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Accurate ANSI Emulation in Mac OS X?
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."
Boy, that takes me WAY back. I seem to remember a program called MACTerm that did a semi-ok job at ANSI graphics, other than it being all in black & white anyway (this was before color macs). I doubt somehow that you'd find anything that would deal with color....unless you programmed it yourself.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
If you have an appropriate charset locale installed, 'luit' (comes with X11) can emulate any locale when run in a proper unicode terminal. it is a great tool for connecting to systems expecting odd character sets.
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
Argh. Someday I'll learn - preview first, then submit.
f onts.sit
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.
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, look under "Unix source" or something like that.
Hope one of those works, have fun.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
You can use a dos font, it still wont give you ansi color. I had this same problem on iTerm, and the default terminal.
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)
Check this out: http://www.pollet.net/GLterm/ from the site: GLterm is a replacement for the Terminal application which ships with MacOS X. It's made to be faster, and to support more common terminal features. It supports full ANSI colors, all vt102 protocol, all DEC function keys, and a selection of useful xterm sequences. The Big Thing is that GLterm uses X11 .bdf fonts and renders them using..OpenGL. So it's very fast... as long as you have a working 3D accelerator. It should work as intended on B&W G3 and up for desktops and on White iBook and up for laptops: ie a machine whose 3D accelerator is handled properly in OSX. To this date (April 2002) Rage II, II+, Pro are not accelerated.
PuTTY is pretty solid, and I believe it handles ANSI.
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)
Try the Mac Orchard for all things Mac Internet: http://www.macorchard.com/ Specifically, the terminal apps page (DataComet might work for you), or the Commercial apps page if you want to spend more money... Drew
Zterm http://homepage.mac.com/dalverson/zterm/ personally I still use v0.9 on my SE as a serial console, but it will handle Zmodem and PC ANSI BBS, and the latest versions are of course OS X native.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
ZTerm was ported to Mac OS X awhile ago. It's shareware, but it itches the scratch well enough.
cheers- raga
Try setting the "TERM" environment variable to "ansi80x25" or something like that, to see if that helps. You probably don't need a new application - you probably just need to set different terminal emulation in your current app.
Just when I thought I was the only one who checked the boards, I find out there are two. j/k.
.Mac site looks like a good bet.
f onts.sit
u surper.html
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.
DOSBox is excellent. I've been playing Ultima Underworld ( from CDs I bought in the late 90's ) on it. I bought the game originally, in 92 maybe, on 3.5" diskettes; but when the CDRom with the sequel came out I picked it up for I think 10 dollars from the bargain basket at babbage's.
:P
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
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
I've run Black Night 1.07 under OS 9.1, but have not tested it in Classic. I believe it was last updated in 1997. I used it to telnet into a BBS with color ANSI graphics. It supports Zmodem and is extendable with Communications Toolbox plugins. I couldn't find a site for the author, but the software is still out there http://www.macosarchives.com/terminal.html
Old memories only, I'm afraid.
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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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
- 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!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.