7 bit even parity, one stop bit.

QView is unstable and often crashes with the Super Gold Card. I had to swap to the Trump Card.

[stephen_usher]

In case anyone wants to use this, here's the boot file I've written to set things up and run QView:

Code: Select all

100 TK2_EXT
110 MODE 8
120 CLS
130 baudrate=2400
140 serdev$="ser2e"
150 CLS
160 PRINT "Running QView with following params:"
170 PRINT "Baud rate: ";baudrate
180 PRINT "Serial port: ";serdev$
190 BAUD baudrate
200 a$ = INKEY$(5)
210 EW flp1_qview;serdev$

And I'm attaching a floppy image.

P.S. Turning the cache off on the SGC allows QView to work stably.

[janbredenbeek]

In case anyone wants to use this, here's the boot file I've written to set things up and run QView:

Wow, this looks amazing!

I could connect to the service with QPC2 and Qemulator using the following commands:

Code: Select all

QPC_QLSCREMU 8: REMark QPC2 only
OPEN_IN#3,"tcp_teletext.matrixnetwork.co.uk:6502"
EX QVIEW,#3

Qemulator even supports flash.

P.S. Turning the cache off on the SGC allows QView to work stably.

Hmm, to my best knowledge QVIEW doesn't contain self-modifying code, but I still have the source and will take a look at it...

[stephen_usher]

It could have modifiable data memory mixed with code memory which can mess up the caching.

[janbredenbeek]

It could have modifiable data memory mixed with code memory which can mess up the caching.

It creates some sub-jobs, consisting only of a JMP instruction to an absolute address which is filled in by the main code at creation... that's probably the fault.

[stephen_usher]

Never mind.

Now, what I could do with is a Viewdata terminal which listens at 1200 baud but switches to 75 baud to send a character and then switches back to listen at 1200 baud. This is so as to use the analogue Miracle Systems 1200/75 QL Modem. (This is for the exhibition in November.)

I doubt that any software which came with the modem still exists.