Accurate ANSI Emulation in Mac OS X? 105
bedouin writes "I occasionally telnet to some BBSs that are very rich in ANSI graphics. While I can usually navigate fine through message areas and file boards, playing classic door games like Food Fight is almost unbearable. For about a year I've been searching for a Mac OS X terminal emulator that can accurately draw ANSI graphics just as they would appear on DOS systems with ansi.sys, but haven't found anything yet. Any suggestions? A native (and free or shareware) Mac OS X app would be prefered, but I'm willing to use an X11 or maybe even classic alternative as well. So far I've experimented with iTerm, GLterm, and aterm with unimpressive results."
ANSI BBSes? (Score:5, Informative)
luit (Score:2, Informative)
The answer is in your fonts... (Score:5, Informative)
I've been slowly writing my own terminal program just because of the exact reason you've mentioned.
The trick in my case was simply to find a Mac font that contained the IBM Extended ASCII characters in the same sequence. There are two such fonts floating around that will do the trick -- IBMAC and ENCLAVE. IBMac works really well in my experience.
Usually, t's just a matter of putting them in your Fonts folder and telling your term program to use them for the display.
I've slapped them up on my
http://homepage.mac.com/kiddailey/files/misc/ib
Note that they're bitmap fonts, so forget trying to view them in Fontbook.
If you'd like to give my extremly rough, full-ansi supporting work-in-progress term program a try I'd be more than happy to slap it up somewhere for you
Crap - link + additional info (Score:5, Informative)
http://homepage.mac.com/kiddailey/files/misc/ibm-
The only other point I forgot to mention is that your term program will need at least ANSI color support (that you may have to tweak) for this to work right.
Quick Search (Score:5, Informative)
My last suggestion is PuTTY. I've always found it to be an excelent program in the Windows world, and they have source for a Unix version which should work on OS X (this is based on the the Unix underpinnings, not anything written anywhere I saw). Download page [greenend.org.uk], look under "Unix source" or something like that.
Hope one of those works, have fun.
Re:iTerm (International Terminal Emulator) for OS (Score:4, Informative)
I finally used fink, and use kde konsole. I can't believe OSX wouldnt support true ansi color with its default terminal.
Loaded BitchX and compare, you can see the difference. Fonts are easy, decent emulation is the bitch. (pun intended)
Re:The answer is in your fonts... (Score:5, Informative)
GLTerm (Score:4, Informative)
Re:iTerm (International Terminal Emulator) for OS (Score:5, Informative)
It's primarily Win32 software, but there is a UNIX source. Might work in OS X, though there is an OS X port on the way (according to the FAQ [greenend.org.uk])
The Mac Orchard (Score:4, Informative)
ZTerm (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Another challange :) (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Quick Search (Score:3, Informative)
Tried VersaTerm Pro? (Score:4, Informative)
cheers- raga
Have you tried setting the TERM environment var? (Score:5, Informative)
Ahhh.... Fellow BBSer (Score:5, Informative)
Anyhow, I've encountered the exact same problem, and our friend who posted the fonts on his
http://homepage.mac.com/kiddailey/files/misc/ibm-
There are a couple of other things I'd like to bring up. First, I noticed that the backspace doesn't work automatically under the terminal when connecting to telnet sessions. There is a check box in the preferences to change that. Secondly, I write messages in some of the games and apparently the terminal puts in some bogus characters here and there. This may be related to the fonts yet again. However, I thought it was worth mentioning.
For those of you who scoff at playing some door games on the BBS, I suggest you try Usurper. It is a lot of fun. Here is a link to a page that talks about the game in detail, and has some links to where you can telnet to, and play it.
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Castle/7177/
P.S. Some BBS installs have a web front end leveraging Java, which work quite well.
Re:By the side door (Score:3, Informative)
On my 866 powerbook it runs about the same as the NEC powermate 386 I originally played it on 12 years ago, but it works
Re:GLTerm (Score:5, Informative)
I've had plenty of users using iirc ANSI ascii "art", MUD players using GLterm with their ANSI art as well. Gee I've been sent megabytes of sometime pretty borderline "films" to ensure they work.
My own suggestion is to get a lame DOS box, old laptop or something. I'll probably be cheaper than a GLterm registration
Try This One in Classic (Score:2, Informative)
Re:ZTerm (Score:2, Informative)
Essentially, all serial communications in the OS was abstracted, which was hugely advanced over the hard-mapping to COM ports in the DOS/Windows world -- this way, a serial app could connect by any means to anything, as long as there was a Comm Toolbox tool to do it. There were a couple of terminal apps -- Mark/Space had one and Aladdin also released SitCOMM -- which included a bunch of these tools for a variety of connection and download possibilities (YMODEM, anyone?).
Anyway, OS X has the same idea, though it's no longer called the Communications Toolbox. There are an arbitrary number of serial ports, and you can choose which one you want to talk to by holding down Shift as ZTerm launches or by looking in its "Modem Preferences." If you've ever set up a Bluetooth dialup connection, for example, you'll see multiple ports. Unfortunately, I doubt anyone has created a port extension which creates a telnet connection, as had been done for OS 9.
I was hoping, when I started typing this, that it would be possible to run ZTerm 1.0.1 in Classic and have it recognize and use a classic Telnet tool, but I checked it out and no dice. Nothing shows up in its port list. Oh well.
Re:Quick Search (Score:2, Informative)
dataComet (Score:3, Informative)
Memory lane... Good old MacTerminal... (Score:3, Informative)
I looked into this very carefully back circa 1985 to 1989, because I was in the computer unit of a research institution that was heavily into Digital gear, had databases and so forth that exploited Digital terminals, and had standardized on Macs for personal computers.
At the time I found three "winners."
--Apple's own MacTerminal had the most complete, accurate, and lovingly faithful VT100 emulation of anything I ever tested. It worked with everything, and in particular supported double high/double wide characters, everything about keypads. It was by far the best VT100 emulator of any kind, on any platform, I ever evaluated. No graphics, though (no "sixels").
--White Pine Software's Mac240 was a very faithful VT240 emulator and was quite good for graphics.
--Versaterm was not a flawless VT100 substitute, but it was very good at everything it did, and it did a lot.
Many programs that claimed VT100 emulation were quite poor at it, particular issues involving commands that affected the VT100's internal state.
The quick test is to try double high/double wide characters. An emulator that doesn't do them is not aspiring to be a high-fidelity DEC emulator. If an emulator does do them, it's a sign that the developers were really trying and probably knew their stuff.
Much as I'd love to love them, Red Ryder/White Knight were lousy at VT100 emulation. If that means anything to anyone.
THE CORRECT ANSWER (Score:2, Informative)
If you want quick and painless ANSI terminal emulation, looking for a modern app that supports it is the wrong way to go about it. I've tried all the modern terms and they all do a worse job than this method.
- Download an ANSI font from here [earthlink.net]
- Place sabvga.pcf in
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc
- cd to that dir and run "sudo mkfontdir"
- Fire up X11 in your Utilities folder
- Open an Xterm and run "xtern -fn sabvga"
Voila! You now have perfect ANSI terminal emulation because it is exactly the same program as people have been using for ANSI for decades!Informative? (Score:3, Informative)
The TERM environment variable is used to tell the applications which emulation your terminal is using so they can send the correct escapte sequences. Changing it will make the apps send different codes which will mess up program you start.