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A VALIANT LITTLE TERMINAL A VLT User`s Manual

1. Fifo Pipes We will discuss the Fifo Pipes option in considerable detail later in this chapter Open Console Selecting the Open Console item opens a console window at the bottom of the screen The console window which allows you to send both ordinary text to the host and script commands to VLT will be discussed in detail later in this chapter View History We will discuss the View History option in considerable detail later in this chapter Change Directory Change Directory provides you with a way of setting and or chang ing the default directory from which VLT is operating When you choose this option a directory requester or a string requester under 1 3 will appear which contains a single string gadget The current default directory will be displayed in this gadget Replace the displayed directory with 27 another of your choice Note on string requesters after you have entered the desired string you press the return key to proceed Unlike the file requester string requesters have no Okay button only a Cancel button Program Mode The Program Mode option allows you to program a number of function keys menu options and keyboard abbreviations Details are discussed later in the chapter Save Configuration The Save Configuration command is very important in that it allows you to save the settings you have changed such as baud rate number of lines macro key settings colors etc You configure VLT the way you want and
2. makedir work VLT copy VLT work VLT all If you wish to make VLT a resident program or if you are still running under AmigaDOS 1 3 then you must assign the logical device name VLT to the directory which contains VLT For instance if you copied the VLT drawer to your work partition then you must assign VLT to work VLT To do this add the line assign VLT work VLT to your user startup file or your startup sequence under 1 3 We re assuming that you have unarchived VLT on someplace other than work otherwise VLT would be already installed on work and you wouldn t need to do anything further 9 If you tend to run from a shell most of the time you will also want to add a path to VLT this is true for people running with AmigaDOS 1 3 as well as AmigaDOS 2 04 To do this add the line path add work VLT to your startup sequence Note that using the procedures outlined above you can install VLT on any hard disk parti tion even inside any directory or subdirectory that you choose Installing VLT on a Floppy Disk If you have two floppy drives you can run Workbench from one drive and VLT from the other In that case you won t have any problems since VLT just fits on a floppy disk If you only have one floppy drive however you ll need to install VLT and Workbench on the same floppy You may find this rather difficult because VLT is a rather large program So in order to get rid of excess baggage we recommend th
3. turn received from the host as a carriage return and linefeed Some hosts Macintosh computers for instance will only send back a carriage return without a linefeed This can be a problem because without the linefeed the host will overwrite part of the text that it has just sent you By selecting Display CR as CR LF you eliminate this difficulty Display LF as CR LF Display LF as CR LF is needed because of the Fifo Pipes option described earlier When you connect to another Amiga you usually get linefeed characters to signal the end of a line Setting Display LF as CR LF ensures that VLT will display a carriage return as well as a linefeed Auto Screen to Back During file transfers Auto Screen to Back brings the Work bench screen to the front and displays the status window Mouse Support The Mouse Support option is discussed in detail later in the chapter Beep Volume Unless you are using the commodore 1080 or 1084 monitor it is unlikely that the monitor you are using has a built in speaker so you will either have to go out and purchase a small speaker with a built in amplifier or hook up the Amiga to your stereo in order to get an audible beep If you have a speaker available you can set the volume of the beep by selecting this item and typing a number from 1 to 64 in the string gadget which appears 1 is low volume 64 is high volume Using negative numbers 1 to 64 will provide you with a somewhat higher pitched beep If you do
4. 135 path 14 28 109 111 path search 100 phonebook 10 11 104 133 PingServer 42 PostScript 51 118 125 progdir 14 105 Program Mode See also Menu Options Program Mode Function Keys Menus 49 Menu Shortcuts 49 Off 49 Provector 51 R RC variable 72 73 83 Repeat Forward 48 Repeat Reverse 48 requester 27 color options 57 58 directory 27 104 111 133 file 3 14 33 35 51 64 104 109 font 38 menus 111 multiple select file 111 palette 38 53 59 resident 9 resident program 12 r view buffer 31 45 85 86 88 92 102 103 display window 46 to 48 menus 92 103 142 review menu options Append 47 Append To Buffer Size Clear 46 Column Left 48 Column Right 48 Deselect All 47 End of Buffer 48 Invert Selection 47 Left Margin 48 Line Down 48 Line Up 48 New Page 47 Page Down 48 Page Left 48 Page Right 48 Page Up 48 Repeat Forward 48 Right Margin 48 Save 46 Save As 46 47 Save to Clipboard 46 Search 48 Search Forward 48 Search Reverse 48 Select All 47 Top of Buffer 48 review library 12 13 102 103 46 47 47 103 REXX 71 90 S schedules 64 cancelling 64 65 expiration of 65 script uninterruptable 65 Script Commands 66 71 78 71 ACTivate 78 activate vt100 104 ANSicolormode 78 APPlicationcursor 79 AUToscreentoback 79 BAUD 79 BEEP 79 97 99 BEEPFunction 42 79 90 97 98 BREAK
5. 27 100 Clear Screen 37 52 116 Close Device 28 Close Screen 39 53 Color Options 53 58 CR Key Echo CR LF 41 CR Key Send CR LF 41 Cursor Height 39 Destructive Backspace 103 Destructive BS 41 Display CR as CR LF 41 82 Display Cross Hair XY 52 Display Cross Hair Only 52 Display LF as CR LF 41 43 82 Edit Paste Clipboard 31 Edit Paste File 31 54 55 Emulation 124 End Capture 27 Error Checking 29 Exit 28 External 91 External Options 34 Fifo Pipes 27 41 43 83 File Transfer Mode 34 Function Key Gadgets 41 GIN Report Style 54 128 Graphics Lock 43 102 Handshake 29 Hangup 86 Help Key LF 41 HelpKeyLF 83 Incremental Mode Step 55 124 Kermit Options 33 Key Repeat 40 Line Error 30 Load From Archive 43 51 Lock Graphics 42 57 84 Maximum Size 51 Mouse Report Character 55 127 Mouse Support 41 49 50 New Page 46 47 No DSR 30 Number of Colors 38 Number of Columns 38 103 Number of Lines 38 Numeric Keypad 40 Open Console 27 44 45 49 103 Parity 29 113 Parity Error 30 Paste 46 Paste from Clipboard 31 Paste from File 31 Print Bitmap 51 89 Program Mode 4 28 42 45 49 98 99 Protocol 33 Quit Archive 51 Receive File 32 33 35 Refresh Screen 37 Remove All Traps 36 Rendering Mode 39 Report EOL String 54 129 Reset 30 86 Reset Zoom Pan 52 Return To Alpha Numeric 57 Save As Current F
6. 99 amp 123 are the alt ed and shift alt ed up arrow 100 amp 124 are the alt ed and shift alt ed down arrow 101 amp 125 are the alt ed and shift alt ed right arrow 102 amp 126 are the alt ed and shift alt ed left arrow 103 amp 127 are the alt ed and shift alt ed Delete x Only true if the HelpKeyLF option hasn t been used to set the Help key to the linefeed character 83 104 amp 128 are the alt ed and shift alt ed Help 105 114 are the shift alt ed keypad keys 0 9 The command takes the usual form of a VLT action string GOTO label name Tells VLT to goto a specified label a name with a colon after it and execute all the commands after that label The label name should be specified without the trailing colon when used with the goto command even though when used as a label elsewhere in the program it must have the trailing colon GRAphicslock ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE Switches graphics lock on or off When on special characters from the host will not be able to switch you from the text screen to the graphics screen Otherwise certain control characters and escape sequences can change VLT s mode to the graphics mode This script command corresponds to the Lock Graphics command found in the Graphics Menu of the text screen and in the Control Menu of the graphics screen HANDshake None Xon xoff 7 wire Xon xoff 7 wire cts rts Lets you specify the handshake mode for the serial port
7. If you clicked on the Continue button you would then see that 4 B 49 was now the keyboard equivalent of the Screen to Back option while Send Break would now have Screen to Back s original keyboard equivalent Mouse Support In Detail Selecting the menu option Mouse Support causes a panel of string gadgets to appear These string gadgets allow you to program the left mousebutton s behavior in sixteen different ways since you can program not only the mouse by itself but the mouse in combination with the shift ctrl alt shift ctrl shift alt and shift ctrl alt keys you can also program the mouse to respond differently depending on whether the left mouse button has been pressed or released If you enter the word auto into the first string gadget in the lefthand column then clicking on the left mouse button will tell the host to move your cursor to that position on the screen Therefore in auto mode Mouse Support provides a substitute for using the arrow keys on the cursor keypad This is very useful on an IBM mainframe when in Xedit etc but does not necessarily work on all hosts You can also use the auto string to program the mouse in combination with the qualifier keys If you want to program your mouse in more complicated ways you can use command strings containing up to 7 C style escapes The C style escapes allow your mouse program to receive certain arguments such as the location of the mouse and each style escape allows
8. In case both Xon Xoff and 7Wire are desired both options may be specified In addition the keyword CTS RTS can be substituted for the 7Wire option HANGup Causes a hangup This is accomplished by dropping the DTR signal on the serial port for a period of 1 second Notice that most modems can be set to ignore the DTR status and that three wire cables do not usually convey this signal to the modem If this option does not work you may have to send a special command sequence to your modem such as 4 followed by a delay and ATH in the case of Hayes compatible modems HELpkeylf ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE When you turn HELpkeylf on using this script command the help key transmits the line feed character ctrl J to the host Otherwise the help key transmits the sequence esc O 1 lower case L when in application keypad mode IF NOT acceptable condition command string else command string This command is now comparable to the if then flow control statements of high level programming languages The IF recognizes a specific set of conditions listed later in the chapter it also recognizes their negatives specified using the not option If the condition is met the command string included afterwards is executed as if a schedule command was used If the condition is not met nothing happens and no error message is returned unless you have specified another course of action using an else clause This
9. Print as PostScript screen This option when selected brings up a file requester Enter the name of the file that you Save As Script Commands want to load then click on the Okay button or hit return Load From Archive Save Bitmap as IFF File Print Bitmap It is possible to display on the graphics screen an old file that had been saved to an archive without losing the current screen display to return to the current display Quit the archive file Quit Archive Quit Archive gets rid of the archive graphics file that you have displayed on your screen and if another picture was displayed there earlier displays that picture again Save Bitmap as IFF File Save Bitmap as IFF File does just that it saves the image on your screen as an IFF bitmapped graphics file Print Bitmap Print Bitmap lets you print the image currently displayed on your graphics screen using a printer attached to your Amiga You can print this image in one of four sizes Maximum Size 1 3 Page 2 3 Page and Full Page Specify the size of the printed image using the submenu that appears when you select the Print Bitmap option Save Print as PostScript Save Print as PostScript allows you to save the picture currently on screen as a PostScript file if a PostScript printer is attached to your Amiga you can then using this option print the picture by saving the file directly to the par device Save As Script Commands Save As Script Commands all
10. The Graphics Menu Both of the commands in this Graphics Menu deal with the graphics screen a special window or screen that is used to dis play graphics The To Graphics command is basically self explanatory as it puts you on the graphics screen If this screen is not already open this command will open the screen then switch you to it Lock Graphics A A F To Graphics To understand the Lock Graphics command you have to know that VLT supports a set of special characters and escape sequences which the mainframe can send in order to switch you to the graphics screen for subsequent output It also supports a second set of sequences which switch you back to the text screen Unfortunately if you are on a noisy line or if while you are logged on the host you leave your terminal for a long time VLT may receive some kind of garbage which will throw you onto the graphics screen Selecting the Lock Graphics option prevents you from being thrown onto the graphics screen by accident because VLT disables the escape sequences which throw you onto the graphics screen This completes a discussion of the text menus themselves The following sections discuss certain important menu options in detail 42 Fifo Pipes in Detail Before we begin please note that Fifo Pipes won t work unless you have Matt Dillon s fifo library and fifo handler So before you use this option you need to obtain these programs and install them So wha
11. Timeouts hh mm ss xx Timeouts are specified in hours minutes seconds and hundredths of seconds Units not required need not be specified i e the single digit 1 means one second whereas 1 00 means one minute etc VLT Action Strings string command A VLT action string is either a string that is sent to the host after ARP style escapes are parsed or a keyscript character followed by one or more VLT script commands ARP Some commands such as send and emit have a text string as their argument Most of the time you can use ARP escape sequences to insert special characters in such strings See Appendix E for a description of ARP escape sequences ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE You ll see this argument description many times next to a main command in the list of VLT script commands below What this means is that typing the main command plus On Yes or 1 will tell VLT to turn the option specified by the main command on while typing the main command plus Off No or 0 will tell VLT to turn that option off Typing the main command plus Toggle will allow you to toggle the option specified by the main command to its opposite state The Script Commands The following list is for quick reference all entries will tell you what the command does as briefly as possible Those commands which correspond to menu options discussed earlier will not be discussed in detail but the
12. While it pays to use this option for short quickie scripts if you are writing longer scripts it is easier to use the methods outlined in Chapter 4 The console can also serve as the output window for tracing information when debugging scripts see Writing Scripts The console window does have some drawbacks for instance it is line oriented In addition it only functions under certain setups Those running under AmigaDOS 1 3 unless they have WShell 2 0 must install ConMan 1 3e in order to use the console window Under AmigaDOS 2 04 you can use the console handler that comes with the system ConMan or WShell 2 0 but you will need WShell 2 0 if you want to use the VLT ConsoleMenus file in s please note that the console menus only work under AmigaDOS 2 04 Programming the Open Console Option Selecting the Open Console item under Program Mode lets you specify the console string you would like VLT to use when it opens the console Editing this string is especially useful if you want to use CNC instead of CON to power the console window which is likely the case if you are using AmigaDOS 2 0 and don t want to run ConMan in your startup sequence Note that you will also have to add a mountlist entry for CNC if it isn t already in the devs mountlist file and that you will have to add a mount CNC statement in your s user startup file For the full scoop on this see the ConMan documentation Your default command string probably loo
13. by directing the host to redraw or erase the screen signifying the start of a new page or by using the New Page option in the VLT Menu Buffer Size Buffer Size allows you to resize the review buffer When you select this option a string requester will appear asking for the new buffer size in bytes The default value will already be displayed in the requester Replace it with your new value Quit Closes the review window Select All The Select All command selects all lines in the buffer Since only selected lines can be saved to a file this command is useful when you wish to save the contents of the entire buffer Selected lines are highlighted Deselect All The Deselect All command causes all the selected lines in the buffer to become unselected Select All A S Deselect All 4 D A Invert Selection Invert Selection The Invert Selection command causes all selected lines in the buffer to become unselected and all un selected lines to become selected You should be able to see the effects of the Invert Selection command all highlighted lines should lose their highlighting and all unhighlighted lines should become highlighted Aside from using the menu options in the Review Window s Select Menu you can also use the mouse to select and drag select lines To select a line just click on it with the left mouse button To deselect it click on it again To drag select first click on a line you want to select or d
14. device status report string The string is a standard VLT action string ECHO ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE Lets you switch echo on or off ECHOLinefeeds ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE When on the ECHOLinefeeds option causes linefeeds to be echoed to the screen as well as carriage returns when the return key is pressed in local echo mode EMIT RAW character string Tells VLT to display a character string on the screen at the current cursor position If the raw option is specified the string is not parsed for ARP style escape sequences 82 EXIT VLT QUiet next script Lets you exit the current script or quit out of VLT entirely if VLT is specified When exiting a script a message is displayed to indicate that the script has terminated unless the quiet option is specified If a next script is specified that script will then be executed EXTRact field name This command is available from ARexx only It extracts information from VLT in the form of the VLT stem variable If no field is specified all fields are extracted See the section on the extract command earlier in this chapter FAULT error number This command is available only from ARexx it reads the error number specified and puts the corresponding text explanation in the variable VLT Error All VLT commands set the RC error code number variable in an ARexx script to a code depending on whether a command was successful or not
15. goes to the shell must have double quotes ARexx also understands double single quotes and double double quotes which will be translated respectively to a single quote and a double quote Remember that each level of interpretation eats one level of quotes As for using BEEPFunction To use this command from the menu select Program Mode as Function Keys Menus then select Beep Volume and enter the string as follows rx address PingServer beep To use the command from a script you ll need one more level of quotes but since these will be interpreted by VLT you can use for example parentheses beepfunc rx address PingServer beep You need the parentheses to tell VLT that you want both rx and add beep to be part of the beepfunction By the way since rx is also a VLT command its argument can also use parentheses or braces such that beepfune rx address PingServer beep is also fine or even beepfunc rx address PingServer beep since all these brackets nest With these bracketing conventions you can save the quotes for when you really need them When I try to program the User Menu with taglines it doesn t work first no tagline appears and second it sometimes decides that the tagline is part of the command What am I doing wrong Here s my command syntax send gone Gone Well your problem is that second sign When you type a one line command string into the
16. the command delete fonts v1t4 all If you intend to make VLT a resident program or if you are still running under AmigaDOS 1 3 assign VLT to VLT s directory of residence just as a new user would For all users if you tend to run VLT from a shell add VLT s directory of residence to your path see Installing VLT on a Hard Disk If you find that VLT is often unable to find needed files in specific situations you may be able to fix the problem by making more assignments or by consolidating files in certain directories or by eliminating directories you don t need which VLT looks for anyway see Getting Started VLT s Method of Searching Paths x A resident program is a program which has been permanently installed in true memory This means that a resident program is always loaded into memory even when you re not using it on the other hand if you run the program several times the computer will use the same copy instead of loading the program into memory several times as it would with a non resident program To make VLT resident issue the command resident VLT VLT from a shell 12 Flushing review library 13 In order to use the new review library you must flush the old version from memory To do this make sure the old version is not in libs delete it if it is and then reboot If you go to the CLI and give the command version review library you should see the response review library 1 31 or a higher number O
17. the current size of the history buffer is also saved as well as the dimension and location of the history buffer display window known as the review window when it was last opened If you want to take material from the review buffer and send it back to the host you should select it copy it to the clipboard and then use the Paste facility see the Paste Menu to paste the clipboard contents into VLT Review Window Menus Clear The Clear command clears the buffer wiping out all the contents Don t use this command unless you want to get rid of everything in the buffer Clear Save Save As The Save As command saves all se lected see the Select Menu explanation lines to a file you specify This command brings up a file requester in which Save As you specify the file you want to save to If the file already exists clicking on the Okay button will bring up a second Save to Clipboard requester This requester informs you that the file already exists and asks if you wish to append the new material tack it on to the end of the file overwrite the old file or cancel Append To the whole operation The Save command saves all selected lines to the file specified in the most recent Save As com mand This overwrites what was previously in that file Buffer Size Save Append New Page Save to Clipboard When you select the Save to Quit Clipboard option all selected lines within the review buffer are saved to the Amiga clipboar
18. ules etc are stored in fields If you want to know the contents of one of these fields while you are working in ARexx then you use the extract command With extract you can either extract the contents of a single field from VLT or the contents of all fields at once In particular you can extract the line that is currently on the screen at the vertical location of the cursor and also the current search line in the review buffer Combine this with the movecursor command and you can read every line on the screen from ARexx Also extractable are the current x and y coordinates of the cursor you can thus put the cursor back to where it was The stem variable that receives all the extract values is always called VLT VLT ansicolor for example stores the extracted value for the ANSICOLOR field The number of fields that can be extracted is stored in the variable VLT fields while the names of all the fields that can be extracted are stored in an array with the stem VLT fields VLT fields 1 for instance stores the name ANSICOLOR Some fields have subfields For intance VLT color 0 stores the RGB setting for color 0 VLT color 1 the RGB setting for color 1 etc while VLT color itself stores the number of different colors that VLT can use The sample program which follows an ARexx program which extracts all the color fields and prints their contents to the screen demonstrates the use of extract command If you want a more comprehensive de
19. 1 Address VLT schedule blinker cursorh 0 goto blinker If you do run a script from WShell don t forget to type schedule after Address VLT The schedule command is there to tell VLT to turn control of WShell back over to you even though the blinker schedule runs in an infinite loop If you only type Address VLT blinker blinker will run just fine but WShell will be tied up forever and you ll have to cancel the schedule to regain control of it The extra are needed because ARexx eats the first level of quotes Cancelling Schedules Knowing how to run schedules isn t enough You also need to know how to get rid of schedules when you don t want them around any more Getting rid of unwanted schedules is called cancelling the schedule There are several ways to cancel schedules First if you select Abort VLT Scripts from the Script Menu then all currently pending schedules are cancelled You can also cancel a schedule from ARexx by typing in a WShell 64 1 Address VLT cancel schedulename Since cancel is a VLT script command it can be called from inside a schedule The ability to cancel other schedules from inside a schedule can be very useful at times For instance if you wanted a particular schedule to stop your cursor from blinking whenever it ran you could cancel the blinker from inside this new schedule by including the command cancel blinker There is an even more important use for the abi
20. 1200 2400 4800 9600 19200 38400 57600 and Midi These are the baud rates which VLT supports If you are using a modem and a tele phone line to connect with your host you will probably havea f Select Unit 1200 or 2400 baud modem and so should probably select one of these two choices If you are working with a mainframe that you are hooked up to directly you will probably be able to Baud use either the 4800 or 9600 baud settings depending on your setup check with a local expert Important Note Even if your setup supports it you may have trouble using the 19200 Handshake 38400 57600 and Midi baud options when using the Amiga s built in serial port due to hardware limitations on a standard Error Checking A500 or A2000 Teis Parity Parity is an outmoded technique for error detec tion which most non IBM computers pretty much ignore un less the user insists upon it Unfortunately IBM mainframes Reset still insist on getting a specific parity and if this is not set Send Break correctly you will not be able to log on to the mainframe If Ra you select the Parity item in the Comm Menu you will be Hangup presented with a submenu which will allow you to choose the parity settings that the Amiga supports In addition to the more common even and odd parity settings you will find the Set Buffer Size less common mark and space parities To log onto an IBM mainframe always select 7E1 To log onto Tymnet and bul letin boards w
21. 85 91 W word wrap 40 Workbench 9 10 12 38 WShell 10 11 45 64 72 73 103 104 132 X XPR 3 4 10 12 16 33 See also file transfer protocol external libraries 16 requester 16 xprascii 10 33 xprkermit 33 100 xprquickb 33 xprxmodem 33 xprzmodem 33 Z zoom 52 56
22. In Detail Mouse Support In Detail Graphics Screen Menus The Image Menu The Zoom Pan Menu The Cursor Menu The Screen Menu The Operation Menu The Control Menu The Color Options Requester In Detail Writing Scripts ooa Introduction To VLT s Scripting Facility A Syntax ios a A RA Da peaa a ke Sy dl eee 4168 Schedules s 25 2 aaa a amp he ae ees iA Nor Sot ch gas ee SP ee o DA Important script demande eal en cae Secs Sass aca 666 Mixing VLT and ARexx ta a e EEL Quick Reference Section ma dd a BA VO Some Conventions AAN A rat We a ee AO The Script Commands Beit e Mae ve te vee Es et Bea TB Conditions Recognized by the IF Command 91 The Review Command Bae nhs BO a es pee Orde Ss 2 OIL Troubleshooting o oo a a s he t ahin Se dad eae S 98 Troubleshooting 4 OEE eae el et ee ce de SOT Syntactical Questions Tricks and Bloopers 2 2 97 Programming Problems 2 6 7 ee eee eee ee es 99 Directory Dilemmas eee a ae 46 e AO Data Flow Difficulties 5 fe Be te Sh we a Bye 01 Review Buffer Riddles bosber sare Soe ws eee amp 0 4 A02 Miscellaneous Musings te ar a ace pe 108 Appendices 2 ee ee ee es pA HS tint Abe tes att amp c
23. Kermit that you want it to terminate itself and return control of the terminal to you Remember while Kermit is in server mode all keyboard input to the mainframe is blocked You should know however that with many hosts Kermit Bye will also log you off the host The fifth option in the submenu is Kermit Finish Kermit Finish behaves a great deal like Kermit Bye except that it does not under any known circumstances log you off the host 33 when it terminates Kermit The sixth option in the submenu allows you to specify packet size What are packets Well Kermit transfers your file to or from the mainframe a piece at a time These pieces are known as packets Each packet is checked for errors if an error is found in a packet the receiving computer tells the sending computer to send the packet over again the sending computer does this automatically so you don t need to worry about it If you are using a modem and sending information over a noisy telephone line use short packets Noisy telephone lines tend to increase the number of errors and short packets minimize the amount of information that needs to be resent when an error is discovered If you are using a different setup and don t tend to get many file transfer errors go ahead and use long packets the file transfer will take somewhat less time Some hosts don t support long packets in that case choose a packet size of 94 When you select Set Packet Size a string requeste
24. Left Page to left Margin Rigth Char Right Page to Right Margin Glo Resave to current file overwrites existing file Namie If previous command successful set envi ronment variable name to current search line Else erase the environment variable name Save to Clipboard 93 5 Troubleshooting etc Troubleshooting This section discusses solutions to some of the more common problems mistakes questions that you may encounter while using VLT They are listed here so that you do not have to go hunting through the entire manual for your particular problem there is however no guarantee that your problem will be in here as we are not omniscient so you may have to do some hunting anyway Syntactical Questions Tricks and Bloopers Q1 Al Q2 A2 Q3 A3 Q4 A4 Q5 Ab Q6 AS QT Whenever I invoke the beep command or expect a beep I get a message window telling me that srx is not a valid command My Beep Volume is set to call a script What do I do This is a pitfall for those users who wrote scripts in VLT s old scripting language As of version 4 846 the srx command is defunct Just go into program mode select Beep Volume and change srx to rx for more on the rx command see Writing Scripts Traps don t work when I funnel text to the screen through Fifo Pipes Yes well that happens to be true There s nothing you can do about it s
25. Lets you select a new data transmission speed Valid values are 110 300 1200 2400 4800 9600 19200 38400 57600 and Midi The Midi setting is programmable by issuing the command baud midi new value where new value is the serial speed you would like to use you can equate the Midi setting with any baud rate no matter how unusual For instance you could set Midi to the 600 bps rate used by X10 controllers or if you wanted to work at a faster rate than 57600 to 115400 bps Midi is set by default to be 31250 bps Note that the new Midi value is not saved in the configuration file and is not extractable using the extract command Midi s programmability is provided strictly for peculiar situations BEEP Causes a beep When a Beep function has been set this function is executed Otherwise when the volume is set to 0 the screen will flash If the volume is not zero the built in beep is sounded BEEPFunction beep function Lets you specify the command to be executed in place of sounding the VLT bell The command is a standard VLT action string A common action string is rx address PingServer beep which causes the beep command to be sent to the PingServer See the documentation for the PingServer program BREAK Sends a break signal to the host BREAKTime break time Sets the time in microseconds that the break signal lasts The default is 75000 BUFfersize size Sets the size of the serial buffe
26. One may call the Fault command with RC as an argument to find out what the error code meant FIFO ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE Behaves just like the menu option Fifo Pipes in the VLT Menu FILE SENd RECeive GET file name Lets you send or receive the file with the specified file name to or from the host using the currently active transfer protocol FONT fontname Used to change VLT s font The font will still have to pass VLT s notorious test of existing in both an 8 point and an 11 point tall size The width must be 8 point and the font must be monospaced Function key number command Set function key indicated by the key number to a command Key numbers are in the range 1 to 128 where 01 10 are the regular unshifted function keys 11 20 are the shifted function keys 21 30 are the ctrl ed function keys 31 40 are the alt ed function keys 41 50 are the menu items right Amiga 1 through 0 51 80 are the screen gadgets 81 90 are the alt ed keypad keys 0 9 91 amp 115 are the alt ed and shift alt ed keypad Enter 92 amp 116 are the alt ed and shift alt ed keypad 93 amp 117 are the alt ed and shift alt ed keypad 94 amp 118 are the alt ed and shift alt ed keypad 95 amp 119 are the alt ed and shift alt ed keypad 96 amp 120 are the alt ed and shift alt ed keypad 97 amp 121 are the alt ed and shift alt ed keypad or Help 98 amp 122 are the alt ed and shift alt ed keypad
27. The Scrolling Speed option is of interest primarily to users who want to use VLT in scrolling mode and want it to scroll as fast as possible Since scrolling the screen is a fairly time consuming process listing files with many short lines may be slow and tedious if VLT scrolls only one line at a time VLT s solution is to look ahead in the text that came from the mainframe if there are many carriage returns VLT simply scrolls a number of lines in one step Scrolling Speed determines the maximum number of lines which will be scrolled at once We have found 8 to be a number which provides fairly smooth scrolling without sacrificing much in the way of speed Setting the prescroll variable proceeds in exactly the same way as setting the number of lines or the number of columns If you set the scrolling speed to be a negative number like 2 then VLT will scroll that number of pixels at a time this is called smooth scrolling Note Even numbers work better when your screen is in Interlace mode Cursor Height The Cursor Height option allows you to set the height of your cursor that is make it thinner or thicker in the vertical direction When you select the Cursor Height option a strimg requester will appear and the present height in pixels of the cursor will be shown in the string gadget Modify this number and hit RETURN to establish the new cursor height If you set the cursor height to zero pixels your cursor will disappear altogether Fu
28. The allowed commands and arguments are shown in the table at the end of this chapter REXxportname name Changes the name of VLT s ARexx port to the specified name This command can only be used if no outstanding ARexx scripts are around RX SYNChronous ARexx command Submits the specified ARexx command to ARexx If the synchronous option is specified the command is executed synchronously the program will wait until the ARexx command has completed before continuing SCHedule commands Creates a new context and starts executing the specified commands in that context Multiple commands need to be separated by semicolons SCHedule FUNCTION key number Similar to schedule can be used to execute the contents of a function key SCREENDepth depth Sets the depth of the screen Values from 1 to 3 are allowed SCREENGadgets ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE Switches screen gadgets on or off When on the standard screen displays 30 gadgets at the bottom all of which are programmable The display will be adjusted to fit the set number of lines in the remaining area SEND RAW character string Sends a string of characters to the host If raw is specified as an option the string is not parsed for ARP style escape sequences but by default it is 88 SENDLinefeeds ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE When ON this option causes linefeeds to be transmitted in addition to carriage returns whenever the return
29. This happens occasionally when you are using the Xon Xoff handshaking mode In that mode flow control is performed to keep both VLT s and the host s buffers from overflowing An Xoff signal from the host tells the Amiga to stop sending data over the line whereas an Xon tells the Amiga to start sending again and vice versa Sometimes on noisy lines the noise will look to VLT like an Xoff character VLT can t tell whether an Xoff came from line noise or the host so the next time you try to send something to the host VLT will sit and wait until the host sends an Xon Only since the host never sent the Xoff it also won t ever send the Xon In principle the Amiga is now dead waiting patiently forever for the Xon which will never come With lesser terminal programs the only way to recover is to reboot VLT however tries to be a little smarter Whenever you try to send data to the host it looks at how much data it is supposed to send and at the current transmission speed baud rate It calculates from this how long it should take to send the data adds a margin for error and then starts a timer Next it sends the data off to the host usually this will be accomplished well before the timer times out and everything s hunky dory When however the Amiga has received an Xoff character for whatever reason VLT won t really be able to send anything and the timer will time out while VLT is still trying to send the data If this happens VLT
30. VLT can t exit until the script exits If you issue the command with two Q signs like this QOSomeScript vlt then VLT runs the macro under ARexx instead of simply REXX which means that VLT doesn t have to wait for the script to exit before exiting itself The disadvantage is that the default host for the macro will now be REXX rather than VLT with no way for the script to find out VLT s port name This is occasionally inconvenient Since however you can pass arguments to programs launched with either of the commands you can get around this last problem First launch program A with a single sign so that it knows who the default host is Have program A do the following A vlt vitport address B v1lt vltport exit This launches program B with the correct VLT port name as an argument so that it can still send messages to the correct host without requiring VLT to stick around until program B is finished running You might ask why have VLT launch the program rather than ARexx The reasons is that VLT unlike ARexx has a particular search order for v1t scripts The way program A works B vlt will be found if it is in VLT s search path for ARexx scripts Mixing VLT and ARexx Up to now the programming language known as ARexx has only been peripherally discussed It is important to establish that ARexx unlike the VLT script language is not a built in feature of a single program but a completely self sufficient pro
31. be run The Delay Command The delay command causes a schedule to pause for a specified amount of time before exe cuting the next command The length of the pause or timeout is specified in hours minutes seconds tenths of seconds and hundreths of seconds See Some Conventions earlier for the syntax of timeouts Delays allow you to keep your script from going too fast and getting ahead of itself they can also be used to insert pauses for the user s benefit at any point in the program For instance a delay command allows you to specify the amount of time a message window stays open The Schedule Command The schedule command tells VLT that the lines associated with the schedule command are part of a different schedule In the script file below the schedule command is used to create a second schedule within the same script file 66 This is to show you that there can be more than one schedule in the same script file if you use the schedule command schedule hello emit Hi I m a schedule beep greeting emit Hi I m a different schedule Notice that all commands associated with the schedule command are enclosed by delimiters and that within these delimiters commands are separated by semicolons The Goto Command and Infinite Loops The goto command allows you to execute a certain set of commands in an infinite loop Let s look again at blinker scp This is the file blinker s
32. be associated with the on com mand If you use a goto command as the associated command however you can tell VLT to 68 execute more than one command each time the trap receives the trap string An example is shown below Simple scp script simple on Ready goto gotit delay 3 5 emit I guess we timed out Host croaked exit gotit emit Host is ready exit Trap the trap command is the most flexible of the three trap commands It has a several possible subcommands discussed below trap add Add a trap to the system Depending on which option you specify the trap will behave differently The syntax of the trap add command is as follows trap add trap ID options match string actions A trap ID only has to be given if the trap is to be referenced specifically by a later command such as trap activate Trap ID s are integer numbers between zero and 32767 You may also want to use one of the options strings explained below options case Make matching of trap string with received string case sensitive defer Intialize trap as inactive autodeactivate Deactivate trap after first occurrence install Install this trap permanently which will keep it alive beyond the duration of the schedule All traps must have a match string string a trap string although the match string may be the keyword nothing Traps must also have an actions string a set of VLT commands separated by
33. bits of y coordinate Bit 4 unused Bit 5 and 6 11 Tag bits Bit 7 parity LoY Bit 0 through 4 intermediate 5 bits of y coordinate Bit 5 and 6 11 Tag bits Bit 7 parity HiX Bit 0 through 4 most significant 5 bits of x coordinate Bit 5 and 6 01 Tag bits Bit 7 parity LoX Bit 0 through 4 intermediate 5 bits of x coordinate Bit 5 and 6 10 Tag bits Bit 7 parity In the syntactical expression above an item enclosed in may be omitted if it is the same as in the previous x y sequence For example an applications program running on the host assuming 121 a 4000 series terminal would send HiY LoY HiX and LoX but not Extra Note that LoX always needs to be sent Notice also that if either Extra or HiX or both are sent LoY must be sent To put it differently sending HiY is always optional but LoY can only be left out if neither Extra nor HiX are to be sent Again LoX must always be sent In addition to these printable characters the following control characters and escape se quences are recognized ESC ESC NUL ESC ENQ Introduce escape sequence Introduce escape sequence Set bypass and return terminal status BEL Ring bell flash screen LF Ignored ESC LF Introduce escape sequence CR Set alpha mode ESC FF Erase and home ESC ETB ESC CAN ESC SUB Make copy Set bypass condition Set GIN
34. character with all following characters according to VT100 standard XMOdemmode 1K 128 CHecksum CRc Sets up to two XMODEM options Options not specified will be carried over from the previous setting XPR INIT init string Sends the specified initialization string to the current protocol See the documentation of the protocol NOTE It used to be the protocol had to be set using the External option but since all protocols are effectively external these days this requirement was relazed It ts up to you however to make sure the correct protocol is currently loaded XPR SELect external protocol Selects a different external protocol Notice that this command does not set the current transfer protocol see TRANsfer Protocol Conditions Recognized by the IF Command The if command recognizes a large number of possible conditions which aze listed below 91 SHIfttabesc True if the Shift Tab sends both a tab and an escape character LOCal True if VLT is in local mode i e keystrokes are not sent to the host ECHOLinefeeds True if the return key when pressed echos a carriage re turn and linefeed SENDLinefeeds True if the return key when pressed sends a carriage re turn and linefeed CLIP True if VLT currently has something in its clipboard buffer SECONDcursor True if the secondary cursor is currently displayed SELECTdown True if the left mouse button is currently pressed down The Review Comman
35. directory you won t have a problem So for convenience store your scripts in the first place on the path that exists this holds true for other types of files as well Note that you can always fool VLT by assigning v1t_scp to the directory containing your VLT scripts no matter how many other directories exist because v1t_scp has the highest priority in the VLT script search path You can pull a similar trick for the other paths too vlt libs progdir xpr progdir rexx E an be Wg ee keymaps Tek archive vit_archive vit archive AA AAA Now it is perfectly possible that you have previously saved certain things in your configura tion files which will appear to alter VLT s path priorities without actually doing so For example you might have saved libs xprzmodem library as your default file transfer protocol In that devices XPR libraries VLT scripts 15 case when you select a new protocol to use the XPR protocol requester will point to libs with xprzmodem library in the file gadget In that case just type the real location of the XPR libraries into the drawer gadget hit return and select the desired XPR 16 Starting Up There are two ways to start VLT from the Workbench or from a CLI Before we discuss starting up VLT we need to briefly explain a few terms Initialization Files When VLT starts up it first reads the file VTPrefs dat which contains default values of all its internal
36. each addition so that in case of crash the file most often is preserved Example trace 15 20 causes both script line tracing trap tracing and the output is sent to both the console if it is open and to the log file There will be a 4 second delay after each script line and each trap line Note if you suspect that a particular script may cause a crash be warned that logging to VLT log may be hazardous to your hard disk Better set your default to rad and use DiskSalv to recover the file from rad if rad doesn t recover by itself If a script causes a crash be sure to report the problem TRANsfer Mode image text Selects image or text mode for file transfers In text mode files are assumed to be text files and end of line sequences are converted Also ctrl Z s in the file may be used as an end of file indication TRANsfer Protocol External Kermit Xmodem Selects the transfer protocol one of Kermit XMODEM or External In case of external protocols use XPR Select to determine which external protocol is to be used TRAP trap operation This command was discussed in detail earlier VOLume volume Sets the volume of the beep to be used When zero the screen is flashed instead When positive the usual VT100 beep is sounded when negative a higher pitched shorter beep is used This is however superseded by any BEEPFunction setting WAIT character string timeout Waits until the specified character string is re
37. end of the buffer respectively In all Page Left these cases you can accomplish the same thing by using the scroll bars at the right hand and bottom sides of the review window or by using the keyboard alternatives Line Up Left Margin Top of Buffer Page Right Page Down When you look at this menu in VLT you will notice entries in brackets to the right of each command option These entries correspond to the keyboard alternatives for each menu option as a result the menu can be used as a quick reference table for people who want to know the keyboard contmands If you are using the menu this way however it is necessary to note that when the bracketed entry is of the form lt ctrl gt or lt shift gt this does not mean to press the ctrl or shift key and then the key It means instead to press the ctrl or shift key and then the arrow key mentioned in one of the previous bracketed entries Search Forward The Search Forward command tells VLT to search from the top of the buffer down to a certain string after requesting this search string from the user a search string can be any combination of letters and numbers For instance say you want to go to the set of telephone numbers you know were listed on your terminal screen earlier and you know that this set of numbers was prefaced by the word Telephones Repeat Forward 4 6G Instead of scrolling endlessly up and down your buffer review A T window you can select the Searc
38. file If VLT still can t find the specified file it will create that file in the current directory CONTinue Tells VLT to continue a script that is currently in a pause delay or wait state Exe cution of the script is resumed at the script command following the pause delay or wait command The CONTinue command can also be used with the name of another schedule as an argument This ability to continue one schedule from inside another allows you to synchronize sched ules For example consider two schedules schedule A and schedule B Schedule A consists of the following commands ScheduleA scp ScheduleB scp pause 81 miscellaneous commands while Schedule B looks like this ScheduleB scp miscellaneous commands continue A exit quiet After executing Schedule B Schedule A would normally continue without any regard to Schedule B s further behavior but since A encounters the pause command it waits Mean while Schedule B executes what it needs to execute then uses the continue A command which breaks A out of the pause state and allows it to execute the rest of its commands While Schedule A continues to execute Schedule B exits CONSole Open Close Specification console string Height height Specified with open opens the console window with close closes the console window The specification suboption lets you specify the console string while the height s
39. in that submenu are allowed including allowing the host to specify the EOL string Tektronix 4105 reports In 4105 4107 emulation mode some other sequences are recognized that cause a report to be sent to the host ESC IQ Report Terminal Settings All unsupported reports will return a single 0 report Supported reports are TF TG T M They are briefly described in the following paragraphs ESC IQTF Request for report of the current text color map ESC IQTG Request for report of the current vector color map VLT only maintains one color map so the reports for the two options above are the same except for the first two letters The report has the following syntax TG or TF number of surfaces report integer array CR where number of surfaces is the report integer 1 and integer array has the structure color 0 surface number color 1 color 2 color 7 The surface number is the report integer 1 and the color n are three report integer sequences describing hue lightness and saturation of color n The length of the array is therefore 25 specified as the first number in the array A report integer in this context is always a three character sequence which is different from a regular Tektronix integer see later ESC IQ Request for report of the current terminal mode This sequence has the same effect as the Report Syntax Mode sequence listed later ESC IQ T Request for report of the Tektron
40. is only selected when a binary file is being transferred examples of binary files are executable programs and graphics files on either the mainframe or the Amiga In order to carry out a binary file transfer you have to set up both the mainframe and Amiga properly Let us take as an example a binary file transfer from the Amiga to an IBM mainframe First go to the Transfer Menu and select Binary from the File Transfer Mode submenu Then set up the IBM mainframe Kermit by typing KERMIT and then wait for the prompt to appear at which point type SET FILE BINARY and RECEIVE filename filetype filemode Note Don t make the mistake of taking this command literally You re supposed to type in RECEIVE a filename such as foo a filetype such as x0f2imp and a filemode that s the mini disk where the file is stored such as a 34 When the screen clears you are ready to go to the menu and select Send File When the file transfer completes you have to leave Kermit by hitting RETURN once or twice to get its attention and then type QUIT To get a binary file from the IBM to the Amiga you proceed in the same way except that you give the IBM the command SEND filename filetype filemode after setting the file to be binary and you select the Receive File option on the Amiga When transferring a text file choose the Text option On different computers text files can be stored in slightly different ways If you transferred a text file with
41. loop into a timed loop you need to use the delay schedule and cancel commands as shown below A blinker with a timed loop called blinky scp 67 schedule delay 20 cancel blinker blinker cursorheight 0 delay 0 3 cursorheight 1 delay 0 3 goto blinker By using schedule we have made the delay 20 and cancel blinker commands part of a different schedule than the blinker goto loop since one schedule can be cancelled from inside another schedule this means that you can cancel the blinker loop from within the script file using the cancel command The delay 20 tells VLT to wait 20 seconds before cancelling the blinker loop Other Uses of the Goto Command When you instruct VLT using the goto command to return to a label earlier in the schedule you create an infinite loop If the goto command is going to a label Jater in the program however you won t have a loop you ll just execute the commands following the label once Trap Commands Waits Ons and Traps The wait command the on command and the trap command belong to a class of commands known as traps These commands wait for a particular string to be sent from the host to VLT before executing the next line in the program Wait The wait command waits for a particular string to be sent from the host the rest of the schedule is put on hold until the wait command receives this string A time limit specified in seconds can be attached to the wait For exam
42. names are nearly identical so you should be able to go back and review the detailed explanation of the option command Name of VLT ARexx script file Can be used to execute scp files as VLT native scripts or to launch vl1t and rexx scripts as ARexx programs This command was described in more detail earlier in this chapter ACTivate Vt100 Tektronix Next Brings either the VT100 screen the Tektronix screen or the next screen in the screen list to the front If the VT100 screen is not open and Activate Vt100 or Activate Tektronix is received the screen will be opened ANSicolormode ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE Switches ANSI color mode on or off In ANSI color mode color escape sequences for fore ground and background colors are recognized 78 APPlicationcursor ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE Switches Application Cursor mode on or off Using the APPlicationcursor script command is the same as selecting the Application Cursor option on the text window s Operations Menu AUToscreentoback ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE Switches Automatic Screen to back mode on or off When set to be on this option causes the screen to be put behind all other screens when a file transfer starts with the file transfer status window appearing on the Workbench Otherwise the status window remains on VLT s screen and VLT s screen remains where it is BAUD baudrate MIDI new value
43. nature of the request and on the current graphics mode While the terminal is in alpha mode receiving ESC ENQ from the host causes automatic transmission of the terminal status byte the x y position of the lower left hand corner of the alpha block cursor and the end of report sequence When the terminal is in vector marker or incremental plot mode ESC ENQ causes transmission of the terminal status byte the current x y position of the beam pen and the end of report sequence During GIN mode ESC ENQ leads to transmission of the x y position of the graphic cursor and the end of report sequence The emulation exits GIN mode and returns to alpha mode Also during GIN mode entering a character on the keyboard or pressing the left mouse button causes transmission of the entered character or in case the mouse button was pressed the currently selected character associated with the mouse see the Mouse Report Character 127 item of the Operation Menu the x y position of the graphic cursor and the end of report sequence In the default case where the 4010 subitem is selected from the GIN Report Style menu item the report has the following appearance Status Bit 0 always 1 Bit 1 0 if left margin is at left 1 if at center of screen Bit 2 and 3 00 mode is point plot 01 mode is alpha 10 mode is vector 11 mode is other Bit 7 parity This byte is sent fi
44. not even if you select them from the menu instead of from the external protocol requester Kermit Options When you select Kermit Options a submenu will appear The first two submenu options allow you to select which of Kermit s two modes you want it to run in Selecting the Send Receive option allows you to run in Send Receive mode In Send Receive mode whenever you want to transfer a file you first tell the mainframe to run Kermit Then you select either the Send File or the Receive File option from VLT s Transfer Menu Selecting the Host is Server option allows you to run Kermit in something known as server mode In this mode the mainframe Kermit is continuously running which means that the Amiga can control the entire file transfer from its end As a matter of fact the entire file transfer must be controlled from the Amiga because Kermit when in server mode blocks all keyboard input to the mainframe When you are running in server mode selecting Receive File will bring up a requester requesting the name of a file on the mainframe The third submenu option Downcase File Names tells VLT whether or not to automati cally convert filenames on the mainframe to lower case on the Amiga A check next to this option means the filenames are being converted to lower case no check means that they are not The fourth option in the submenu is Kermit Bye If you are running the mainframe Kermit in server mode you need Kermit Bye in order to tell
45. not have a speaker available then setting this number to zero will 41 provide you with a visual beep i e the screen will flash instead In addition this option is programmable using Program Mode Entering a standard VLT command string in the programming requester will cause that command to be executed in lieu of sounding the VLT bell A common command is rx address PingServer BEEP which causes the BEEP command to sent to the PingServer See the documentation for the PingServer program You can also reprogram the Beep Volume option using the BEEPFunc tion script command User Menu There are ten options in the User Menu each indicated by their keyboard abbreviations A n where n stands for a number from 0 to 9 Selecting one of these options is equivalent to entering the listed keyboard sequence which can be programmed using Program Mode to perform a special op eration of your choice The program can consist of a VLT script command a command that calls a VLT or ARexx script or an ARexx command prefaced by a and the rx command An especially nice feature of the User Menu is the ability to add explica tory taglines to its various options To do this go into Program Mode and select the option to which you want to add a tagline When the pro gram string requester appears add the desired tagline as a comment string preface it by a few spaces and the character just following the program string
46. number of total On bits in each byte sent After the sending computer reads the first seven bits of a byte and counts up the number of On information bits the computer then sets the parity bit so as to make the total number of On bits even Therefore if there are an even number of On information bits then the parity bit is set to be Off but if there are an odd number of On information bits the parity bit is set to be On For instance the byte 01011011 has an odd number of On bits so the last bit will be changed to an On bit before the byte is sent The computer at the other end will therefore receive this byte 11011011 After the byte is verified the parity bit is stripped off and the first seven bits are read 112 When the receiving computer gets a byte it will count up the number of On bits If it sees an even number of On bits then everything is okay and it will let the sending computer send the next byte If it sees an odd number of On bits however the receiving computer knows that there is an error When this happens the receiving computer will either ignore the error or give the sending computer a message complaining that one of the bytes received had a mistake in it Odd Parity Odd parity is based upon the exact same principle as even parity except that the setting of the parity bit is chosen so as to make the number of On bits in every byte odd instead of even Mark and Space Parities Mark and space parities are actually
47. option does not work either You should check the docs on your modem to see if it is set to ignore DTR If it is then indeed the menu Hangup function won t work since it relies on the DTR signal Set your modem to recognize DTR if you can Another possible cause of this problem are you using a cable that doesn t have the DTR line hooked up I followed the instructions but no matter what I do file transfers to the host don t work What s wrong File transfers are tricky things Very often the problem is that somewhere between the Amiga and the host some piece of hardware like a terminal multiplexer or an overly smart modem is not transmitting all data exactly as the Amiga or the host sent it These problems can range from flow control problems to parity translations and usually have to be resolved on a case by case basis Talk to your host s system manager Sometimes when I m logged on I get this burst of noise after which VLT becomes really sluggish It takes a second or so for every character I type to appear on the screen and I get this message requester saying Temporarily unable to send data Waiting The requester also has two gadgets RETRY and RESET Sometimes the requester goes away by itself If I click on RETRY then sometimes everything is just fine but other times the requester just reappears Clicking on RESET usually solves the problem but occasionally I lose data and sometimes I get logged off
48. parameters VTPrefs dat can be in any directory in the appro priate search path see Getting Started VLT s Method of Searching Paths Afterwards it looks first for a file called v1t_startup v1t and then if this file doesn t exist for a file called vlt init These files which are known as intialization files are no different from other script files except that they are run at startup time before the VLT screen has been opened Since it basically overwrites the settings in your VTPrefs dat file an initialization file is a good place for changing your color settings and so on Initialization files are really for people who log on regularly to two or more different hosts each of which requires different default settings Serial Devices and Unit Numbers Normally your Amiga comes with one serial port the piece of hardware which handles the transmission of signals information to and from your Amiga from and to your host You may however choose to install extra serial ports Serial ports are run by pieces of software known as serial devices Depending what hardware you are using you may have to run each serial port with a different serial device or you may have to run all your serial ports with the same device and differentiate the ports using unit numbers Typically unit numbers are assigned beginning with 0 Starting Up VLT From the CLI To start up VLT from the CLI environment type RUN VLT assuming that you have stored
49. point where you clicked 7 The mouse button plus control and alt keys provides an option for BIX users click on a conference topic combination on BIX like microsoft other and VLT will resign the topic for you 8 Clicking with the left mouse button while holding down the shift control and alt keys is especially useful when combined with the shift ctrl left mouse option Suppose you wanted to enter a combination of words on the command line without typing them in they are already in various places on the screen Now usually you want these words to be spaced apart with a number of spaces What you do is this use Shift ctrl left mouse to highlight the first word Now also press the alt key and click the left mouse button on the command line where you want the word to appear Spaces will be sent until the cursor is in the column where you clicked minimum one space and then the word will be sent as well Repeat for the other words In addition you will find that NeatStuff has changed your ALT and SHIFT ALT cursor keys and a few keypad keys First when you hold down ALT and use the cursor keys a second cursor will appear which you can move around using the ALT cursor keys When you also hold down the shift key you can increase the size of the cursor by using the right arrow and down arrow buttons and decrease the size of the cursor by using the left arrow and up arrow buttons To get rid of the second cursor if it is currently up t
50. programming requester VLT looks for the last sign and decides that what follows is the comment tagline It looks at the after the Gone sees nothing after it assumes the tagline is empty and if your command is the name of a script file assumes the preceding Gone is part of the command Don t follow the tagline with another I have been trying to work with traps Everything I have tried so far works except this line Trap add host shut hangup goto quit 98 A9 Q10 Alo The script executes fine except for the goto which returns with aScript error in line 0 not found Label does not exist I can add a command after the goto such as BEEP and it will get executed but not the goto I have tried all kinds of quoting to no avail If you substitute the EXIT for the goto the script will not exit The problem is that the trap command can t do a goto to what it considers outside its domain of influence The hangup goto quit in the trap command is a little script all by itself This little script knows nothing about labels in the main script The best way to fix it in this case would be something like ON host shut goto hangupquit hangupquit hangup beep exit What s wrong with this line RX send space date n date i 2 0 R The line RX etc worked in versions of VLT prior to version 4 846 because VLT had this funny system of allowing two quotes eith
51. relying upon your host to do it for you In this case select this menu option When you do this a string requester will appear and the number of lines which are currently being displayed will be shown in the string gadget Simply modify this number and hit RETURN the new default number of lines will be established If you choose too large a number of lines VLT will display as many lines as possible Number of Columns VLT in principle allows you to set the screen to display any number of columns each column has a width of one character The limitations upon what can actually be displayed are the size of the screen and the size of the font being used VLT can display a maximum of 140 columns on an overscanned screen otherwise VLT can display a maximum of 128 columns You can also use the Number of Columns setting to affect where the text appears in the VLT window If you use 80 columns then it will be roughly centered if you use a setting higher than 80 85 for example it will be moved to the left on the screen Note that for some applications on your host 80 columns may be required so check with a local expert The procedure for setting the number of columns is the same procedure used for setting the number of lines with the Number of Lines option If you specify too large a number of columns VLT will display as many columns as it can using the smallest font available Note On the Workbench extra room is taken up by the window borde
52. script file elsewhere See VLT s Method of Searching Paths Running Multiple Scripts Getting VLT to run multiple scripts in a specified order at startup time requires a slightly different procedure First create icons for all of your scripts using the procedure outlined above Then click once on the icon belonging to the first script you want VLT to run and hold down the shift key While holding down the shift key click once in sequence on the icons of all the other scripts you want VLT to run Then still holding down the shift key click twice on VLT s own icon Phew Now you can release everything and let your fingers have a rest VLT will start running and execute all your scripts in the order that you clicked on them Tool Types When starting up VLT from the CLI there are various parameters which can be included with the RUN VLT command What if you want to specify the values of these parameters but also want to start VLT up from the Workbench Tool Types are the solution Using Tool Types There will be several disk icons to one side of the Workbench screen representing different partitions of your hard disk if you have one and the floppy s currrently in the floppy drive s Click on the icon named for the disk where VLT is stored 20 you can specify the parameters you want VLT to start up with then whenever you start up VLT from the Workbench VLT will start up using those parameters Note If you direct VLT to run m
53. sequences are associated instead with colors 1 through 5 of the current screen palette It is recommended that a 3 bitplane custom screen be used in this mode although this works with a Workbench window as well though some color information is lost The assignments are as follows oN re BO by 3 Normal operation Color mode operation Normal attributes Use color 1 Underlined Use color 2 Bold Use color 3 Reverse video Use color 4 Italic l Use color 5 Additional escape sequences Some additional sequences of the type CSI Po Pam are recognized They affect only the color selection for text display and work only if the Color option of the Rendition menu item is selected The following values of Pa are recognized Pa Color mode operation effect 30 Change text to color 0 31 Change text to color 1 32 Change text to color 2 33 Change text to color 3 34 Change text to color 4 35 Change text to color 5 36 Change text to color 6 37 Change text to color 7 If the Color option is selected and the ANSI Color option is selected then VLT will recognize some additional ANSI sequences 115 Pa Color mode operation effect 40 Change text backfill to color 0 background 41 Change text backfill to color 1 42 Change text backfill to color 2 43 Change text backfill to color 3 44 Change text backfill to color 4 45 Change text backfill to color 5 46 Change text backfill to color 6 47 Change text backfill to color 7 If the Color
54. suit an other host Macros of this type have already been written at SLAC to obtain them contact Marvin Weinstein NIV SLACVM XMODEM Another protocol which has come into wide use is the XMODEM protocol and its derivatives such as YMODEM and ZMODEM As with Kermit it requires that a pair of programs be run together one on the mainframe and one on the desktop computer Although this protocol cannot be used with IBM mainframes it can be used with VAXes Again as with Kermit two modes of operation are possible First file transfer can be carried out entirely by hand by starting the mainframe program and then handling the Amiga s end of the deal from the menu options On the other hand it is a simple chore to rewrite the ARexx scripts which handle Kermit file transfers to handle XMODEM transfers to and from the VAX ARexx and VLT ARexx is a programming language based on the IBM mainframe language Rexx ARexx is a full implementation of Rexx on the Amiga with extra features which allow access to many of the Amiga s special capabilities A discussion of the way in which VLT interfaces to the general Amiga multi tasking environment and ARexx in particular will be given later Throughout this manual we will often assume that you have a setup which includes ARexx This will indeed be true for all 2 0 users since ARexx comes with the 2 0 operating system but it may not be true for those still using AmigaDOS 1 3 If you don t have this pr
55. that the number in each string gadget corresponds to the num ber mentioned in the previous text If you change the number in the string gadget to the number of some other color register then the color register will be mapping to a differ ent color register Let s return to our example of the green flowers and red leaves The color green used by the flowers is stored in say color register 3 the color red used for the leaves is stored in color register 4 To swap the two colors we bring up our color options requester then tell it to map color register 3 to color register 4 and color regis ter 4 to color register 3 Now if we have the screen redrawn the colors will have been swapped This is because when the Amiga went to draw pixels in color register 3 it was told by VLT that it should go find the color stored in color register 4 and use that color instead The reverse happened whenever there were pixels to be displayed in color register 4 Most of you are probably wondering how you can be expected to know which color is stored in which color register There s a trick that lets you find out quickly easily and intuitively 58 Return to the Screen Menu and choose the Select Colors option When the palette requester comes up look at the top You ll see one or more rows of little boxes each in a different color you know already that clicking on one of these boxes lets you select the color in the box as the one you want to c
56. the break signal as a break signal only if it endures for a specified length of time known as the break time For most hosts a break time of 75 thousand microseconds will be sufficient for the host to recognize it as a break signal but some hosts may demand a longer break time Furthermore some hosts consider the break signal a disconnect command if the break signal endures too long so you will want to shorten the break time when dealing with these hosts The Set Break Time option allows you to do this When you select the Set Break Time option a string requester will appear Specify the break time in terms of microseconds and hit return Set Buffer Size It is important not to confuse the buffer mentioned here with the history buffer The buffer discussed here is the flow control buffer a buffer the Amiga uses to handle temporary overloads of incoming data Set Buffer Size allows you to make this flow control buffer larger or smaller Selecting this item will bring up a string requester The default buffer size will appear in the requester replace it with your own value Specify the size of the buffer in terms of bytes The Paste Menu Paste from Clipboard The Paste from Clip board option will send the current clipboard contents to VLT and thence to the host Paste from Clipboard A Edit Paste Clipboard The Edit Paste Clip i board option resembles Paste from Clipboard ex Edit Paste Clipboard cept that it gives you the opportu
57. the requester s close gadget would do 60 4 Writing Scripts Introduction To VLT s Scripting Facility Syntax VLT s scripting language is a very specific sort of computer programming language with its own grammar or language syntar Familiarity with this syntax is extremely important as incorrect syntax can lead to all sorts of errors in your scripts String delimiters String delimiters surround a string and tell VLT that it is dealing with a string instead of a command Delimiters can be double quotes single quotes curly braces pointed brackets square brackets or parentheses Delimiters are also used in conjunction with certain commands such as the schedule command On the whole anywhere that double or single quotes are used the other delimiters can be used also Comments Whenever text in a script is prefaced by a character VLT ignores it This is because the character tells VLT that what follows is a comment meant for the benefit of the user If a comment runs over several lines each line must be preceded by a character Comments are used to explain the purpose of a script or the purpose of a particular command They help make scripts more readable The Keyscript Character When a set of script commands are issued from the VLT Console window from the program for any function key or from the program for any pro grammable item they must be prefaced by the VLT keyscript character By
58. then select this option The settings will be saved in a configuration file such as VTPrefs dat If you already have a VTPrefs dat file the current settings will replace the ones in that file If you don t have a VTPrefs dat file yet VLT will create one and store it in the current directory Note that VLT looks for the specified initialization file using VLT s path search procedures see Getting Started VLT s Method of Searching Paths for more details Save Configuration As Selecting Save Configuration As allows you to save your current configuration without overwriting your current configuration file This would be useful for a user who deals with many different hosts each having specific configuration requirements and who therefore needs several different configuration files When you select this option a file requester will appear using this requester you can give the configuration file you create any name you choose In order to have VLT use a configuration file created this way instead of VTPrefs dat you invoke VLT using the P command line option see Getting Started Starting Up About About brings up a message telling you what version of the program you are using You should include this in any correspondence about problems you may encounter as the bug may already be fixed in a more recent version Exit Exit does exactly what it says it shuts down the terminal program It is best to log off from your mainframe before select
59. to first redraw the original picture and then zoom in on a new region Once you ve selected this option hold down the left mouse button and move the mouse in the direction that you wish to have the display region move A frame will appear as you do this in order to show you how your new display region will be positioned relative to the picture currently being displayed on the screen Reset Zoom Pan The Reset Zoom Pan item causes the original unzoomed picture to be displayed upon the screen The Cursor Menu Switch Graphic Cursor On makes a cursor ap pear on the graphics screen Switch Graphic Cur sor Off will make the cursor disappear Display Cross Hair Only attaches cross hairs to your cur sor the cross hairs are two perpendicular lines inter secting in the middle of the cursor Under ordinary es the graphics pe be turned on Display Cross Hair Only LAJH and off under the control of the host Sometimes Display Cross Hair XY A N however it is convenient to be able to display the cross hairs in order to make it simpler to read the coordinates of a point off a graph and you will need the ability to toggle the graphics cross hairs on and off under local control If you select the Display Cross Hair XY option the coordinates of the cross hairs relative to the bottom left hand corner of the screen are also displayed in Tektronix coordinates This feature is useful if you are using the cross hairs to interact with a mainframe g
60. to store such files understanding the paths VLT uses can help you make those decisions In addition if you have as you very well may multiple versions of files floating around you may have some frustrating moments where VLT just refuses to load your configuration file instead of some weird configuration file you haven t used in ages The solution is probably that you have an old version of the file floating around in a high priority directory knowing the paths makes this type of problem much easier to solve The paths VLT uses when searching for specific types of files are listed below with the various directories listed in order of priority from left to right NOTE In the tables which follow progdir stands for the directory containing the VLT executable Files s Path that is searched libraries vlt_libs vlt xpr es CIT IN 14 When VLT puts up a requester it may not yet know where to look so it will point to the first directory it can find in the path The paths VLT follows when bringing up requesters for various filetypes are shown below Notice that the directory with the highest priority is shown first regardless of its contents for example if all your script files are in s while a rexx directory exists the rexx directory will appear in the requester without your files because rexx is higher on the priority list VLT can t know ahead of time that your scripts aren t there of course if you don t have a rexx
61. unfamiliar with script files they will be fully discussed in the chapter titled Writing Seripts At this juncture the only thing you need to know is that such scripts exist and that you can tell VLT to execute any number of them in a specified order at startup time Since the procedure for running one script at startup time is slightly different from the procedure used for running multiple scripts at startup time we will discuss them separately Running One Script Before you can tell VLT to run a script at startup time the script needs its own icon There is a special script icon provided with VLT this is a project icon titled TestScript scp info A sample script file called TestScript scp is included with the info file To make an icon for a different_script duplicate the TestScript scp file from the Workbench the icon file will duplicated automatically by selecting the Copy option from one of the Workbench menus Using the Workbench Rename option rename the script file then edit the script file and change it to what you want If you would like to make your own script icons then make sure that the icon is a project icon and not a tool icon Its default tool should be VLT To have VLT run the script at startup you double click on the script icon VLT will start up automatically and run the script Note If for some reason you have created an iton whose associated script file is not in the icon s directory VLT will look for the
62. used to set the options in the checkserialerror command using the DECimal option _ CLEAR CLOSE Clear the VT100 screen If the CLOSE option is specified the screen or window will also be closed see ACTivate COLOR color register color value pen assignment Sets a certain color register to a particular RGB value For example color 2 FFF sets color 2 to white The three heradecimal digits specify Red Green and Blue respectively F means as much R G B as possible while 0 means no R G B at all When running with a custom screen in AmigaDOS 2 0 the specified color may also be assigned to any of the following 8 pens DETail BLOck TEXt SHIne SHAdow HIFILL HIFILLText BACkground These assignments only affect VLT when the screen has four or more colors You must close VLT s screen and reopen it in order to see the full effect of these assignments The Shine and Shadow assignments are also used to determine shadowing of all gadgets VLT uses Since these assignments are not protected in any way it is up to the user to be very careful system gadgets and window borders may seem to disappear if certain pen assignments are made In order to get the same colors and settings that are in effect on the Workbench run the following script Set VLT s custom screen up for WB colors COLOR O AAA DETAIL BACKGROUND 80 COLOR 1 000 BLOCK TEXT SHADOW HIFILLTEXT COLOR 2 FFF SHINE COLOR 3 57A HIFILL CLEAR CLOSE ACT
63. user can now gather them all together in a single directory or put them in scattered directories according to his choice VLT finds these files by checking what are known as paths and while this method of finding files is both useful and effective it can occasionally be confusing as well In this section we ll explain how VLT looks for files and what aspects of this new feature are necessary for you the user to know When VLT is looking for a file it will search through a set of likely directories in sequence until the file is found This set of likely directories plus the order in which they are searched constitute a path These paths will vary depending on whether VLT is looking for a file or putting up a file requester they will also vary depending on the type of file that VLT is looking for VLT will search through these paths until it finds the file it needs then stop This means that if you have slightly different copies of a file in different directories you need to make sure that the version you want VLT to use is in the directory highest on VLT s priority list otherwise VLT will find a different version of the file early in its search and use that instead Understanding these paths can be useful especially if you are a long time VLT user with lots of baggage such as handy scripts you absolutely can t live without In that case when you install your VLT upgrade you ll probably be making some judgment calls on where
64. which converted into base ten is the number 6 The Amiga then gives this particular pixel the color stored in color register 6 Remapping color registers Normally VLT displays every color on your graphics screen according to the mainframe program s instructions On occasion however you may object to the mainframe s choice of colors Let us say for instance that you are in the graphics screen looking at a picture of flowers that the host has sent you For some peculiar reason the flowers are green and the leaves are red To you this seems completely ridiculous you want the leaves to be green and the flowers to be red Since you only want to swap the two colors without actually changing them using the Select Colors option isn t quite what you want The remapping option on the color options requester is When you select Color Options the requester that appears looks like this Lock Colors Mask Colors Erase Mask Map color 8 Map color Map color 18 to Map color 11 to Map color 12 to Map color 13 to Map color 14 to Map color 15 to Map color Map color Map color Map color Map color Map color Map color color NOUAWNEG You ll notice that the bottom half of the requester contains sixteen string gadgets preceded by the words Map color n to where n is a number from zero to fifteen These string gad gets constitute the remapping option How do you use it Well normally each color reg ister will map to itself so
65. will irritate 2 0 Instead you should issue the command mount CNC and program VLT s console window to use CNC instead of CON see The User Interface Text Screen Menus In this case ConMan will only be used by VLT and won t interfere with ordinary 2 0 functions On the other hand you may choose instead to purchase WShell 2 0 see the Introduction ARexx and VLT Upgrading from older versions of VLT Those of you upgrading from older versions of VLT will notice that the method of installing VLT has changed significantly since VLT can now keep all the files it needs in its own directory This is not entirely necessary you can if you wish install VLT as you have previously done by copying devs files to devs libs files to libs etc If you want to install VLT this way you ll probably want to put all the scp files and rexx files that come with VLT into rexx On the other hand you might want to clean up your system and change over to the new method of installing VLT In principle you should be using the same method of installation as new users but there will probably be one important difference you ll have files of your own such as script and configuration files that you ll want to keep You can copy these into subdirectories in the new VLT directory but be careful not to overwrite the new files with old material or to overwrite your own configuration files with the new standard configurations that come with VLT 11 10
66. you have made your choice click on the OK gadget or hit the RETURN key The arrow keys provide another possible shortcut if you have clicked on the file gadget the up and down arrow keys allow you to scroll through filenames with the currently selected filename appearing in the file gadget If the file you are dealing with has a very long filename SYS documents essays english cartonessay tex for instance you may not be able to remember the device directory and subdirectories that make up the file s pathname or drawer In such cases you may want to scroll through a list of directories or subdirectories instead of a list of files To do this type the name of the device such as SYS into the drawer gadget and hit return A list will appear in the region above the drawer and file gadgets This list will probably contain some filenames but it will also contain names that are preceded by the highlighted letters drw Names prefaced by drw are names of directories or subdirectories When you click on a name that starts with the higlilighted letters drw this directory specification will appear in the drawer gadget Another list will appear this one of files and subdirectories within the directory you selected Now what about scrolling through device names Devices have names which finish in a colon that is names like SYS DFO DF1 RAM VDO etc Some devices are partitions on your hard disk others are floppy drives still other
67. you to request a different type of information as shown below X current mouse X position in character coordinates Y current mouse Y position x current cursor X position y current cursor Y position l number of lines currently on the screen c number of columns currently on the screen q the qualifiers shift ctrl alt etc pressed at the same time as the mouse bit pattern All of the coordinates received this way will be character coordinates with 1 1 being the upper lefthand corner of the screen The simplest example of using this feature is the case where the host can accept unsolicited cursor position reports In that case a possible command string might be E X YR This string starts with E which will be interpreted using ARP escape conventions as an escape character decimal 27 and then a square opening bracket these two together are also known as the csi sequence Next is a X this means that at this point the current mouse X position will be substituted Then follows a semi colon and then a Y Here the current mouse Y position is substituted The sequence ends with a capital R If you entered this string in the no qualifiers gadget of the mouse selectdown column and clicked on Use this sequence would be sent to the host with current values substituted e g esc 26 68R whenever the left mouse button was depressed Note that VLT guarantees that left mousebutto
68. you wish to reprogram A requester will appear and display the command which is currently assigned to this key Change this command to the one you want and then hit RETURN the requester will disappear You can use the Function Keys Menus option to reprogram the thirty on screen mouse operated PFKey gadgets the User Menu items the function keys by themselves the function key SHIFT function key CTRL and function key ALT combinations the shifted keypad and cursor keys the shift alt ed keypad and cursor keys the Delete key and the Help key Also programmable are the menu options Mouse Support Beep Volume and Open Console When you are finished reprogramming the keys that you wish to change return the Program Mode to Off so that the keyboard sequences et al stop bringing up reprogramming requesters As an example let s say that you wanted to program function key 6 to send the command gone to your host You would select Program Mode to be Function Keys Menus then enter F6 from your keyboard When the string requester appeared you would type in gone R and hit return Then you would turn Program Mode off When you want a key to send a command to your host it is enough to enter the command as is If you want the key to execute a VLT script command you will have to preface the command by the VLT key script character When you want the key to call and run a VLT or ARexx script preface the name of the script with the VLT key scr
69. 11 12 Here s a sample upgrading sequence Unpack the VLT archive as described earlier Make a directory called work vltnew as well as the directories work vltnew rexx and work vltnew scp Issue the following commands copy rexx vlt work vltnew rexx copy rexx scp work vltnew scp From the Workbench drag the VLT drawer created when you unpacked the archive to your work partition You should now have a VLT and a VLTnew drawer on work you can also do this from a CLI as shown earlier Issue the following command copy work VLT work VLTnew all Now delete work VLT by typing the following command delete work VLT all Now rename VLTnew to VLT by issuing the following command rename work VLTnew work VLT Now copy the configuration files by typing copy s VTPrefs dat work VLT s copy s TekPrefs dat work VLT s _If you made changes to s TekProlog ps make the same changes again to work VLT s TekProlog ps Then delete the files just mentioned from your s directory If you have other programs that need access to the XPR libraries you should probably leave them in your libs directory Otherwise copy all the XPR libraries you have to work VLT libs then delete these files from libs You should also delete libs review 1ib rary libs strokefont library libs simplexfont library and libs duplexfont lib rary If you wish you can now delete all VLT specific fonts from your fonts directory by issuing
70. 26 Each item enclosed in on the right hand side represents an ASCII character Hil Bit 0 through 5 most significant 6 bits of integer Bit 6 1 Tag bit Bit 7 parity Lol Bit 0 through 3 least significant 4 bits of integer Bit 4 sign bit When set the integer is positive Bit 5 and 6 01 Tag bits Bit 7 parity In the syntactical expression above an item enclosed in may be omitted if the significant bits are 0 When two Hil values are specified the first one gives the bits 10 through 15 of the resulting integer the second one bits 4 through 9 and the Lol value bits 0 through 3 If only one Hil value is specified it determines bits 4 through 9 If only a Lol value is specified the resulting integer takes the value specified in the bits 0 through 3 Lol must always be sent and its bit 4 determines the sign of the integer Notice that with this convention the positive integers 0 through 9 happen to coincide with the ASCII characters 0 through 9 Tektronix 4100 series integer arrays A Tektronix 4100 series array of integers is syntactically described as array number of elements int int It is simply a list of N integers encoded as explained above preceded with the number N also encoded as an integer Reports to the host Tektronix 4010 14 reports There are several ways in which the host can request a report from the emulation The details depend on the
71. 3 Jmodem 10 Kermit 4 5 10 32 90 100 XMODEM 4 5 10 32 91 YMODEM 5 10 33 ZMODEM 5 10 33 file transfer protocol external 33 34 90 91 flow control buffer 31 fonts 38 103 105 duplex stroke 56 G GIN mode graphics 29 fonts 46 mode 1 43 See also Tektronix emulation screen 37 42 43 graphics cursor 52 55 cross hairs 52 54 118 graphics lock 84 102 H handshaking 3 29 84 TWire 29 84 TWire X 29 CTS RTS 84 102 None 29 102 Xon Xoff 29 84 101 102 history buffer See review buffer hosts IBMs 3 30 34 35 40 46 50 112 page oriented 46 47 VAXes 3 5 29 33 40 46 89 I initialization files 17 19 28 See also configuration files K key repeat 40 keymap default 39 editor 39 105 special 4 39 85 105 135 standard 105 3 4 10 54 114 118 123 124 127 140 keypad application 136 numeric 3 40 41 46 86 87 92 135 136 keyscript character L labels lha 9 qualifiers 9 loops infinite 67 68 pasting 70 timed 67 M Menu Options Abort All Scripts About 28 Adjust Display 55 Application Cursor 40 63 85 63 65 67 68 79 84 99 36 100 ARexx Macro 35 136 Auto Screen to Back 41 Baud 29 Baud Rate Mismatch 30 Beep Volume 42 49 97 98 Break Received 30 Buffer Overflow 30 Buffer Size 103 Bypass Cancel Character Cancel Paste 31 Capture Session 27 44 80 Change Directory
72. 79 BREAKTime 79 BUFfersize 79 cancel 65 67 68 79 CAPture 80 CAPture RAW 80 CD 80 CHeckserialerror 80 CLEAR 80 COLOR 80 91 COLOR REQuest 81 COLUmns 81 CONFiguration SAVE 81 CONSole 82 CONSolewindowadjust 82 CONTinue 81 88 CURsorheight 82 CUStomscreen 82 delay 66 67 75 81 82 DESTructivebackspace 82 DISPLAYCrascrlf 82 DISPLAYLfascrlf 82 DSR 82 ECHO 82 ECHOLinefeeds 82 emit 66 78 82 exit 66 83 84 extract 74 75 80 83 fault 72 73 75 83 FIFO 83 FILE 83 FONT 83 Function 83 goto 64 66 88 99 GRAphicslock 84 HANDshake 84 HANGup 84 86 HELpkeylf 84 if 70 84 91 INTerlace 84 KERmit BYE 85 KERmit DOWncase 85 KERmit FINish 85 KERmit MODE 85 KERmit PACKetsize 85 KEYMap 85 KEYRepeat 85 KEYScriptcharacter 85 LINES 85 LOCAL 85 MENU 85 143 MESsage 85 MISCFlags 44 85 124 136 MOUsesupport 87 movecursor 74 87 NUMerickeypad 87 ON 87 PARity 87 paste 66 70 88 pause 81 82 88 PRELoadgraphics 88 PREScroll 88 PROGrammode 88 REFresh 88 RENdermode 88 REView 88 92 REXxportname 88 rx 42 75 88 97 to 99 schedule 63 64 66 88 SCHedule FUNCTION 88 SCREENDepth 88 SCREENGadgets 88 send 66 78 88 SENDLinefeeds 89 SERialdevice 89 SHIfttabesctab 89 STRipbit8 89 SWApbackspacedelete 89 TEKNOPointer 86 TEKtronix 89 TEKtronix MENU 89 TEKtronix PAN 89 TEKtronix PRINT 89 TEKtronix SAVEas 89
73. 9 116 ARexx Commands Address 72 ARP 3 10 49 50 78 97 111 132 arp library 10 See VT100 B baud rate 28 79 101 102 133 beep 40 41 See also Beep Volume BEEPFunction break signal 30 31 C clipboard 31 46 70 86 92 102 135 color lock 59 color masking 59 60 color options requester color options color registers 57 to 60 color remapping 58 59 configuration files 28 See requester TekPrefs dat 18 55 56 VTPrefs dat 17 18 28 99 100 ConMan 10 11 45 103 console CNC 11 45 CON 11 45 handler 10 11 45 103 menus 10 45 104 5 window 10 11 27 44 45 82 103 D device logical 9 139 serial See serial device directory requester See requester direc tory DTR 101 E echo 82 cr lf 41 local 30 82 91 remote 30 erase masking 60 error checking parity See parity serial device 30 XMODEM 34 error codes 72 73 83 See also RC variable escape sequences ARP 78 132 Tektronix 114 115 118 VT100 86 87 114 116 F Fifo capture 44 Fifo Pipes 10 43 44 97 local 43 See also VLTL remote 43 See also VLTR fifo handler 10 43 fifo library 43 FifoBBS 10 44 105 106 See requester file 10 32 35 36 79 86 90 file requester file transfer 101 112 binary 34 buffered 44 multi file 35 status window 35 text 35 unbuffered 44 file transfer protocol 4 5 15 32 33 83 90 ASCII 10 33 CISQuickB 10 3
74. ARexx macros can be called from VLT and can send directions to VLT the macro itself runs independently of VLT ARexx macros have great flexibility and power you can write ARexx macros to go through a specific logon sequence or to handle at both ends a file transfer between the Amiga and a mainframe preparing the mainframe to receive send the file at the same time as it directs VLT to send receive it VLT scripts on the other hand have only limited capabilities and run under the control of the VLT program itself Abort All Scripts Since ARexx macros run independently of VLT they do not interfere with its operation when they abort the error messages are usually sent to an Amiga CLI Since VLT scripts run under VLT s control you need a way to abort a script once it has started and selecting Abort All Scripts accomplishes this As of VLT version 5 045 a new convention allows you to a create an uninterruptable script which would be invulnerable to the Abort All Scripts option see Writing Scripts for more details Note If you select Abort All Scripts when a VLT script command has been sent to VLT by an ARezz macro and that script command is still pending VLT will abort the script command and try to abort the ARezxz macro as well Remove All Traps There is a set of VLT script commands known as traps the wait command the on command and the trap command These trap commands tell the script to wait for a certain set of char
75. IVATE VT To get pretty good looking shadowing on VLT s screen using VLT s default colors use Set VLT s custom screen up for default 8 colors COLOR O 000 DETAIL BACKGROUND HIFILLTEXT COLOR 1 078 BLOCK TEXT COLOR 2 AOO HIFILL COLOR 3 090 COLOR 4 C6A COLOR 5 E90 COLOR 6 056 SHADOW COLOR 7 999 SHINE CLEAR CLOSE ACTIVATE VT As it turns out these settings also work pretty well in 4 colors although the shine pen now effectively will be color 3 and the shadow pen color 2 As said before for a two color screen these settings have no effect COLOR REQuest Causes the VLT color requester to open on VLT s screen The command will only return when the user has completed his color selection COLUmns number of columns Sets the number of columns to be displayed on the screen If the number is larger than the number that fits on the current screen size the font may be changed to a smaller size CONFiguration SAVE filename Allows you to save VLT s configuration as do the Save Configuration Save Configura tion As options in the VLT Menu The configuration file will be saved according to VLT s path search methods see Getting Started VLT s Method of Searching Paths If the filename is not specified the file will be saved over the last read preferences file If the filename is specified the configuration file will be saved with that name if no directory is specified for this file the path will be searched for the
76. If at any later time you wish to display more graphics selecting the To Graphics Option from the text screen Graphics Menu will automatically reopen the graphics screen as long as there is enough memory available Select Colors Color Options Close Screen The Operation Menu Tek Emulation The Tek Emulation option deals with the type of Tektronix emulation that you want VLT to use You see once upon a time when Tektronix 4010 was first developed it didn t really do all that much it didn t support color it only recognized a very limited set of escape sequences and it only supported a 1024 by 1024 coordinate system Then along came Tektronix 4014 which was a little bit better it recognized more escape sequences and supported a 4096 by 4096 coordinate system as well as a 1024 by 1024 coordinate system Yet Tektronix 4014 wasn t perfect it still didn t provide color So along came Tektronix 4105 which provided color After Tektronix 4105 came Tektronix 4107 which had even more features Tek Emulation when selected provides you with two choices a 4010 4014 emulation and a 4105 4107 emulation The 4010 4014 emulation recognizes all the escape sequences and 53 provides all the features of the early 4010 and 4014 emulations The 4105 4107 emulation on the other hand has all of the features of the Tektronix 4105 emulations with a few of the 4107 features thrown in Unless your host can t deal with the 4105 4107 optio
77. LT uses for the serial device itself To adjust the review buffer you need to use the Buffer Size option found in the review window s menus Miscellaneous Musings Q26 A26 Q27 A27 Q28 A28 Q29 A29 When I type beyond the last column displayed on my screen then backspace using De structive Backspace I get a dangling character at the EOL No matter what I do I can t erase that character Uh well ever heard the saying It s not a bug it s a feature More seriously this problem is part of VT100 emulation arcanum One way to avoid that dangling character is to run with WRAP mode on You could also switch off Destructive Backspace How do you run VLT with low memory 512K for example First don t use review library delete it Second use VLT Jr not VLT Third use VLT on the Workbench screen not on its own screen or use a custom screen with a small number of colors 2 or 4 and no interlacing Whenever I open VLT on the Workbench screen all the text is shown in a tiny font What s wrong When you open VLT on the Workbench extra room is taken up by the borders of the VLT window This means that the number of columns each column has a width of one character that fit using a certain font on the Workbench may not be the same as the number of columns that fit on a custom screen To squeeze in as many columns as possible VLT uses the small font If this bothers you reduce the number of c
78. SLAC 370 REV 4 SLAC 370 REV 4 A VALIANT LITTLE TERMINAL A VLT User s Manual Amanda Weinstein SLAC Report 370 REV 4 Revised August 1992 Prepared for the Department of Energy under contract number DE AC03 76SF00515 This document and the material and data contained therein was devel oped under sponsorship of the United States Government Neither the United States nor the Department of Energy nor the Leland Stanford Junior University nor their employees nor their respective contractors subcontractors or their employees makes any warranty express or im plied or assumes any liability or responsibility for accuracy complete ness or usefulness of any information apparatus product or process disclosed or represents that its use will not infringe privately owned rights Mention of any product its manufacturer or suppliers shall not nor is it intended to imply approval disapproval or fitness for any particular use A royalty free nonexclusive right to use and dis seminate same for any purpose whatsoever is expressly reserved to the United States and the University 2 80 SLAC 370 REV 4 UC 414 M A VALIANT LITTLE TERMINAL A VLT User s Manual Amanda Weinstein Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Stanford University Stanford CA 94309 August 1990 Revised December 1990 July 1991 September 1992 Prepared for the Department of Energy under contract number DE AC03 76SF00515 Printed in the Unite
79. Set bypass and return terminal status BEL Ring bell flash screen ESC BEL Ring bell flash screen BS Move one space left ESC BS Move one space left HT Move right to next tab stop ESC HT Move right to next tab stop LF Move one line down and return to left margin ESC LF Same as ESC CR Move to left margin ESC CR Same as ESC VT Move one line up ESC VT Move one line up ESC FF Erase and home ESC ETB Make copy CAN Switch to Alphanumeric supermode VT100 ESC CAN Set bypass condition ESC SUB Set GIN mode and bypass condition FS Set point plot mode ESC FS Set point plot mode GS Set vector mode ESC GS Set vector mode RS Set incremental plot mode ESC RS Set incremental plot mode SP Move one space right DEL Same as BS ESC DEL Same as ESC ESC 8 Select largest character size ESC 9 Select large character size ESC Select small character size ESO Select smallest charactersize ESC 0 Same as ESC 8 ESC 1 Same as ESC 9 ESC 2 Same as ESC 120 ESC 3 Same as ESC Notes 1 Fora description of the report to the host see the section on reports to the host 2 These sequences are not currently implemented 3 After vector mode is entered a move will be executed to the vector that follows All subse quent vectors will be drawn In addition while this is not strictly in acco
80. T and Fifo Pipes can be used to set up a bulletin board service Using this BBS you can give remote Amigas access to your Amiga but you can also control who has that access and what kind of commands they can give To install this bulletin board service first create a directory somewhere and assign FifoBBS to it FifoBBS will do the rest To run the program go to your CLI and type FifoBBS with either the remote or local argument When invoked without arguments a fake BBS will be run from the current CLI When invoked with the local argument the BBS will run with a local VLT bypassing the serial port Use this argument when you want to log into the BBS from the Amiga on which it is running In neither of these cases will the FifoBBS commands UPLOAD or DOWNLOAD work When invoked with the remote argument the BBS will run as a real BBS through the serial port and people can dial in from the outside When FifoBBS is run for the first time there will be only one account that of SYSOP Hit return to get to the FifoBBS Username prompt Log in as SYSOP and change your password When you are logged on hit return to see the list of supported commands The commands prefaced by an asterisk can only be used by SYSOP Now log on as someone else by logging on as NEW and register Then try logging on again you will find that you are not yet validated Log on as SYSOP and use the VALIDA FE command to change the access code of the new user from 2 to 3 Th
81. TEKtronix ZOOM 89 TiTlebar 90 TRACE 90 TRANSsfer Mode 90 TRANsfer Protocol 90 91 TRAP 90 VOLume 90 WAIT 90 WEDGE 76 90 WINDOW 91 window open 104 WORkbenchcolors 91 WRAP 91 XMOdemmode 91 XPRINIT 91 XPR Select 90 91 script comments 63 scripts 11 14 35 ARexx See ARexx scripts uninterruptable 65 search path 35 71 134 See also path search serial device 17 18 28 101 103 port 3 17 18 25 28 29 43 44 84 86 101 135 port unit number 17 18 28 89 server mode 33 SetMiscFlags 85 103 136 T Tektronix configuration files files TekPrefs dat emulation 4 18 52 86 91 114 115 118 124 130 escape sequences See escape se quences Tektronix See configuration files 43 mode See Tektronix emulation screen 78 85 text 85 timed loop See loops timed Tool Types 20 21 traps 36 66 68 97 to 99 cancelling 68 on 36 68 75 87 90 97 99 See also Script Commands ON trap 36 68 69 90 97 99 See also Script Commands trap wait 36 68 73 81 90 See also Script Commands wait trembling extremities See Handshaking U unit number See serial port unit number universal quote 63 User Menu 42 yv VLTL 43 VLTR 43 144 VT100 configuration files files VTPrefs dat emulation 3 18 56 84 91 103 114 115 118 130 escape sequences quences VT100 See configuration See escape se mode See VT100 emulation screen 78
82. Tektronix configuration file By default VLT loads a file called TekPrefs dat This file deals with parameters for the Tektronix emulation or graphics part of VLT RUN VLT C Quickie Script 18 If you type the command with C you can type a short VLT script bounded by double quotes see Writing Scripts Introduction To VLT s Scripting Facility immediately afterwards separate the C and the script by one or more spaces This script will then be executed upon startup RUN VLT B If you type the command with B VLT starts up without opening the VLT screen This is useful if for some reason you want VLT to be running in the background Any other file names specified on the command line are the names of script files that the program should run after startup is completed Note see Getting Started VLT s Method of Searching Paths for a description of where VLT looks for these files Names of script files should be specified last after the parameter specifications that you have made In fact the complete syntax of the RUN VLT command is RUN VLT scripti script2 where the and represent one or more of the parameters previously discussed Note that the indicate that the parameter is optional they should not be typed As an example of how to run VLT from a CLI environment let us say that you have two initialization files called IBM INIT and VAX INIT and two scripts called IBMLOGON SCP a
83. They and How Do You Run Them VLT s scripting facility is based on the notion of a schedule A schedule is a set of commands written in VLT s scripting language and sent to VLT VLT script files are schedules as are scripts run from the console window and script commands executed when a programmable function key is pressed Finally if an ARexx script sends one or more commands to VLT the set of commands sent by the ARexx script to VLT is considered a schedule too Schedules may have names As a rule VLT will assume that a schedule is named after the first label in the schedule Therefore it may be a good idea to start all schedules with a label that conveys some information about its purpose even if you never need the label for use with a goto command A simple example of a schedule would be this brief script file which programs the cursor to blink constantly This is the file blinker scp blinker cursorheight 0 delay 0 3 cursorheight 1 delay 0 3 goto blinker To run the above schedule you would select VLT Script from the Script Menu and enter blinker scp in the file requester You could however just as easily run the same schedule from the console window inside VLT Inside the console window we could start this schedule by typing blinker cursorh 0 delay 0 3 cursorh 1 delay 0 3 goto blinker If you wanted to run this schedule from outside of VLT you could start the schedule from WShell by typing
84. VLT in a directory belonging to the current path that is the group of directories that the Amiga will search for the specified program You can provide the command with several parameters that affect the way in which VLT is invoked The parameters are specified using special subcommands A discussion of these subcommands and their syntax follows if you forget them typing VLT into your CLI will bring up a special message window with a brief description of these commands and their syntaxes RUN VLT I startup file If you type the command with the I option then you are telling VLT that it should use an initialization file with a name other than VLT_startup vlt or vlt init In the above example that would be startup file Moreover the file specified with this option is automatically checked to see if it is written in either ARexx or VLT s scripting language and run upon startup when it is On the other hand if you type RUN VLT I 17 then you indicate that the program should be run without looking for vlt init or vlt_startup vlt RUN VLT S serial device If you type the command with S and a serial device name you indicate that you want VLT to use the specified serial device You must specify the serial device s full name e g tsstrm device RUN VLT U unit number If you type the command with U and a unit number you indicate that you want VLT to use the specified unit RUN VLT N VLT name If you ty
85. acters to be sent from the mainframe before executing the next script clause Sometimes however one of these traps will be hanging around waiting for the mainframe to send it the right set of characters when you don t want it hanging around and waiting at all Remove All Traps basically aborts all wait on or trap commands The Screen Menu The menu options provided in the Screen Menu are concerned with setting various proper ties of the text screen You should know that in addition to being able to open multiple windows on the Workbench screen the Amiga supports the concept of multiple custom screens Following the desktop metaphor you can think of the screen as the desktop and the windows which belong to a given screen as pieces of paper or file folders which can be placed anywhere on a given desktop but which cannot be moved from one desk to another Multiple windows can be opened on a given screen when a window is opened we are looking inside a given folder Although windows have different contents all of the windows which open on a given screen share certain display characteristics For example all windows on a given screen have the same number of colors available to them All windows which open on the Workbench screen for instance use the same four eight or sixteen colors depending the version number of your operating system In addition changing the characteristics of a screen changes the characteristics of its associ
86. also have problems if you ve just installed a new version of VLT since you need to flush libraries out of memory Old versions of review library floating around where VLT might find them frequently confuse VLT A surefire method of flushing libraries is to delete them copy over the new library versions then reboot Incidentally if you don t want to use the review buffer you can save memory by not installing this library VLT s review buffer clipboard support seems to cause complaints from other applications Your problem has to do with the fact that a good many applications don t obey IFF file specifications and therefore have trouble with even padded clips As a result VLT has been set to do things the wrong way so as to agree with the majority of applications If your application insists on even padded clips can give it indigestion To solve this difficulty 102 Q25 A25 use either the MISCflags script command or the SetMiscFlags macro included with VLT see Writing Scripts Quick Reference Section see Appendix F I don t understand is the review buffer s size really limited to 8192 bytes It doesn t make much sense but whenever I try to adjust it using the Buffer Size option in the Communications Menu VLT won t let me enter a larger number No the review buffer s size is not limited to 8192 bytes you ve been adjusting the wrong buffer The Communication Menu option adjusts the buffer V
87. ameter settings your host requires Then flip through the following section which discusses the various menus and menu options in detail until you find the option s that will let you reset those parameters Once you have done this turn to the dicussion of the Save 25 Configuration option of the VLT Menu Read this section carefully as it explains how to make your new parameters the default parameters that VLT will use whenever it starts up We will devote the remainder of this chapter to listing each of the menu options and explain ing what they do Since there are separate menus associated with the text and graphics screens the chapter is divided into two main sections Text Screen Menus and Graphics Screen Menus Within those sections the menu options are organized according to the the menu which contains them 26 Text Screen Menus The VLT Menu Capture Session The Capture Session op tion can be selected from the menu as shown or by us ing the alternate keyboard command 4 O hold down the right amiga key and type O All commands that have keyboard alternatives are indicated in the menu End Capture in this way This option allows you to capture to a file all information received from the host If you select this option a file requester will appear You will need Open Console to give 1t the necessary drawer and directory specifica tions as well as a filename for VLT to capture to If the file already exists a request
88. and CAN The US GS and FS sequences cause VLT to switch to Tektronix mode while CAN causes VLT to switch to VT100 mode In addition ESC 0 causes VLT to switch to Tektronix mode while ESC 1 makes VLT switch to VT100 mode see Appendix D for more about these sequences 114 Two more escape sequences are used in Tektronix mode to switch between light and dark vectors They are mentioned here because they are recognized and handled by the VT100 escape parser ESC 0d Draw light vectors with current attributes ESC 1d Draw dark vectors erasing previously drawn graphics One other graphics related sequence is recognized ESC 0 This sequence requests a re port on VLT s current emulation mode The response to this request is a sequence of 6 characters 001 CR if the current mode is VT100 and 000 CR if the current mode is Tektronix Differences compared to standard VT100 In the case of a regular VT100 the sequences CSI 1p and CSI 0p switch one of the keyboard LEDs on and off Since the Amiga does not have a set of keyboard LEDs this function switches the highlighting status of the on screen INS gadget on or off when the on screen PF key gadgets are being displayed Normally the sequences CSI Po Pam are used on VT100 s to change the current mode of graphic rendition e g boldface italic reverse video If the Color option of the Rendering Mode menu item is selected however these
89. at you make copies of the VLT docfiles as well as those rexx and scp files which as examples you won t need and then delete all of these files from the VLT directory that you plan to install If you don t intend to use some of the frills included with VLT such as the phonebook facility you can also get rid of the VLTPhonebook NeatStuff SetMiscFlags files that exist in your rexx and scp directories Even so in order to free up enough space a little over 610K you ll need to get rid of any unnecessary system files on the Workbench especially since you ll probably need extra room for the files discussed in the following section Other Files You May Need VLT uses certain other files that are not distributed with VLT some of which are essential to VLT s operation others of which support and provide various frills First and this is extremely important VLT uses arp library whether or not it is running under AmigaDOS 1 3 in other words 2 04 users need it too Under 2 04 VLT uses ARP considerably less but can t do without it Therefore you must have this file in your libs directory you don t however need the other files that usually come with ARP You will need arp library version 39 1 commonly known as ARP 1 3 Those running under AmigaDOS 1 3 unless they have WShell 2 0 must install ConMan 1 3e in order to use the console window Under AmigaDOS 2 04 you can use the console handler that comes with the system b
90. ated windows For example if you change a screen from non interlace to interlace mode then all the windows which open on it will also be in interlace mode x Under 1 3 the Workbench Screen this is the screen which you see when you first boot can display only four colors You can use the Preferences tool to set these four colors to be any four chosen out of a palette of 4096 possible colors 36 Screens and windows differ in a very important way In general most windows can be resized and moved around on their screen by using the mouse to grab their drag and resizing gadgets Screens don t have close gadgets they open and close only under the control of a program and they cannot be resized Also screens must occupy the full width of the display although they can slide up and down to reveal anything which lies behind them Thus like windows screens can overlap one another and also like windows they can have front to back gadgets In other words if a screen has a drag bar at the top you can grab it with a mouse and slide it down to reveal a screen in back of it or you can click on its front to back gadget to place it in back of any other screen which is open however you cannot move it to the right or left If there are back to front gadgets on the screen they will be located in the top right hand corner of the drag bar VLT allows you to open both the text and graphics windows either on the Workbench screen _ or on separate custom sc
91. b slac stanford edu as well as various other online services and BBS s In addition floppy based systems will not automatically run ARexx upon startup if you have a floppy based system and want to use ARexx macros you ll need to either drag the RexxMast icon over to your WBStartup drawer or add RexxMast to your user startup file Finally several files included with VLT implement useful extras including a phonebook facility these facilities are documented in Appendix F There are also quite a few interesting and useful VLT scripts that have been written by other users Some implement phone books while others automate up download facilities for on line services Installation for SLAC Users SLAC users should call Willy Langeveld and get their VLT setup with all the files that they need from him Installation Notes for 1 3 Users Since VLT now uses by default 2 0 style icons users will notice a new directory Icons _ For_1 3 This directory contains special 1 3 style icons for those users with a 1 3 operating system Copy the relevant info files from this directory over the ones that you copied during the installation Installation for 2 0 Users Under 2 0 you can use the system s standard console handler to support the console window Even if you want to use a ConMan console you do not want to run ConMan in your startup sequence when mounted as CON ConMan replaces the regular system console handler in all cases which
92. ccess to serial devices PADdedclips When added sets the VLT review buffer up to pad files saved to the clipboard so that all clip files in accordance with IFF specs contain an even number of characters Padding of clipboard files disagrees with some editors so the option is by default off SERialshared When added causes VLT to open the serial port in shared mode You must reopen the serial port before this takes effect either by selecting the Reset menu option or Hangup option or by issuing the HANGup script command TEKNOAnsicolors When added causes VLT to support csi n m sequences in Tektronix mode as long as n is in the range between 30 and 37 TEKNOBoundary When added prevents panel outlines from being drawn TEKNOPointer Affects the display of cross hairs in Tektronix mode Normally when cross hairs are being displayed the mouse pointer changes to a target box on the graphics screen When TEKNOPointer is added only the cross hairs are displayed UNBufferedcapture When added capture to a file is unbuffered This is occasionally use ful when capturing to strange devices see The User Interface Text Screen Menus s section on Fifo support for more details VT100toprow When added forces the top four keys of the numeric keypad to send VT100 sequences under all circumstances MISCFlags number The old MISCFlags interface for reasons of compatibility is supported in addition to the newer interface discussed in t
93. ce VLT s port name may not be VLT if you ve started the program up under a different name The Fault Command and the RC variable When during the running of an ARexx macro a timeout or error occurs an error code is returned Error codes are numbers each number corresponds to a particular type of error In ARexx the variable known as the RC variable stores the error code When VLT script commands are sent from ARexx to VLT and something goes wrong VLT will return an error code to ARexx s RC variable VLT has 29 error codes 0 to 28 these error codes in no way correspond to the error codes returned by errors in ARezz macros The VLT script command fault when given a number from 0 to 28 assigns to the variable VLT Error a textual error message corresponding to that particular error code Fault can be called with a x Although an error code is returned when a timeout occurs a timeout is not considered an error and therefore does not cause a VLT script to abort Remember all other errors will cause VLT scripts to spontaneously abort ARexx macros are aborted by VLT errors unless the ARexx command ON FAILURE is used 72 number as its argument for instance fault 1 would result in VLT Error containing the word Timeout or it can be called with the ARexx RC variable as its argument You must issue the fault command from either WShell or an ARexx macro using the Address VLT command Let s take a look at an example to see how it w
94. ceived from the host or if specified until the timeout period has expired If this is the last command before returning to a REXX process the return code will reflect that a timeout ocurred Wait traps with timeout are equivalent to on character string continue delay timeout except that contrary to on traps the wait trap is only valid for one occurrence The character string is parsed for ARP style escape sequences WEDGE item port name Currently only one item can be wedged KEYStrokes If the specified port name exists a REXX message will be sent to that port of the form KEYSTROKE code qualifier iaddress character where the code and qualifier numbers are the key code and lowest order 8 qualifier bits of the key pressed by the user Iaddress keeps a history of all keystrokes while the character is the translation of code and qualifier using the current default keymap If no translation is available this field will be absent Note that the special case where the space bar was pressed will look the same For an example of the use of this function see earlier in this chapter 90 WINDOW leftedge topedge width height OPEN CLOSE Called with any of the first four arguments allows you to size VLT s main window All arguments are optional Specifying 0 for width and or height will cause the window to open to the right and or bottom edge of the physical display Missing arguments default to 0 but the argu
95. cess Last and likely the least is the small gadget in the right bottom corner of the requester the gadget which looks like a small triangle If you grab this gadget with your mouse you can resize 110 the requester between some minimum and maximum sizes by moving your mouse around Moving your mouse upwards shrinks the requester vertically moving your mouse downwards expands the requester vertically moving your mouse to the left shrinks the requester horizontally and moving your mouse to the right expands the requester horizontally Finally the Amiga allows you to pull a trick and assign whole path names to a logical device For example if you type ASSIGN REXX SYS REXX inside a CLI or put it in your startup sequence the requester will display rexx along with the other device names when you click on Disks saving you from plumbing the depths of various directories to find a specific file File Requester Menus The ASL file requester has a single menu associated with it the Control Menu The various options are described below The Control Menu Last Name The Last Name option scrolls the filename in the file gadget up one that is it takes the preceding file in the list before the currently selected file and puts this preceding file in the file gadget instead If no file is currently selected this option puts the first file in the list in the file gadget Next Name The Next Name option scrolls the filename in t
96. characters are captured as received including carriage returns line feeds and nulls Otherwise nulls are stripped out and files are stored with linefeeds as line delimiters according to Amiga standards CAPture SUSPEND RESUME FLUSH OFF Capture Suspend and Capture Resume suspend or resume capturing to the current capture file Capture Flush causes the current buffer to be flushed to the capture file Capture Off causes the current capture file to be closed CD directory specification Changes the directory out of which VLT is operating according to your specification CHeckserialerror SERialdevicebusy BAUdratemismatch LINEerror PARity error BUFferoverflow NODsr BREakreceived ON OFF DECimal error mask Tells VLT to check for various errors Any number of the options may be used in the same call Each option specified will be switched by default to the ON state to turn an option off preface it by the OFF option You can use the ON and OFF switches several times in the same command for example Ch Ser Off Bau On Line Par Off Buf Once you ve used the OFF switch all options specified will be switched OFF until you use the ON switch again at which point all options specified will be switched ON The DEC imal option can be used in conjunction with the extract command for checkserialerror The extract command returns a bit mask of the current state of each option A bit mask in the identical format can be
97. cognize the command string since it is an ARexx command Since the entire on command has already been established as a VLT script command VLT doesn t know to return the second half of the command the command string to ARexx to execute Instead VLT will return an error message and abort the script On the other hand if you issue the commands Address VLT on Ready rx address MYPORT ready delay 10 everything will work because VLT will see the rx command and send the command string back to ARexx to be executed Unlike the extract and fault commands the rx command can be invoked from within VLT as well as from within ARexx Within VLT the rx command is primarily useful when programming the user menu or keyboard functions because it lets you program these functions in ARexx Delimiters and Delays Keeping an ARexx sent On Command Alive An on trap lasts only as long as the schedule that set it up Normally this isn t a problem since the schedule will end after the on command has outlived its usefulness When an on trap is created from ARexx however you run into a problem An on command sent from ARexx via the Address VLT command is received by VLT as a one line schedule The only command the schedule contains is the on command itself so the schedule sets up the on trap and promptly expires Since the on trap always dies with the schedule the on trap dies too much too fast to receive the trap string that it was s
98. command is especially useful when you want to program keys to behave differently in Alphanumeric VT100 and Graphics Tektronix mode The commands execute on the same schedule that the if command was called from so you can include goto s that refer to labels outside the if s command string as well as exit commands and have them work correctly By contrast with earlier versions of the if command all the commands within the if statement execute synchronously with the schedule in which the if appears For example if VT100 emit Avalon delay 1 emit Arthur emit done If VLT is currently in VT100 mode then Avalon will appear followed after a delay of one second by Arthur done will appear immediately afterwards In previous versions because the commands within the if were executed asynchronously Avalon would appear followed immediately by done and Arthur would appear a second later INTerlace ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE Lets you switch interlace on or off for custom screens 84 KERmit BYE Sends a Bye message to host if the Kermit protocol is currently selected KERmit DOWncase ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE Calling this option with either the YES ON or 1 subcommand causes the names of received files to be converted to lower case KERmit FINish Behaves like KERmit BYE except that it does not log you off the host KERmit PACKetsize packet size Sets maximum packet size
99. cp cancel blinker blinker j cursorheight 0 delay 0 3 cursorheight 1 delay 0 3 goto blinker The last command in this schedule is goto blinker Goto blinker tells VLT to go back to the _ line with blinker on it and execute all subsequent commands The line saying blinker is known as a label as we mentioned earlier any name with a colon after it is considered a label by VLT To use a goto command you must have a label for the goto to return to When VLT reaches the goto blinker command again it goes back to blinker once more and executes all subsequent commands As long as the schedule isn t cancelled this cycle of commands will continue eternally Such a cycle is known as an infinite loop Infinite loops are not the only kind of loops used in programming There are a variety of loops which let you loop through a set of commands a specified number of times or until a certain answer is reached etc VLT s script language only has the goto command which means that it doesn t recognize these other kinds of loops There are however sneaky ways of making the goto command a timed loop that is a loop that expires after an elapsed period of time The Goto Command as a Timed Loop Currently if we run the schedule blinker scp our cursor will blink until we cancel the schedule You may however want your cursor to blink for twenty seconds and then stop of its own accord without your intervention To turn the infinite goto
100. d The VLT script command review is used to manipulate the history buffer from the Console or from a script There are a variety of single character subcommands which appended to the basic review command allow you to manipulate the history buffer and review window in a variety of ways Some of these subcommands allow or require an argument some do not A table of subcommands arguments and the subcommands purposes is therefore included on the following pages Note Most of the commands in this table are available in the menus of the review buffer window O testo 9 ts O INICIOS AAA CTI o Y Des Irene S D I Select Deselect Invert from search line to top 92 Review Subcommands cont Select Deselect Invert from search line to bottom lines Jump relative to search line by lines lines Negative numbers jump towards Q e 5 3 f a S D I top Jump relative to line from top 0 is top line Negative numbers count from bot line tom 1 is bottom line string Search from top Forward for string string Search from bottom in Reverse for string Repeat search Forward Repeat search Reverse string Search from last search position Forward for string string Search from last search position in Re verse for string UL UP T DL DP B LC LP LM RC Move Up Line Up page to Top Down RP RM Line Down page to Bottom left Char
101. d If you then return to the Workbench and enter your favorite editor you can insert the contents of the clipboard into the editor s text Append Append To Append To allows you to append all selected material in the history window to the end of an already existing file Selecting this option brings up a file re 46 quester Choose the file to which you wish to append and hit return The Append command appends all selected lines to the file specified in the most recent Append To or Save As command New Page The New Page command which is for use with page oriented hosts tells the history buffer to start a new page This command is important because of the way the History Buffer operates on page oriented hosts While the most recent screen or page will appear in the review window the contents of this most recent page can unlike all the other pages in the buffer be overwritten That is the last page in the buffer reflects all alterations that occur on the terminal screen including the erasure of text VLT recognizes full screen erasures as the start of a new page but not partial erasures of the screen Since the host partially erases the screen all the time to make room for new text this means that some of the screen contents if the user is not careful will disappear from the buffer and be lost The only way to avoid this is to inform either the host or VLT that a new page has been started There are two ways to do this first
102. d States of America Available from the National Technical Information Service U S Department of Commerce 5285 Port Royal Road Springfield Virginia 22161 A Valiant Little Terminal A VLT User s Manual by Amanda Weinstein Fourth Edition August 1992 Trademarks and Copyrights IBM and VM CMS are trademarks of International Business Machines Ann Arbor and Ambassador are trademarks of Ann Arbor Inc Modgraph is a trademark of Modgraph Inc Digital DEC DECnet VAX and VMS are trademarks of Digital Equipment Corporation Micom is a trademark of Micom Systems Inc TX is a trademark of the American Mathematical Society TxEd TxEd Plus FastFonts and FunKeys are trademarks of Microsmiths Inc Amiga AmigaDOS and Amiga Workbench are trademarks of Commodore A miga Inc PostScript is a trademark of Adobe Incorporated Tektronix is a trademark of Tektronix Inc ARexx WShell ConMan are copyright Wishful Thinking Inc AmigaT X is copyright Radical Eye Software Inc ProVector is copyright Stylus Inc It s It is a registered trademark of It s It Ice Cream Co Acknowledgements Many thanks to Willy Langeveld the creator of VLT for assistance discussion and expla nation as well as the writing of Appendices C and D of this manual Thanks as well to Marvin Weinstein author of the original VLT manual VLT the Story for the use of his efforts his TEX assistance and the new VLT logo We are also
103. day this restriction may be lifted How can I get VLT to put the files it creates during TekCapture where J want them to be Assign TekStore to the device or directory where you want the files to be stored I m having real trouble making FifoBBS work in remote mode Consider what happens someone tries to call the modem of a system running VLT and FifoBBS The modem sometimes sends RING to VLT and VLT thinks someone hit a return As a result FifoBBS sends the Username prompt out through the modem Very often this aborts the connection right there since modems typically abort the connection process if data is sent before a connection is established But even if the connection isn t aborted you have a problem since if the connection is not established yet modems usually echo the data that you send them So the entire Username banner text is sent back to FifoBBS which interprets this as a person trying to log on As you can see this interferes 105 Q41 A4l massively with the real logon process So you ll probably want to set your modem to not report RING messages and to not echo data when you re running FifoBBS Most modems are capable of being set this way NOTE the newest FifoBBS tries to ignore RING messages during the logon sequence When I try to invoke a twenty sixth session of VLT using the N option VLT refuses to open Well VLT can t open more than twenty five simultaneous sessio
104. default this char acter is the tilde Although you can choose a different keyscript character we advise against this as it may lead to confusion The Universal Quote The combinations or act as a universal quote If _ one of these combinations without corresponding open brackets is placed in a line all text from there to the end of the line will be treated as a string and the reserved symbols ignored by VLT s script parser including quotes and so forth which would otherwise have been processed This is particularly valuable when you want VLT to send text without processing it first For example if you re reading text in and then having VLT send it you may run into problems because you won t know if the text contains reserved symbols So you would issue the send command as follows send sometext This syntax is only valid as of VLT version 5 045 Use of Semicolons Whenever a set of commands are written on the same line they must be separated by semicolons The semicolons tell VLT that a new command is beginning and an old command is ending Writing each command on a new line serves the same purpose but it may sometimes be necessary to write commands on the same line when you are running a script from the VLT console window for instance Use of Colons A name followed by a colon tells VLT to consider the name a label The uses of labels will be discussed later 63 Schedules Schedules What Are
105. e cate S107 Appendix A The file ioiai A o a Ne O LOD Using the Requester TEE A ere a 109 File Requester Menus foie A a AL The Control Menu p a ue a eh o AL Special Notes 24 60 a a as A Appendix B Parity b dia tee Aig Feel Sho adhe ok e Bits Bytes and Nybbles i te a o o a A rs SED Even Parity c e aoe e die p ou oe eia Y O Odd Parity 4 Sod aga a Be Se XAT Mark and Space Parities ESR baw es ewe ae en eee cado Stop Bits Schnee E des eb ate ap Oe o ATS Parity Abbreviations ito with ga eal lie Ses 5 26 at la far eet Leen ent wey ATS Appendix C VLT s Emulations se ha ote aoe a A Introduction 2 2 0 eee EE Ee a ao at ye de ETA VLT s modes 244 TA te ht de eee Ge 114 Sequences related to the Tektronix emulation 114 Differences compared to standard VT100 2 115 Additional escape sequences LE ta e Ae ee LAS Sending commands to VLT from the host ve teeta A eek Ss tos ee TG Device Status Reports and Device Control String 117 Appendix D Tektronix Programmer s Manual 118 Overview a 2 6 Has Gok LS Sequences that ve gupemnads Mon ELE ucts nr asa AO Alpha mode id ts ee a a is 120 Vector and poiit piot marker mode 121 Incremental Plot mode Sete a bs RR amp Bee ee 28 GIN mode 2 2 225 BO poe ae
106. e new user can now log on but does not have access to the commands prefaced by an asterisk However as SYSOP or if you have access code 5 or larger you can use the SYSTEM command This will bring you to a prompt from which you can type any system command dir cd list info avail anything that produces text output You can even run Ed That s the editor that comes with the Amiga and you can do this only under AmigaDOS 2 0 with the WINDOW and WIDTH and HEIGHT settings There are some programs like More that should work but don t You can type return to get back into the BBS system FifoBBS currently has a single listings section a single message section and private mail between everybody It detects the NO CARRIER string sent by the modem and if that string is present will log the current user off so that the next user can t intrude on someone else s account Capture To Fifo You can capture files to the Fifo Pipes by using the Capture Session option of the VLT Menu and capturing to the device fifo When doing so it is wise to use unbuffered file transfer Since file transfer is normally buffered you will need to switch the buffering off See the discussion of the MISCFlags option found in Writing Scripts Quick Reference Section for an explanation of how to switch off buffering of file transfers you can also use the ARexx macro SetMiscFlags vlt discussed in Appendix F The Console Window In Detail Selecti
107. e programming VLT menu options to send material to the host The Escape Character and SET ESCAPE comand All ARP escape sequences must be preceded by the escape character which by default is the You can however choose a different escape character using the ARP command SET ESCAPE value which you issue from WShell or ARPShell Escape Sequences The escape sequences recognized by ARP are as follows N new line T horizontal tab V vertical tab B backspace R carriage return F form feed E escape ascii 27 decimal Xnn the character represented by the hexadecimal value nn 132 Appendix F There are a number of programs written in ARexx which either provide VLT with extra facilities or modify VLT in some way Some of these extras are included with the VLT distri bution and are consequently documented in this appendix In order to function most of these extras require rexxarplib library version 3 0 or later available in a separate archive on a BBS near you In addition some features such as multiple select file requesters only work under AmigaDOS 2 0 If you are working under AmigaDOS 1 3 you must have ARexx for these programs to work at all see the Introduction The ARexx Phonebook facility A phonebook facility written in ARexx is included with VLT To use it first run from VLT the script called VLTPhoneBook v1t you may want later on to program a fu
108. ear Bypass BEL Clear bypass and ring bell flash screen ESC BEL Clear bypass and ring bell flash screen LF Clear bypass ESC LF Clear bypass and introduce escape sequence CR Clear bypass VT Clear bypass HT Clear bypass ESC CR Clear bypass and introduce escape sequence ESC FF Clear bypass enter alpha mode erase and home ESC ETB Make copy ESC CAN Set bypass condition ESC SUB Set GIN mode and bypass condition US Clear bypass and set alpha mode ESC US Clear bypass and set alpha mode Notes 1 For a description of the report to the host see the section on reports to the host 2 In 4105 4107 emulation mode these sequences only clear bypass mode In 4010 14 emu lation mode however they also switch the graphics mode to Alpha and perform the same actions they would perform in Alpha mode 3 This sequence is not currently implemented Tektronix 4105 4107 When 4105 4107 is selected from the Emulation menu item of the Operation Menu some control and escape sequences are recognized that otherwise are not The category of supermode changing control sequences was already discussed in a prior section those that gen erate reports will be discussed in the next section Also supported are csi P m sequences with n in the range from 30 to 37 These sequences are exactly the same as their VT100 counterparts see Appendix C Additional escape se quences This f
109. eature can be turned off using a MISCFlags command see Writing Scripts Quick Reference Section 124 We will not describe all Tektronix 4105 commands in detail Many of them have parameters and defaults and in order to use them properly it is necessary to consult the documentation that is available from Tektronix We will limit ourselves to giving a list of supported commands with some remarks where necessary followed by some more detail on frequently used sequences see also Tektronix 4105 reports later in this appendix ESC KC ESC ID ESC IE ESC KI ESC LE ESC LF ESC LG ESC LH ESC LP ESC LT ESC MC ESC MG ESC ML ESC MM ESC MN ESC MP ESC MR ESC MT ESC MV ESC NU ESC NT ESC RA ESC RH ESC RL ESC RP ESC RR ESC RS Cancel Disable GIN mode Enable GIN mode Ignore Deletes End Panel Move Draw Draw Marker Begin Panel Boundary Graphic Text Graphic text is always drawn using a stroke font Alpha mode text uses the default Amiga text font except in zoom or pan mode Set Graphtext Size 4107 extension since graphic text is drawn using a stroke font all sizes are allowed Set Graphics Area Writing Mode Set Line Index 4107 extension colors 8 through 15 are supported Set Marker Type Markers are drawn using a stroke font and don t exactly match the Tektronix ones In the PostScript output they match better Se
110. eft southwest 5 Move left west Move up left northwest 5 1 For a description of the report to the host see the section on reports to the host 2 In 4105 4107 emulation CR is ignored in incremental mode for compatibility with Tek tronix 4100 series terminals 3 This sequence is not currently implemented After vector mode is entered a move will be executed to the vector that follows All subse quent vectors will be drawn 123 5 These commands move the pen one Tektronix pixel The actual amount of movement therefore depends on whether a 1024x1024 or a 4096x4096 coordinate system is used This is controlled by the Operation Menu item Incremental Mode Step GIN mode When the Graphics INput GIN mode is set VLT enters bypass mode This means that keyboard and mouse actions are handled internally by the emulation and usually sent on to the host in a different form GIN mode and the accompanying bypass condition can be exited transparently to the host by selecting the Switch Graphic Cursor Off item of the Cursor Menu but is usually terminated by a report to the host A report is sent to the host when any alphanumeric character is entered from the keyboard or when the left mouse button is pressed For a description of the report see the section on reports to the host During any bypass condition the following escape and control sequences are recognized ESC ENQ Set bypass and return terminal status BS Cl
111. en or activate vti00 When I doubleclick on the phonebook s file requester nothing happens Moreover when the directory requester opens the drawer gadget isn t activated and the requester won t respond to my hitting return What s wrong At the moment there are a few moths and spiders in the ASL file and directory requesters When used in multiple select mode the file requester can t tell the difference between a double click and two separate single clicks So when you double click on an entry the file requester thinks that you have selected and then de selected the entry Rather than doubleclicking click on Okay after selecting files As for the directory requester you have to click on Okay instead of hitting return Hopefully these bugs will be fixed in the next version of the operating system I want to use a different set of file requesters but using them sometimes causes VLT to crash What can I do There s not much that you can do While there are several file requester replacements in the public domain VLT does not support them When you use them you do so at your own risk while VLT doesn t do anything to make these requester replacements fail it isn t specially equipped to deal with them either and there may very well be problems I m an AmigaDOS 2 0 user but I m having trouble getting VLT to use the version 2 0 3D look Your problem is caused by a mismatch between the color assignments and the ac
112. ence it would then compare the first part of the string with the current value of the environment variable SystemPassWord on the Amiga and would if the two matched execute the rest of the string as a standard VLT command In the particular case mentioned above VLT would find the tilde which indicates that the received string is indeed a VLT script command it would then send the command address command WLens 100 100 VLT to ARexx which if WLens is installed would open the WLens window on VLT s screen The requirement of the SystemPassWord is for security reasons Obviously someone with ill intent working on a not too secure mainframe could send you a command to reformat your hard disk So if the password does not match the current value of the environment variable called SystemPassWord you will get a notice on your screen saying that a command was sent to you the notice will also show the first part of that command If you do not have a SystemPassWord any command sent from the host will always fail this way Device Status Reports and Device Control String VLT supports two answer back strings DSR 1 and 2 DSR Device Status Report These are programmable by means of a script command called DSR DSR 1 is VLT s response to the sequence CSI c from the host and the default is ESC 1 7c DSR 2 is VLT s response to the VT200 sequence CSI gt c and defaults to ESC gt 1 10 0c In order to program the device control st
113. eparation bars used in the menus must be counted MESsage message Posts a message using VLT s message window The character may be used to cause line feeds When the message is not specified the current message window is closed MISCFlags add remove option flag MISCFlags allows you to set minor VLT options using the option flags listed below Adding sets an option flag to be on while removing sets an option flag to be off There is also a program included with VLT SetMiscFlags which allows you to set these flags using a very comfortable graphical user interface See Appendix F for details ALPhaonmainscreen When added causes Tektronix alpha mode text to appear on the VT100 screen rather than on the Graphics screen AUToactivate When added causes the VLT screen to pop back to the front after VLT finishes uploading or downloading files DISplayoff When added prevents new data from being shown on VLT s screen INActivemessages When added causes message windows to come up inactive instead of active 85 NOEscapescripts When added nullifies the escape key s ability to abort scripts NOLocalprint When added switches off the capability for automatic local printing see Appendix C NOMessages When added prevents VLT from displaying message windows including the file transfer status window NOOwndevunit When added turns off the support for Chris Wichura s OwnDevUnit stan dard for arbitrating a
114. er or in front of a line to indicate that all the rest was part of the argument This is no longer allowed To fix your line with the minimal amount of pain replace the gt with or or For more information see the explanation of the Universal Quote at the beginning of the Writing Scripts chapter _ Programming Problems Q11 All Q12 _ the addition of the trap facility is there any reason I shouldn t use ARexx scripts exclusively A12 What s the right way to manipulate the User Menu entries I tried editing the VTPrefs dat file but it s a long tightly formatted line and editing it yields a VLT that hangs What do I do First the right way to manipulate the User Menu is to use Program Mode Switch it on and select the user menu item that you wish to program A requester will appear for further detail see The User Interface Text Screen Menus Second you now have a problem The VTPrefs dat file has a special format and when you tried to edit it you reformatted it completely VLT will certainly be quite upset with this Delete the VTPrefs dat file completely open VLT yes VLT can open without a VTPrefs dat file set your parameters and select Save Configuration Now you have a properly formatted VTPrefs dat file again The idea of native VLT and ARexx scripts in parallel is for historical reasons isn t it With There s indeed no reason to use VLT native scripts if you prefer ARexx
115. er will appear asking you Change Directory whether you want append the new material to the end of the current file overwrite the current file or cancel Program Mode the operation altogether Note that we recommend capturing to RAM or RAD since it is faster than capturing to a floppy disk Also should a system crash occur for some reason while VLT About is writing to a disk there is a chance that you will wind up with an unreadable floppy Capture Session Fifo Pipes View History Save Configuration Save Configuration As Exit Selecting the Capture Session option from the VLT menu a second time will suspend file capture A message box will appear on your screen saying that this has happened This message box will go away as soon as you hit any key or click on one of your mouse buttons When capture is suspended nothing that comes to the screen goes to the capture file Reselecting Capture Session toggles capture on again and everything coming to the screen is again being saved into the previously defined file You can toggle capture on and off as many times as you wish Note The use of the file requester is discussed in Appendix A The file requester appears again and again when you save things to files from VLT so if you are unsure of how to use the file requester you should read this appendiz End Capture To shut down file capture completely and close the capture file select the End Capture option
116. ercept keystrokes mp openport WEDGEPORT opens a port tells VLT to intercept all keystrokes and send them to WEDGEPORT address VLT wedge keystrokes WEDGEPORT Loop until quitflag is 1 waiting for packets each keystroke is a packet do forever if quitflag 1 then leave t waitpkt WEDGEPORT We got a number of packets Loop over all of them sifting out null s 76 do ff 1 p getpkt WEDGEPORT if c2d p O then leave ff line getarg p Got a line It is of the form KEYSTROKE code qualifier iaddress character parse it out parse var line command code qual iaddr char If we got an a quit If a b say that we 11 handle this one ourselves by replying a O error return and replace it with a capital C Otherwise return a 1 if char a then quitflag 1 if char b then do t reply p 0 if char b then address VLT send C emit C end else reply p 1 end end 77 Quick Reference Section Some Conventions We now turn to a description of all the script commands In this description we will use the following conventions Abbreviations The capitalized letters unless indicated otherwise indicate the minimum number of char acters that need to be specified Usually commands less than 6 characters in length need to be specified fully whereas with longer commands a suitable abbreviation is used
117. ermit is also supported on many other SLAC systems x If you are a SLAC user you will receive these libraries with VLT Otherwise you will need to obtain the protocol libraries from their creators since they don t normally come with VLT In any file transfer process of this type there are two separate programs which must be run together one on the mainframe and one on the local desktop com puter In the beginning you will probably have to do everything by hand that is first run the mainframe transfer protocol and then use the Amiga keyboard or menu options to handle the Amiga end of the process This of course necessitates that you know how Kermit works on both the Amiga and the mainframe At SLAC you can learn how the mainframe version works by logging onto VM and typing HELP KERMIT Obviously a general file transfer mechanism of this type had to be included since it allows you to handle file transfers using Kermit with any Kermit supporting machine The disadvantage of this mechanism is that you have to carry out many repetitive steps Since VLT interfaces to AmigaREXX A Rexx it is possible to write macros also called scripts or execs which handle the entire file transfer These ARexx macros take care of running both the mainframe Kermit and the Amiga Kermit for you Since each host supports Kermit in a slightly different manner these macros are host specific it is not however all that difficult to alter these macros to
118. ers may find unfamiliar features in the most recent version Those familiar with versions of VLT older than version 4 846 will discover that among other things the VLT scripting language has been redesigned and menu options have been added removed or moved to different menus Hopefully this manual will clarify confusing issues and explain the new version of VLT to your satisfaction For those familiar with VLT version 5 045 the most important changes have been made to the menus which in addition to being rearranged have acquired some new options and to the scripting language which has acquired some new syntax features and quite a few new commands 2 Getting Started Installation At present if you are not a SLAC user you will have obtained VLT in the form of an archive file SLAC users should get VLT directly from Willy Langeveld Both SLAC and non SLAC users have a wide variety of setups If you have a hard disk you will be able to run VLT with all of the frills you are accustomed to having on Workbench If you have two floppy drives but no hard disk you should still be able to do this since you can run Workbench from one drive and VLT from another If you have only one drive and must run Workbench and VLT from a single floppy however you will have to delete some of the Workbench s frills simply because VLT takes up so much space on the floppy Installing VLT From An Archive If you have obtained VLT as an archive fi
119. eselect then hold down the left mouse button and drag the mouse up or down When the first line you clicked on was a selected line it becomes deselected and all other lines you move the mouse across also become deselected the line you click on first determines whether you will select or deselect in the drag select operation When you move the mouse over the top or bottom line the display will start to scroll a line at a time If you drag the mouse a little higher or lower the scrolling speed will become higher a quarter page at a time To select most of the buffer except for a few lines use drag select in combination with the menu options for selecting lines 47 Moving Around The options in the menu to the right allow you to move around in the buffer window Line Up and Line Down move the window text one line up or down respectively Page Up and Page Down move the window text one page up or down with a page Page Up Column Right being defined as the number of lines of text displayed in the window Column Left and Column Right scroll to the left and right one character at a time Page Left Line Down Right Margin and Page Right scroll to the left and right one page at a time with a page defined to be the the length of a line in the review window Left Margin and Right Margin End of Buffer scroll to the left and right margins respectively and Top of Buffer and End of Buffer move you to the top of Column Left the buffer or the
120. etMiscFlags Program The ARexx program SetMiscFlags v1t allows you to set the MISCFlags options mentioned in the Quick Reference Section of Chapter 4 SetMiscFlags vlt is meant to be run from inside VLT to run it go to the Script Menu and select the ARexx Macro option When VLT brings up a file requester find and select SetMiscFlags vlt then hit return A panel will appear at the bottom of the screen with a plethora of gadgets in addition to two buttons Use and Cancel Each gadget has a description of the Miscflag that gadget controls such as Pad clips to clipboard or Do not update screen Clicking on the gadget toggles the Miscflag on and off when the gadget is highlighted it s selected and Miscflag is turned on when the gadget is not highlighted the Miscflag is turned off At any one time you can change as many settings as you like When everything has been arranged to your satisfaction click on the Use button at the bottom of the panel The new Miscflag settings will be put into use and the panel will disappear in order to have VLT remember these settings after it shuts down use the Save Configuration option If you want to get rid of the panel without using the new Miscflags settings click on the Cancel button 136 Index Index A Alphanumeric archives 9 vlt5p576 lha 9 vltj576 lha 9 ARexx 5 11 17 35 36 42 64 71 79 83 88 98 117 133 136 port 18 100 rexxarplib 11 scripts 35 36 42 49 64 9
121. ext in one does not affect the graphics display in the other There is also however an option to display text and graphics on the same screen When the terminal is in Alphanumeric supermode the window usually contains text and the program responds to standard VT100 escape sequences In Graphic supermode the associated window usually contains graphical displays and the program responds to Tektronix control sequences When in graphics supermode an escape sequence is not recognized it is handed to the VT100 escape parser to be evaluated as a VT100 escape sequence The converse is not true when in VT100 supermode unrecognized escape sequences are ignored they are not passed to the Tektronix escape parser This means in particular that the programmer must switch VLT to Tektronix mode before sending any Tektronix sequences Sequences related to the Tektronix emulation The following sequences switch between VT100 and Tektronix emulation modes ESC FF Switches to Tektronix emulation and clears the Tektronix screen ESC SUB Switches to Tektronix emulation and enters GIN mode CSI 38h Switches to Tektronix emulation without clearing the Tektronix screen CSI 381 Switches back to VT100 emulation ESC 0g Switches back to VT100 emulation Here CSI is the sequence ESC or when in eight bit mode the character hex 9B In 4105 4107 emulation mode the following single character sequences are recognized US GS FS
122. fication in fact all file transfer protocols in VLT are external including those which pretend to be built in such as Kermit and XMODEM Kermit transfer is the protocol of choice for sending files to and from the IBM mainframe If you use this protocol then you may set your various options using the Kermit Options item X MODEM transfer is not available for transfer to and from the IBM it can however be used for transferring files to and from VAXes If you select this protocol then you have to set your XMODEM default parameters using the XMODEM Options item All the other options come under the subheading of External ASCII CISQuickB ZMO DEM and YMODEM are the four currently known external file transfer protocols other than Kermit and XMODEM While not explicitly supported there is no ASCII Options menu op tion for example they have been given their own submenu options The Other option allows you to access any external file protocol including the ones mentioned above When you select Other a file requester appears showing the names of available XPR libraries Give it the name of the library containing the protocol of your choice An important warning as we said before all file transfer protocols supported by VLT are in fact external You may notice xprkermit xprxmodem xprquickb xprascii and xprzmodenm libraries listed in the file requester Do not erase them Without them VLT will not let you use these file transfer protocols
123. for a bypass cancel character CR a carriage return LF a linefeed None None VLT does not enter Bypass mode Set By Host let the host set the Bypass Cancel Character The default setting of the Bypass Cancel Character option is CR If your host didn t like a carriage return for your EOL String set Bypass Cancel Character to be the last character of your EOL String instead In case of trouble try letting the host set the bypass cancel character Mouse Report Character Generally host graphics programs don t support the use of a mouse On an ordinary Tektronix terminal when a graphic cursor is used it is positioned using the cursor keys although VLT lets you move the cursor around using the mouse Furthermore when a host graphics program wants you to specify a specific point it usually asks you to position your cursor over that point and then hit a key on your keyboard Mouse oriented users however would rather be able to click on their mouse button VLT allows the user to do this by a simple strategy when you click on your left mouse button VLT receives a mouse signal VLT then sends a keyboard character to the host who thinks that you have hit a key on the keyboard and is perfectly happy In order to carry out this strategy however VLT needs you to tell it which keyboard character to send to the host that is what Mouse Report Character is for Selecting this option will bring up a string requester enter the keyboard c
124. function keys it accepts the programs just fine but when I use the function keys VLT sends funny Amiga sequences instead of using my programs Could the special keymap support be buggy I set my special keymap to a Denmark keymap and most of the keys work just fine but I can t think of anything else it could be Your use or abuse of the Special Keymap option is definitely the culprit Don t set the VLT special keymap to that of your country The special keymap is supposed to consist of null entries except for those few keys that you want to change When you set the special keymap to a standard keymap such as USA1 the rather weird function key settings in the special keymap override VLT s normal treatment of all keys treatment which includes checking for function keys that you might have programmed So use the special keymap only to set those keys you really need to change Incidentally in order to create a special keymap use a keymap editing program such as KeyMapEd Why are there so many fonts that VLT won t use The font VLT uses must have both an 8 and an 11 pixel tall version For example in order for you to use a font called SubtleBlue there must be a directory called fonts SubtleBlue and files called fonts SubtleBlue font fonts SubtleBlue 8 and fonts SubtleBlue 11 Furthermore these fonts must both be 8 pixels wide and monospaced Under 2 04 only fonts that show up in the font requester are acceptable to VLT Some
125. gaDOS 2 0 134 NeatStuff scp if you are using the VTprefs dat file that came with this version then you don t have to run NeatStuff scp NeatStuff programs the mouse to have the following features 1 If you click the left mouse button by itself normally it does nothing but if there is a highlighted area it gets rid of it 2 If you click on the left mouse button while holding down the shift key VLT sends enough mouse moves to the host to get the cursor to the place where you clicked This doesn t work with all hosts 3 If you click on the left mouse button while holding down the ctrl key you can drag out an area that when you let go is put into the clipboard The area stays highlighted If you want to get rid of it just click the mouse without holding down ctrl If you want to select another area just click and drag again while the ctrl key is down 4 If you click on the left mouse button while holding down either alt key and if there is an area already highlighted then the highlighted text is sent to the serial port and the area loses its highlighting 5 If you click on a word in the display while holding down the shift and control keys the word will be highlighted and put in the clipboard If you want a different word just click again while shift and ctrl are still down 6 If you click with the left mouse button while holding down the shift and alt keys VLT puts up a window displaying the column and row of the
126. ghlighted and then holding the mouse steady you release the right mouse button For keyboard oriented individuals we have also provided keyboard shortcuts for selecting most of these options To select an option from the keyboard hold down the Right Amiga key i e the key to the right of the space bar with the letter A on it and type the letter you found shown to the right of the item text in the menu Thus to start a capture you can select the Capture Session option in the VLT menu using the mouse or alternatively hold down the Right Amiga key and hit the letter O You can change these shortcuts if you like see The User Interface Text Screen Menus Program Mode In this chapter the keyboard abbreviations indicated are the default abbreviations There are also some shorthand symbols in the menus which need to be explained You may be familiar with the practice of writing the keyboard equivalent of the menu option to the left of the option in the menu In addition the symbol to the left of a menu option indicates that the option has a submenu while three periods following a menu option s name indicates that selecting the option opens up some sort of window There are a great many menu options some of these options allow you to change the default parameters with which VLT opened If you discover that you need to change some of these parameters before logging on to your host check with a local expert or documentation about the special par
127. gn with spaces such spaces will cause problems Moreover when using the C option don t surround the command string with quotes If you want to get rid of an already specified parameter click on the parameter that you wish to delete click on DEL and then click on the SAVE gadget Again since selecting SAVE closes the Information window don t select SAVE until you have finished making changes Finally if you want to take a look at all of the parameters you ve specified you use the arrow gadgets The down arrow moves you forward in the list of parameters the up arrow moves you backward Under 1 3 the procedure for handling tool types is similar see your Amiga manual No matter what procedure you use to get VLT up and running once your screen goes blank you have entered the domain of VLT and the time has come to become acquainted with what we refer to as its user interface j Under AmigaDOS 1 3 the Workbench has fewer menus So under 1 3 this particular item is found in the Workbench menu and is called Info 21 The User Interface Parameters and Menus Assuming that you have followed our instructions in the previous chapter you will now find yourself staring at a blank screen this emulates what an ordinary terminal looks like when you turn it on and wondering what you should do If you have hooked up your modem or cable to the Amiga s serial port according to the instructions in your Amiga manual all you really have
128. gramming language with a great deal of flexibility and power There are several sources which give a detailed explanation of how to use ARexx if you re a 1 3 user refer to the ARerr Manual by W Hawes the IBM System Product Interpreter User s Guide releases 1 and 2 No SC23 0375 0 and the IBM System Product Interpreter Reference releases 1 and 2 No SC23 0374 0 if you re a 2 0 user refer to the ARexx section of Using The System Software a manual which came with your copy of 71 the operating system In this manual we will assume that you know the basics of ARexx use and focus on the ARexx features that make it possible to mix VLT script commands and ARexx commands within ARexx programs We will then discuss certain VLT script commands which are specifically intended for use within ARexx programs and can only be called from within an ARexx environment Note Before reading this section we recommend that you become familiar with ARezz The ARexx Address Command ARexx has a special command the Address command which allows it to send commands to other programs This command is invoked by typing Address and then the name of the program to which you want commands sent To send commands to VLT you type Address VLT Once it sees Address VLT in the program ARexx enters a mode wherein ARexx interprets as much of a line of the program as it can without aborting the program when it sees an unfamiliar command Instead whenever a line con
129. grateful to the BIX users whose questions formed the basis for the Troubleshooting section and to Suzanne Weinstein for the creation of the limited edition VLT T shirt 1 2 Table of Contents Introduction oa a a a ee An Introduction to VLT What It Does At SLAC Terminal Emulation File Transfer 2 ee ee o ARexx and VIT FastFonts and VET 2 2 2 The VLT Manual Getting Started 2 2 eee Installation 2 20080 884847 Installing VLT From An Archive Other Files You May Need Installation for SLAC Users Installation Notes for 1 3 Users Installation for 2 0 Users Upgrading from older versions of VLT Testing VIT VLT s Method of Searching Paths Starting Up Starting Up VLT From the CLI Starting Up VLT From the Workbench 3 The User Interface oa 2 ee eee 4 Parameters and Menus Text Screen Menus The VET Menu The Communications Menu e E O E E A A O The Paste Menu 2 The Transfer Menu The Script Menu The Screen Menu The Operation Menu User Menu The Graphics Menu Fifo Pipes in Detail 2 2 The Console Window In Detail View History in Detail Program Mode
130. h Forward option A string requester will appear asking you for the string you wish to search for When you type in the word Telephones and hit return the window will automatically scroll down to the location of the string Of course if the word Telephones occurs more than once in the buffer file you may not find yourself in the right place in which case you will need to use the Repeat Forward command until you do Search Forward A E Search Reverse AJR Repeat Reverse Search Reverse Search Reverse tells the computer to search from the bottom of the buffer backwards to a certain string As with Search Forward this option will request a search string from the user Repeat Forward Search forward for another occurrence of the search string specified in the most recent Search command it makes no difference whether the most recent Search command is Search Forward or Search Reverse Repeat Reverse Search backward for another occurrence of the search string specified in the most recent Search command 48 Program Mode In Detail Selecting this menu option reveals a submenu which gives you three choices Off Function Keys Menus and Menu Shortcuts By default Program Mode is turned OfF Reprogramming Function Keys and Menu Options If you wish to reprogram the behavior of the function keys on screen PFkey gadgets or any User Menu item set the Program Mode to be Function Keys Menus and then select the item that
131. hange Counting from left to right and from top to bottom you can also use this row of boxes to find out the color register in which each color is stored The color in the first box on the left is stored in color register 0 note that the color stored in color register 0 is the background color while the color shown in the box to its immediate right is stored in color register 1 Proceeding from left to right in this fashion will tell you the number of the color register associated with each color being used in the display If there are multiple rows when you reach the end of a row continue counting from the far lefthand box of the next row Note the number of colored bozes at the top of the palette requester will vary depending on the number of colors you have chosen to use two four eight or sixteen If you want the picture to be in one color barring a different background color of course you map all the color registers except for color register 0 to one color register It is important to understand that remapping color registers does not affect how and where the various colors are stored remapping only affects how the colors stored in the registers are used Lock Colors Computers are usually color blind they do however have a way to talk about color that is more exact than discussing color registers Every color is defined in terms of how much red blue and green is in it The proportions of red blue and green can be reduced t
132. haracter that you want VLT to send to the host and hit return Note When you bring up this string requester the string gadget will probably appear empty That s all right because the string gadget isn t really empty it contains a space which means that VLT will send a space character to the host Incremental Mode Step The Incremental Mode Step option has to do with how far the cursor moves each time it receives a move up down left right one pixel command from the mainframe This option allows you to choose between two settings 1 1024 and 1 4096 Although it is likely that you will want to choosse the 1 1024 setting you may have to experiment to make certain which setting you should use Adjust Display Adjust Display allows you using its suboptions Width and Height to select the horizontal and vertical extent of the display region on the screen and using its suboptions Left Edge and Bottom Edge to select the location of of the left and bottom edges of the display Adjusting these values allows you to correct for faulty aspect ratios in some plots and also allows you to set up a sort of global magnification In general the default settings provided with VLT provide reasonable values for your display size You may however play around with your Width Height Left Edge and Bottom Edge settings to see if you prefer values which are slightly different If you have a very different screen size you may wish to delete the default sett
133. he file gadget down one that is it looks at the currently selected file takes the next file in the list and puts it in the file gadget instead If no file is currently selected this option puts the first file in the list in the file gadget OK The OK option is exactly equivalent to the file requester s Okay gadget Disks The Disks option is exactly equivalent to the file requester s Disks gadget Last Name Next Name Parent The Parent option is exactly equivalent to the file requester s Parent gadget Cancel The Cancel option is exactly equivalent to the file requester s Cancel gadget Special Notes 1 Under AmigaDOS 2 0 VLT also uses a directory requester used to specify default paths and directories and a multiple select file requester used in the phonebook facility If you understand how the file requester works you shouldn t have any trouble using the other requesters 2 Under AmigaDOS 1 3 VLT uses the ARP file requester This requester is a little different in behavior but enough of the preceding discussion applies that you should be able to figure it out 111 Appendix B Parity When you transfer information electronically between computers errors are sometimes in troduced into the file in transit To make file transfers more accurate various error checking schemes have been developed in which the computer on the receiving end checks the information that it has received for errors before accept
134. he previous entries The old style MISCFlags assigns a number to each flag any of these bitflags is set to be off by a value of zero moreover all of these flags are by default off To set a bitflag to be on add the number specified below after the MISCFlags command PADdedclips 1 DISplayoff 2 NOMessages 4 SERialshared 8 TEKNOPointer 16 UNBufferedcapture 32 NOLocalprint 64 ALPhaonmainscreen 256 NOOwndevunit gt 512 TEKNOAnsicolors 1024 INActivemessages 2048 AUToactivate 4096 TEKNOBoundary 8192 VT100toprow 16384 NOEscapescripts 32768 In order to set more than one bitflag to be on add the numbers which set the two flags to be on and include the result after the MISCFlags command For example to set Bit 0 and 1 to be on type 3 after the MISCFlags command To set Bits 0 1 and 2 to be on type 7 after the MISCFlags command To set Bits 1 2 and 4 to be on type 22 after the MISCFlags command Et cetera To reset a bitflag to off add up the current values of the other bitflags and include that number after the MISCFlags command MOUsesupport ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE shift ctrl alt selectup selectdown program string When specified as on the left mouse button without shift ctrl or alt keys is set to auto for both mouse button clicks and releases selectdown and selectup By default when you use this command no qualifiers are specified and
135. he scripts in NeatStuff scp see Appendix NUMerickeypad ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE Switches numeric keypad mode on or off When set the keypad transmits the characters as displayed on the key caps Otherwise the keypad transmits standard VT100 escape sequences ON character string command Waits until the specified character string is received and then performs the specified com mand Only a single command may be specified On traps remain in force until the context they belong to expires If another on trap is specified with the same character string the new on command supersedes the old one if an on command is specified with the same character string but an empty command string the trap will be removed PARity parity specification Selects the parity to be used for serial port communications Valid values are given by a sequence of three characters the number of data bits 7 or 8 the parity mode N M S E or O and the number of stop bits 1 or 2 e g 7El or 8N1 Alternatively the following shortcuts may be used None 8N1 Mark 7M1 Space 781 Even 7E1 or Odd 701 87 PASte CLIP FILE filename STRING string CANcel AUTO PREfix string DELays line delay character delay Complicated command which the Paste Menu uses to accomplish its operations Requires being used with a loop to actually paste something described in more detail along with use of subcommands earlier in t
136. here just hit alt or shift alt plus the period key on the keypad To paste the current clipboard contents to the screen you can use either alt plus the Enter key on the keypad or shift alt with Enter or the menu options in the Paste menu Alt Enter will allow you to edit the lines before they get sent Second when you hit the keypad 0 button with ALT the area currently spanned by the cursor is clipped out and put into the clipboard The area will stay highlighted Had you also held down the shift key while pressing the keypad 0 the cursor would have disappeared after clipping Technical note Alt and shift alt keypad keys used to only perform the preprogrammed func tions if the keypad mode was Application i e not Numeric Now alt and shift alt keypad do nothing if they are not programmed or redefined in the special keymap see The User Inter 135 face Text Screen Menus but if they are programmed they will perform their preprogrammed function no matter if the keypad is in numeric or application mode Finally the NeatStuff scp program will also have programmed part of the User Menu You might want to check out these programs and change them if you prefer If you want to keep all of these programs around indefinitely save your configuration after running NeatStuff and you ll never have to run it again If you would like to see how NeatStuff has programmed all these keys and options look directly at the NeatStuff scp code The S
137. hese control characters and their numerical equivalents is included Sequences that change supermode The sequences that switch between VT100 and Tektronix emulation modes were already mentioned in the previous appendix In the interest of completeness we nevertheless repeat them here In Tektronix 4010 14 emulation mode the folowing sequences are effective ESC FF Switches to Tektronix emulation and clears the Tektronix screen CSI 38 h Switches to Tektronix emulation without clearing the Tektronix screen CSI 381 Switches back to VT100 emulation ESC 0g Switches back to VT100 emulation Here CSI is the sequence ESC or when in eight bit mode the character hex 9B When 4105 4107 is selected from the Tek Emulation item of the Operation Menu several additional control characters and escape sequences when received in VT100 mode will change the supermode on reception from the host When received in Tektronix mode they only switch between the various graphics modes A list follows CAN Exit Graphic enter Alphanumeric supermode Only recognized in alpha mode FS Enter Graphic supermode in point plot mode GS Enter Graphic supermode in vector mode RS Enter Graphic supermode in incremental plot mode US Enter Graphic supermode in alpha mode ESC 0 Switch to Tektronix supermode ESC 1 Switch to Alphanumeric supermode There is an Operation Menu option Switch Screens which allows you to determi
138. his chapter PAUse i Halts execution at this point in the script and waits for a continue or goto PRELoadgraphics ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE When ON causes VLT to open the graphics screen on startup When not set VLT only opens the graphics screen when needed PREScroll number of lines Sets the maximum number of lines to be prescrolled If the currently available data indicates that the screen needs to be scrolled a number of times all scrolls up to the maximum number set with this command will be performed at once This increases scrolling speed PROGrammode ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE Switches program mode on or off REFresh Refreshes the text on the screen Sometimes useful when running on the Workbench screen RENdermode Quick Color Normal Sets the rendering mode Quick means that all text will be rendered in monochrome mode but very quickly whereas color means that all text attributes will be converted to different colors and also ANSI color sequences are recognized to an extent See also ansicolormode In Normal mode bold text will be displayed in a different color but all VT100 text attributes are displayed as intended REView review command argument Executes a review buffer command All commands consist of a single character and some of them allow an argument There may be white space between the command and the argument but there doesn t have to be
139. hus if you want a particular script such as the cursor blinker to continue running after a general script cancellation you can now make it an uninterruptable script but you can still cancel it by name if necessary To make a script uninterruptable precede the first label in the script with a For example in the case of the blinker script you would type blinker instead of just blinker to make blinker scp uninterruptable Note however that the label you must refer to then becomes blinker instead of just blinker Expiration of Schedules Schedules can cancel themselves or expire This may happen for a number of reasons First schedules can expire when there are no more commands to be executed or if an exit command is encountered in the schedule Schedules also expire whenever a fatal error is encountered that is if a command you gave VLT from the schedule is illegal nonexistent or improperly issued At this time all errors are considered fatal 65 Important script commands There is a group of VLT script commands which form the backbone of the VLT script language Among these commands are the emit command the send command the exit com mand the delay command the schedule command the goto command the trap commands the paste command and the Q command When writing schedules you will find yourself using these commands a great deal so they deserve special attention and explanation The Emit Command The e
140. if the pixels associated with the graphics display occupied one set of bitplanes and text display pixels another text and graphics would not interfere While the graphics and text are both present however the overlapping portions will be rendered in another color entirely since the computer will use the combined ON bits of both graphics and text to decide the color of the pixel If the color of the graphics and the color of the text share bitplanes bitplane 2 for example using the Mask Colors option will not solve your problem When you erase the overlaid text you will either get holes in your graphics or portions of the graphics will be rendered in a different color This is because you are erasing bitplane 2 which was being used to determine the color of both text and graphics When the text is being rendered in Color mode it uses all 59 bitplanes for text As a result Mask Colors won t work with your screen in Color mode Quick mode on the other hand uses only bitplane 0 for text while Normal mode uses only bitplanes 0 and 1 Thus if you use Quick or Normal mode you can ensure that text and graphics will not share bitplanes and Mask Colors will be a great help Note Using Quick or Normal mode only affects the text if your graphics is using bitplanes 0 and or 1 you will still get interference You also have to map all colors to color registers which use bitplane 2 Erase Mask Using Mask Colors is sufficient to prevent i
141. ile 89 Save As New File 89 Save as PostScript 89 Save As Script Commands 51 89 Save Bitmap as IFF File 51 89 Save Configuration 28 46 81 99 100 136 Save Configuration As 28 81 Save Tek Configuration 56 Save Tek Configuration As 56 Save To Current File 51 Save To New File 51 Save Print as PostScript 51 Screen to Back 37 49 50 52 Screen Type 38 59 Scrolling Speed 39 Search 48 Select Colors 38 58 59 Select Device 28 Select Fonts 38 Select No of Colors 53 Select Pan Area 52 Select Screen Type 37 53 Select Unit 28 Send Break 30 49 50 Send File 32 33 35 Serial Device Busy 30 Set Break Time 31 Set Buffer Size 31 Set Character Delay 31 Set Default Parameters 56 Set Line Delay 32 Set Line Prefix 32 Shift Tab ESC TAB 41 Special Keymap 4 39 105 Strip 8th Bit 30 Swap BS lt gt Delete 40 Switch Graphic Cursor Off 52 124 Switch Graphic Cursor On 52 Switch Screens 56 119 Tek Emulation 53 119 To Graphics 42 53 Use Duplex Stroke Font 56 View History 27 45 VLT Script 35 64 Wrap 40 XMODEM Options 53 34 multiple select file requester See re quester multiple select file N NeatStuff 87 134 to 136 numeric keypad See keypad numeric P packet size 34 palette requester See requester palette parity 3 29 30 87 89 112 133 even 29 112 113 mark 29 30 113 odd 29 113 space 29 113 paste
142. ince text that comes through Fifo Pipes bypasses the trap checking code How do you send control characters To send control characters use ARP sequences E N R X01 etc See Appendix E Can I have multiple ons Yes you can but watch out for spaghetti code see next question If I don t cancel out of date on statements as I go along my script starts going all over the place Yes scripts can become spaghetti code like you ve never seen if you don t cancel out of date ons Make it a point of style not to leave on traps hanging around unnecessarily This goes for trap commands too How do you cancel an on By specifying the same on with an empty command on foo for example or by exiting the current schedule I m having trouble with making the quotes work How do you program BEEPFunction from a script to call a script when the quoting has to be like this 97 AT Q8 A8 Q9 beepf rx address PingServer BEEP and that doesn t work It all gets misinterpreted because the two levels of double quotes just don t nest If you take advantage of VLT s ability to interpret various types of brackets and parentheses as well as quotes you won t have a problem Anything that s interpreted by VLT can be quoted in 6 or 7 ways using parentheses braces etc moreover all these symbols nest On the other hand what goes to ARexx must have single or double quotes around it while what
143. ing more information Parity is an outmoded method of error checking that is nevertheless still used by several hosts some IBM mainframes for in stance still insist on 7E1 parity In order to comprehend what parity error checking does you need a rudimentary understanding of how information is transferred between computers Bits Bytes and Nybbles When computers send information to one another they break the information up into pack ages known as bytes Bytes represent characters symbols etc Each byte is broken up into eight bits every half byte or four bits is known as a nybble A bit has only two possible settings On or OfF If you look more closely at the nature of bits and bytes you will realize that every byte is essentially an eight digit binary number while every bit is a digit of that number When information is sent without using parity all eight bits of the byte are transmitting information that is all eight bits are used to determine what the byte means When parity is used only seven bits are used to transmit information while the eighth bit the parity bit is used for parity error checking What follows is a diagram of a byte with a parity bit Byte Diagram 6543310 7 Parity Bit Information Bits Actually parity is sometimes in transmitted in a separate ninth bit in which case eight bits are used for transmitting information Even Parity In even parity there must be an even
144. ing this option This ends the list of commands available from the first menu on the text screen The Communications Menu Select Device Select Unit Normally your Amiga comes with one serial port the piece of hardware which handles the transmission of signals information to and from your Amiga from and to your host You may however choose to install extra serial ports Serial ports are run by pieces of software known as serial devices If you run each serial port with a different serial device then you will want to tell VLT which serial device to use This is done using the Select Device option You may also however run several serial ports using the same serial device When you are running several serial ports with one device the ports are assigned what are known as unit numbers in order to differentiate them typically unit numbers are assigned beginning with 0 VLT in this case will not know which serial port the serial device should talk to unless you specify a port unit number this is done using the Select Unit option Note After you select a device using the Select Device option a string requester will appear asking that you enter a unit number The default number is 0 and unless advised otherwise you should leave it that way Close Device The Close Device option closes the device currently being used as a serial port 28 Baud If you select the Baud option a submenu will ap pear that shows the choices 110 300
145. ings entirely i e delete TekPrefs dat and have VLT recalculate the best values for you When you select any of Adjust Display s four suboptions a string requester will appear enter the desired value in pixels and hit return Width and Height are specified by positive numbers Left Edge is counted inwards from the left edge of the screen with the extreme left edge of the screen set to zero pixels Bottom Edge is counted upwards from the bottom of the screen with the very bottom of the screen set to zero pixels 55 Switch Screens There are various special escape sequences used to switch VLT between VT100 and Tektronix mode Switch Screens and its suboptions allow you to adjust to some extent VLT s response to these sequences see Appendix D for more explanation of these escape sequences Ordinarily these sequences will cause VLT to switch between text and graphics screens as well as between text and graphics modes This can cause a kind of flickering however because the host sends at least one of these sequences whenever it sends text to VLT even if you re in the graphics screen VLT can be receiving text behind the scenes As a result VLT is constantly and rapidly switching between the text and graphics modes so that it can get the text and go back to the graphics screen when it is switching between screens as well you get the flicker effect By selecting one of these sequences from the submenu you cause VLT to respond to that se
146. ion Double Sized Custom changes the screen to a Custom screen that has twice the width and height of the usual custom screen You can scroll around this screen either by dragging the mouse to the screen edges currently not shown or by holding down the left Amiga key and dragging the screen using the left mouse button The Double Sized Custom option is a toggle if you select the option a second time the screen reverts to the regular screen size The option also has the keyboard abbreviation A D Note This last option only works under AmigaDOS 2 0 and then only if you have sufficient graphics memory An 8 color 1400 by 960 screen takes about half a Megabyte of graphics memory If you get a message saying the screen couldn t be opened first try changing to fewer colors Select No of Colors Select No of Colors lets you choose the number of colors which can be used to display graphics on a Custom Screen While the custom text screen is limited to eight colors the custom graphics screen can display up to 16 colors out of a palette of 4096 These colors are selected using the same palette requester that is used for changing the colors of the text screen Color Options Selecting Color Options brings up a requester which will be discussed in detail later in this chapter Close Screen Ifyou are finished displaying graphics and wish to recover the memory being used to keep the graphics screen open select the Close Screen option
147. ion a string requester will appear containing the current character delay setting Type in the desired setting and hit return optimum settings may vary from host to host and may also depend on the baud rate that you are using 31 After sending a line to the host the paste facility also waits a specified amount of time before sending the next line The Set Line Delay option allows you to specify the size of this delay in milliseconds When you select this option a string requester will appear containing the current character delay setting Type in the desired setting and hit return again optimum settings may vary from host to host and may also depend on the baud rate that you are using Set Line Prefix If you want the paste facility to send a string to the host before every line of text you can specify that string using the Set Line Prefix option When you select this option a string requester will appear the requester is blank by default Enter the desired line prefix and hit return The Transfer Menu Send File VLT supports three different kinds of file transfer The send and receive commands discussed here are general commands which behave differently depending on the file transfer protocol you have chosen e g Kermit XMODEM etc The Send File menu item is the one you choose to initiate a file transfer from the Amiga to your host What will happen after you select this menu option depends upon the choices which are checked in
148. ipt character and the Q command Note VLT uses the ARP conventions for embedding escape control linefeed etc characters in strings this is explained in Appendix E Menu Shortcuts Changing Keyboard Equivalents The third suboption Program Menu Shortcuts allows you to change the keyboard sequence which VLT considers equivalent to a given menu option or to add such an equivalent if none exists When you select this option a message window will appear asking you to select the menu option whose keyboard equivalent you would like to change After you select a menu option a requester will appear with the option s keyboard equivalent minus the ubiquitous 4 symbol shown in its string gadget Replace this character with the desired symbol and hit return To cancel this process click on cancel to turn Program Menu Shortcuts off click in the main window with the right mouse button As an example say you wanted to change the keyboard equivalent of the Screen to Back menu option to A B First you would turn Program Menu Shortcuts on then select the Screen to Back option A requester would appear you would enter the letter B in the string gadget then hit return If another menu option already had A B as its keyboard equivalent Send Break for instance a message would appear informing you that this keyboard equivalent was already in use and that if you continued the process the keyboard equivalents of the two options would be swapped
149. irst the ATDT setting in the Phone Number gadget is the standard attention sequence for most hosts if your host requires a different attention sequence you ll want to change this In any case you ll need to add a phone number after the ATDT sequence The Modem Speed set by default at 9600 baud should be replaced by the real baud rate of your modem ATZ the default Modem Init entry is the standard initializing string for Hayes style modems and the parity set by default to be 8N1 should be reset if necessary to the parity required by the host being dialed see Appendix B The next two entries Predial Cmds and Postdial Cmds should contain any commands you wish to be issued before or after 133 VLT dials the specified host while the last entry Notes allows you to jot down an explanatory note about the entry For instance if you were creating an entry meant to dial BIX you might type into Notes This is my BIX account or something to that effect Click on the Okay gadget to add the entry to your list a file requester will pop up allowing you to specify the filename under which the entry will be saved To abort the process and get rid of the entry panel click on the Cancel gadget Address City etc i Phone Number ATDT Modem Init ATZ Modem Speed paa Parity EN Predial mdsi D_i Postdiat cds E Notes AA A ee How to Select Entries to Dial and Dial Them Once you have created entries some sa
150. items three through six of this menu In any event after you have se lected this item a requester will appear and you can use it to find the file which you wish to send Once the path and filename are in their appropriate string gadgets click on OK and the file transfer will start While file transfer is going on a message box will appear and it will keep you apprised of how the transfer is proceeding Send File Receive File Protocol Kermit Options XMODEM Options External Options File Transfer Mode In general in order to send a file to or from your host a program has to be run at both ends These menu options only control what is happening at the Amiga end of the process Never select the Send File option before directing your host to prepare to receive a file If you select the Send File option first you will not be able to get to your host to direct it to receive the file In that case the file transfer will either spontaneously abort or hang up NOTE in order to abort a file transfer which has hung up i e you see nothing happening in the message window hit the ESC key or click on CANCEL ALL in the transfer status window see later In the case of Kermit an abort signal is sent each time you hit the escape key and it takes several such signals to abort a transaction After you have aborted a transaction you should hit return a few times to make sure you have either left the transfer program or at least go
151. ith modems you will often have to use 8N1 For a more comprehensive discussion of parity see Appendix B Handshake This item refers to the type of handshaking that the Amiga does with a host in order to guarantee that one computer does not transmit data too fast for the other to keep up Both the host and the terminal have buffers which in order to handle temporary overloads store the characters coming from their correspondent however if as in the case of graphics a huge amount of information is coming down the wire there has to be a way for one device to tell the other to shut up until it has finished handling what it already has gotten The Amiga provides several choices of commonly used handshaking protocols which appear in a submenu when the Handshake option is selected The most commonly used protocol is the one known as Xon Xoff which is the one you will use when dealing with most IBM and VAX mainframes as well as networks The CTS RTS protocol also known as 7Wire is for use when the Amiga and its host are connected together with a set of wires one of which is used for handshaking 7Wire X allows the user to use both the 7Wire protocol and the Xon Xoff protocol simultaneously The None option on the submenu means exactly what is says it tells VLT not to handshake at all with the host Error Checking Prior to version 5 034 VLT ignored all serial device errors Error Checking allows you to specify which serial device errors VLT
152. ix model number This sequence causes the report T followed by the number 4105 in the form of a Tektronix integer to be sent along with the usual EOL sequence ESC IQ M Request for report of available memory This sequence causes the report M to be sent followed by the number of 16 byte blocks of available memory followed by the size of the largest contiguous block again in 16 byte units in the form of two Tektronix integers plus the usual EOL sequence ESC KQ Report Errors Only a single error is kept track of and only the last occurrence The report consists of the two letters indicating the sequence causing the error a two digit error code and in the case of VLT the digits 0 severity and 1 occurred once The most likely error code is 00 not implemented Only a few commands can generate other error conditions ESC 0 Report Syntax Mode 129 This is a request for a report on which emulation mode VLT is currently in The response to this report is a sequence of characters 001 if the current mode is VT100 and 000 if the current mode is Tektronix The sequence is followed by the current EOL string Tektronix 4100 series report integers The encoding scheme of a Tektronix 4100 series report integer is different from that of a standard integer and is syntactically described by i Hill Hil2 Lol Each item enclosed in on the right hand side represents an ASCII character Hill Most sig
153. k Screen to Back The Screen to Back command Select Screen Type does different things depending upon whether the VLT text window is on the Workbench screen or a custom screen If you are on the Workbench screen then it sim ply puts the VLT text window behind all other windows on the Workbench screen If you have VLT opened on a custom screen this command will move VLT s screen in back of the Workbench screen Select Screen Type You select the Select Screen Type item in order to change the current status of the VLT text window and move it to and from the Work bench screen When you select this item a submenu ap pears with the following choices Custom Workbench Interlaced and Non Interlaced If you select Work bench then the text window will be opened on the Work bench screen In that case it inherits the number of col Number of Colors Select Colors Number of Lines Number of Columns Select Fonts Special Keymap Scrolling Speed Cursor height Rendering Mode Close Screen 37 ors and display characteristics of the Workbench screen and the Interlaced and Non Interlaced options will do nothing if Workbench is currently in Interlace mode then VLT will be in Interlaced mode if Workbench is currently in Non Interlaced mode then VLT will be in Non Interlaced mode If you select Custom then VLT opens a custom screen independent of the Workbench screen for the text window and you may then choose
154. key is pressed SERialdevice device unit none Selects a different serial device to be used Optionally select the unit number to be used If the unit number is not specified the previous unit number is assumed If the none option is specified the current serial device is closed SHIfttabesctab ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE When this option is ON the TAB key transmits esc tab to the host when the shift key is pressed at the same time Some hosts interpret this sequence as back tab When not set the shifted TAB key transmits just tab STRipbit8 ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE Switches stripping of the high order bit of data coming in through the serial port on or off This is only useful with parity settings that have 8 data bits SWApbackspacedelete ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE When ON this option swaps the functions of the backspace and delete keys This option is useful to VAX users TEKtronix MENU menunum itemnum subnum Executes the specified menu item as if it had been selected from the Tektronix window menus Note that when counting items the counting starts at zero and the dashed separation bars in the menus must be counted also TEKtronix PAN x1 y1 x2 y2 Using th arguments specify a starting and ending point The TEK PAN command will cause the ending point to wind up in the starting point s original location If x2 and or y2 are missing the
155. ks like CON d a 4d d VLTConsole c unless you are a long time VLT user who worked and or works under AmigaDOS 1 3 in which case your command string probably looks like CON S d d d d VLTConsole c The second form is only needed for those dependent on ConMan 1 3e the first form is preferred under AmigaDOS 2 04 for use with both the normal Amiga console handler and WShell 2 0 If you only want to use CNC instead of CON just change CON to CNC in the console string hit return and save the configuration If you also don t like the position and size of the console window as it comes up by default you can replace the d s in the above by x position y position width and height respectively Otherwise they will be filled in by VLT with the default values which are saved in the configuration file View History in Detail The View History option uses the History Buffer also called the review buffer The History Buffer is an area in memory that stores the text that the host sends to VLT the size of the area can be specified by the user Whenever the buffer becomes full the oldest parts of the text scroll x The console recognizes all editing keys recognized by your console handler See your console handler s documentation for further details 45 off the top i e are lost The buffer operates in a slightly different manner depending on which kind of host VLT is dealing with Line oriented hosts such as VAXes and BBSes us
156. le then you will have obtained one of two archives v1t5p576 1ha which is the VLT archive or v1tj576 1ha which is the VLT Jr archive We will only explain how to decode the VLT archive and install it as the procedure for installing VLT Jr is exactly the same Note however that some files only needed for VLT are not included in the archive for VLT Jr Decoding the Archive File 1 Change to a directory where you have at least 610K of disk space this could be rad or ram if you have a great deal of memory Use the info command to find out how much space you have on a given device see your Amiga manual for details 2 Next let us suppose for the sake of convenience that the archive file v1t5p576 1ha is on a floppy disk in df0 3 Go to your CLI and type lha x a x df0 vlt5p576 1ha Please do not omit either the x a or x qualifiers in this command Installing VLT on a Hard Disk After de archiving all these files you should see from the Workbench a drawer called VLT For the sake of simplicity let s say that you want to install VLT on the work partition of your hard disk Double click on the little disk icon labeled work to open a work window then grab the VLT drawer icon with your mouse and drag it into the work window Your Amiga will automatically copy the VLT directory along with its subdirectories and their contents into work If you don t like using the mouse issue the following commands in the CLI
157. lipboard contents and stuffs it into VLT s internal buffer In a similar fashion the command paste file work foo bar txt tells VLT to retrieve the contents of work foo bar txt and to put it in VLT s internal buffer while the command paste string This is a test causes VLT to put the words This is a test into the internal buffer Once we have something in the internal buffer we need to paste it into VLT s input stream The paste command by itself can only send a single line at most if used with character delays it will send only one character at a time This is why a loop is needed to accomplish the full paste operation so that your script can loop over the buffer contents until everything has been sent to the host Such a loop can be created automatically by using the command paste AUTO which causes your program to loop until everything has been pasted You can achieve the same _ effect by using the following code clipprog l paste clip 1 paste if not clip exit goto 1 As you can see this clipprog script uses the if command if anything is left in the internal buffer the loop continues otherwise the program exits In this context you can also use the edit subcommand The paste edit command acts similarly to paste except that it brings up a string requester which allows you to edit a line of text before it is actually pasted into VLT s input stream You can also use the command paste edit auto which al
158. lity to cancel a schedule from inside another schedule If we ran the blinker schedule for instance from a script file then from the VLT console window and then from WShell we would really be running three separate independent copies of the blinker schedule All of these blinker schedules have the same name but are nevertheless considered separate schedules by VLT When you use the cancel command from inside a schedule it will only abort other schedules never the schedule that the cancel command is issued from We can therefore ensure that only one copy of the blinker schedule is running at any given time by modifying the schedule as shown below This is the file blinker scp cancel blinker blinker cursorheight 0 delay 0 3 cursorheight 1 delay 0 3 goto blinker Note that this particular copy of blinker was the blinker scp schedule that is the copy of blinker run from the script file 1f we wanted to run blinker from the console window or WShell and still ensure that only one copy of blinker was running we would have to add the cancel blinker command to the schedule that we ran from there A new convention valid as of VLT version 5 045 allows you to create an uninterruptable script Such a script cannot be cancelled by selecting Abort VLT Scripts or by issuing the cancel all script command An uninterruptable script can however be canceled if specified by name it is only protected from nonspecific script cancellations T
159. lows you to send an entire file etc to the host while editing it a line at a time Only one paste operation can be active at a time and you can abort a paste operation by issuing the command paste cancel This command empties and deallocates the current internal buffer and indirectly causes any paste operation currently in progress to abort The paste command has two more subcommands prefix and delays Issuing the command paste prefix followed by a string will cause VLT to preface whatever you are pasting with 70 that string For example if you were sending a list of female nobility and you wanted every line of the file you were pasting prefaced by the word Lady you would type Paste prefix Lady Paste file kingdom nobles txt Paste auto Issuing the command paste delays followed by a specified line delay and then optionally a specified character delay in milliseconds allows you to choose the amount of time VLT takes between pasting lines and between pasting characters For example the command paste delays 300 40 would cause VLT to delay 300 milliseconds after pasting each line and 40 milliseconds after pasting each character The Command An sign followed by a scriptname such as blinker scp tells VLT to run the specified script If the sign prefaces a script with a different file extension such as blinker vlt or blinker rexx VLT runs the script as a REXX program Normally when VLT starts up a REXX program
160. ments must be given in the order specified above so for example you cannot omit leftedge if you wish to specify topedge VLT will check to see if the dimensions given are feasible but only if the main window is already open If the window size is set while the window is closed subsequent opening of the window may not work if the sizes are too large VLT will try to open the window again probably with the standard 640 by 200 sizes The size is remembered if you close and then reopen the window or if you switch to a custom screen and then back to the Workbench during the same session Called with the open subcommand this command activates VLT s VT100 screen but has no effect if the VT100 screen is already active Called with the close subcommand this command closes down VLT s screen without clearing it When the window is reopened the text that used to be there will still be there WORkbenchcolors ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE When this option is ON uses the Workbench colors rather than the saved custom screen colors Note that this command does not change the pen assignments see the COLOR com mand WRAP ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE Switches wrapping of long lines on or off When set lines are broken at the current maximum column number and the remainder is displayed on the next line When off lines are not wrapped and the cursor remains at the maximum column accesible while overwriting the last
161. mit command tells VLT to display a character string on the screen at the current cursor position The character string is not sent to the host Enclose the character string with quotes or some other string delimiter brackets parentheses etc This command is useful when you want your program to give a piece of information to the user without telling the host For instance the command emit Please tell me what to do will result in your screen showing Please tell me what to do If you issue the command emit raw some string the string will not be parsed for ARP style escape sequences and will be displayed as is Otherwise VLT will parse the string before displaying it The Send Command The send command sends a character string to the host For instance the command send gone is equivalent to your typing gone in the command line If you issue the command send raw character string the string will not be parsed for ARP style escape sequences before it is sent to the host The Exit Command The exit command tells VLT to exit the current schedule in other words the exit command tells VLT to cancel the script that the exit command was issued from The command exit VLT will cause VLT to shut down completely while the command exit next script will tell VLT to execute the specified schedule after exiting the current one Consider the command exit blinker scp issued from the schedule hello Hello will be cancelled and blinker scp will
162. mode and bypass condition FS Set point plot mode ESC FS Set point plot mode GS Set vector mode ESC GS _ Set vector mode RS Set incremental plot mode ESC RS Set incremental plot mode US Set alpha mode ESC US Set alpha mode ESC DEL Introduce escape sequence ESC Set normal vector pattern 1111111111111111 ESC a Set normal vector pattern 1010101010101010 ESC b Set normal vector pattern 1111101011111010 ESC e Set normal vector pattern 1110111011101110 ESC d Set normal vector pattern 1111110011111100 ESC e Set normal vector pattern 1111111101010101 ESC f Set normal vector pattern 1111111100111100 ESC g Set normal vector pattern 1111000011110000 ESC h Set bold vector pattern 1111111111111111 ESC i Set bold vector pattern 1010101010101010 ESC j Set bold vector pattern 1111101011111010 ESC k Set bold vector pattern 1110111011101110 ESC 1 Set bold vector pattern 1111110011111100 ESC m Set bold vector pattern 1111111101010101 ESC n Set bold vector pattern 1111111100111100 ESC o Set bold vector pattern 1111000011110000 ESC Low Y coordinate Notes 1 For a description of the report to the host see the section on reports to the host 2 3 This sequence is not currently implemented In 4105 4107 emulation CR is ignored in vector marker mode 122 4 After vector mode is entered a move will be executed to the vector that follow
163. monstration of the extract command s powers refer to the extracttest rexx program that comes with VLT an ARexx program that extracts all the VLT fields it possibly can By studying the program and running through the output it generates you should get a pretty good picture of the extract command s range which includes the programs associated with all function keys the settings for all program options all outstanding schedules etc Extract the color fields from VLT x address VLT extract This is the only command in this program that is sent to VLT do j 0 to VLT color 1 VLT color is of subfields b color j b will be color j say overlay b copies 30 VLT b prints contents of VLT b to screen T4 end Caic r ae E e ee ee A AA A The RX Command The rx command is a VLT script command that tells VLT to submit a specific command to ARexx If the rx command is issued with the synchronous option specified the program will wait until the ARexx command is completed before continuing You will find that the rx command is useful with traps such as the on trap when you want the on command string to be an ARexx command For example the command on Ready address MYPORT ready won t work even if issued from ARexx using the Address VLT command This is because the entire command is sent to VLT to be executed VLT will set up the on trap but will not be able to re
164. mple entries are included with the distribution you can select them for dialing using a multiple select file requester Since the file requester is multiple select you can select more than one entry to be dialed a list of entries to be dialed will be created and stored for later reference When you ve selected an entry or entries you can click on Start Dialing Sequence The facility dials the first entry in the list of entries to be dialed then tries to establish a connection with whatever is on the other end If it succeeds the facility will wait allowing you to work with whatever host you have just dialed Once you have finished your session with a host you can select Resume Dialing Sequence to go on to the next entry in the list If on the other hand the facility fails to make a connection it will continue on to the next entry on the list and try all entries until a connection is established The looping will continue until the facility has successfully made all connections on the list once or until you click on the Abort Dialing Sequence button A note of caution for the user make sure that all the VLTPhone vlt and rexx programs are copied to somewhere on VLT s search path The NeatStuff Script The script NeatStuff scp comes with VLT and resides in the scp directory Among other things it programs the mouse to provide cut and paste facilities To see how it works run x Warning the multiple select feature works only under Ami
165. n Ansi Color mode special color escape sequences for foreground and background colors are recognized Ansi Color mode unlike the other three options is not a mode in and of itself rather it is an optional addition to Color mode Close Screen The Close Screen option closes down VLT s screen checking before it does so that the screen is not locked While the screen is closed VLT will continue to interpret incoming data the review buffer is updated and escape sequences from the host including those containing Amiga commands will continue to work normally As a result if you reopen the screen at a later time you will see the most recent data received by VLT 39 To reopen the screen simply run VLT again the screen will open with the message that VLT is already there or send an ARexx message with the command window open which opens VLT s screen again The Operation Menu The Operation Menu controls some of the terminal s display characteristics as well as the way in which keys on the keypad behave It also controls whether you get an audible or visual beep Wrap Wrap controls whether or not the terminal automatically handles wrapping at the end of a line Wrapping text is needed when a word runs over the end of a line instead of ignoring all further characters VLT will start on a new line The default setting is off as your host usually takes care of this for you Note With Wrap set to be on you can wrap back to the end of
166. n select it it s much easier to work with GIN Report Style To explain what the GIN A Report Style option does we first need to explain what cursor reports are Suppose that a mainframe application has brought up the cross hairs i e the Tek Emulation graphics cursor and you are expected to position the GIN Report Style cursor over some point on the screen and then hit a key The mode fish you are currently in is called the Report EOL String graphics input GIN mode and the cursor report is Bypass Cancel Character the information that is sent back to the mainframe af ter you hit a key In general this information consists of the key which you hit the location of the cursor on Incremental Mode Step the screen i e its XY coordinates and then some end of report sequence to tell the mainframe that you have completed the operation Switch Screens Mouse Report Character Adjust Display Size The cursor report uses the units of the Tektronix XY Use Duplex Stroke Font coordinate system When the GIN Report Style op tion is selected a submenu with two options will ap Set Default Parameters pear 4010 and Extended Select the 4010 report op tion when you are using a 1024 by 1024 coordinate system the Extended report option when you are us Save Tek Configuration As ing a 4096 by 4096 coordinate system Note Tektroniz 4105 s use 4010 reports Report EOL String Sometimes the host will ask questions of VLT such a
167. n release up events will be treated the same way as the preceding left mousebutton down press That is if you press the mouse button down while ctrl is also pressed and then let go of the ctrl button before releasing the mouse button VLT will still execute the program that went along with the left mousebutton ctrl program This completes our discussion of the menu options associated with the text screen Now we turn to a discussion of the menu options which are associated with the graphics screen 50 Graphics Screen Menus When you are on the graphics screen and hold down the right mouse button a menu bar appears showing the names of six menus In this section of the manual we will provide a fairly non technical discussion of the items appearing in each of the menus A technical discussion of the Tektronix emulation provided by VLT appears in Appendix D The Image Menu Save To Current File Save To New File The Save To Current File and Save To New File options are concerned with saving Save To Current File the currently displayed picture as vector graph ics to either an archive file you have already cho Save To New File sen or a new archive file of your choice Save to New File brings up a file requester in order to get the name of the graphics file that you wish to Quit Archive save Load From Archive Load From Archive allows you to load a graphics file that had been saved to an archive and view it on the graphics Saye
168. nction key or menu to run this script The phonebook will for the most part install itself and a small panel with several gadgets will appear in one corner of the screen with the following options Select VLT PhoneBook Create PhoneBook Entry Modify Phonebook Entry Delete PhoneBook Entry Show PhoneBook Entry Select Entries to Dial Start Dialing Sequence Resume Dialing Sequence Cancel Dialing Sequence Click on the first option Select VLT PhoneBook before trying to use any of the other options A directory requester will appear asking you if you want to assign the logical device name VLTPhoneBook to a particular location Say that you do and assign it to the phonebook directory that you created during installation Once this is accomplished you can create entries modify them delete them and view them You can invoke these options multiple times which means that you could have several entries open for viewing and several entries in the process of creation open at the same time How to Create A Phonebook Entry When you click on the Create Entry gadget a new panel will appear as shown on the following page This panel follows the standard entry format for the phonebook facility The Name Address and City gadgets are fairly self explanatory since they simply provide space for the information you would put in an ordinary phonebook entry Some of the other gadgets however contain default settings that need explanation F
169. nd VAXLOGON SCP If you type RUN VLT I IBM INIT IBMLOGON SCP VLT will setup according to the defaults specified in the file IBM INIT and then execute the logon sequence specified in the script file IBMLOGON SCP If on the other hand you type RUN VLT I VAX INIT VAXLOGON SCP it will set up the defaults specified in VAX INIT and run the logon procedure specified in VAX LOGON SCP AmigaDOS 2 0 users and 1 3 users who own WShell or ARPShell can add the commands E IBMVLT VLT I IBM INIT IBMLOGON SCP and ALIAS VAXVLT VLT I VAX INIT VAXLOGON SCP to their startup sequences and save themselves a lot of typing 19 Starting Up VLT From the Workbench To start up VLT from the Workbench double click on the appropriate disk icon to double click move your mouse cursor over the icon and quickly click the left mouse button twice This will cause a window to open in this window you will find a VLT drawer icon Double click on this icon too Another window will appear this one containing the VET program icon Double click on the program icon At this point a clock will appear unless you have the 1 3 operating system to tell you that the program is loading In a few moments the appearance of your screen will change dramatically everything will disappear because you are now under the control of the terminal program It is possible from the Workbench to have VLT execute script files at startup time For those of you who are
170. nd on the Amiga This only works of course if you re using VLT not VLTjr and you have switched Graphics Lock off see the Graphics Menu later on To preview a file hook up to the CLI and issue the command type filename VLT will automatically switch you to the graphics screen and begin drawing the picture encoded by the Tektronix file Note Any files that you have saved from VLT in graphics mode are not Tektroniz files but an internal binary form You can however still view such files using the Load From Archive option of the Image Menu You can also use Fifo Pipes to gain access to a remote Amiga Here s how to go about it 1 Take the two Amigas and hook the serial ports together using a null modem Use the CLI hookup procedure outlined earlier on the remote Amiga substituting VLTR remote for VLTL 2 Now run a normal VLT on the local Amiga but use no echo and set Display LF as CR LF to be on Do not close the serial device You should now sce the CLI prompt on your local Amiga but the CLI will be running on the remote Amiga This procedure will also work if you hook up to the remote Amiga with a modem VLT as a BBS Of course it is a little dangerous to let someone hook up to the CLI of your Amiga from their Amiga because such a person could do whatever he or she liked to your system including 43 erasing all your files So included with VLT is a little BBS program FifoBBS rexx which along with VL
171. ne whether a given escape sequence will cause VLT to switch both modes and screens or only modes This menu option has an entire set of suboptions with each suboption representing a specific escape sequence A list of these correspondences follows here Text to Graphics Select Code ESC 0 Erase Screen ESC FF Enter GIN ESC SUB DEC enter 401X CSI 238h FS GS RS US FS GS RS US Graphics to Text Select Code ESC 1 DEC exit 401X CSI 381 Special ANSI ESC 0g Cancel CAN 119 Alpha mode Once the emulation is in alpha mode it will print incoming printable characters to the graphics window If the screen is interlaced a 80 column by 35 line format will be used While it is true that the Tektronix 4010 14 standard calls for 74 columns Tektronix 4105 calls for 80 hence VLT uses the latter If the screen is not interlaced only 24 lines can be displayed The emulation faithfully mimics the two column mode of 4010 14 compatible terminals when the bottom of the screen is reached the left margin is changed to the center of the screen and printout resumes at the top of the screen obeying the new margin When a line extends beyond the virtual graphics screen it is wrapped around to the next line In addition to the printable characters the following control characters and escape sequences are recognized ESC Introduce escape sequence ESC NUL Same as ESC ESC ESC Same as ESC ESC ENQ
172. ng the Open Console item opens a console window at the bottom of the screen This console functions in two ways First ordinary text typed in the console window will be sent through VLT to the host as a command after you hit return This is useful because VLT itself when you are logged on to a mainframe or network provides only those command line features present on the host The console window however acts as an intermediary giving the user the advantages of an AMIGA CLI window even when issuing commands to the host More specifically the console window provides command history and editing which means that the user using the up arrow and down arrow keys can range through the commands recently entered in the CLI until he finds the command he wants to use The user can then using the right and 44 left arrow keys the delete key and the backspace key edit the command Command history and editing are particularly advantageous when the user wants to issue a series of commands which are basically alike except for one or two small differences Using the up arrow key the user can bring the most recent command to the screen modify it and hit return without having to type the entire command again The console window has a second usage by prefixing the command with the VLT key script character which defaults to the user can write in the console short VLT scripts that will be executed when he or she hits return see Writing Scripts
173. nificant 6 bits of integer plus 32 Bit 7 parity HiI2 Middle 6 bits of integer plus 32 Bit 7 parity Lol Least significant 4 bits of integer Bit 4 sign bit When set the integer is positive Bit 7 parity Notice that all three parts of the integer are always sent Notice also that decoding consists of subtracting 32 from the first two characters shifting the first by 6 adding the second shifting the result by 4 and adding the third after masking out the sign bit If the sign bit is set the sign of the result is positive Table of ASCII control characters The following is a table of the first 33 ASCII characters dec hex oct name ctrl equivalent 0 0 0 NUL ctrl O 1 1 1 SOH ctrl A 2 2 2 STX ctrl B 3 3 3 ETX ctrl C 4 4 4 EOT ctrl D 5 5 5 ENQ ctrl E 6 6 6 ACK ctrl F 7 7 7 BEL ctrl G 8 8 10 BS ctrl H 9 9 11 HT ctrl I 10 A 12 LF ctrl J 11 B 13 VT ctrl K 12 C 14 FF ctrl L 13 D 15 CR ctrl M 14 E 16 SO ctrl N 15 F 17 SI ctrl O 130 131 ctrl P ctrl Q ctrl R ctrl S ctrl T ctrl U ctrl V ctrl W ctrl X ctrl Y ctrl Z ctrl ctrl A ctrl ctrl ctrl space Appendix E ARP Escape Sequences This appendix documents ARP escape sequences that is escape sequences parsed using the ARP escape parser ARP escape sequences as observed before are supported by VLT they can be especially useful when you ar
174. nity to edit each line Paste from File before it is sent When you select this option a string requester will appear containing the first line of text in Edit Paste File the clipboard Edit the line to your satisfaction then hit _ return Another string requester will appear containing the next line of text You can abort this process at any Set Character Delay time by clicking on the Cancel button of one of the string requesters or by selecting the Cancel Paste option Cancel Paste Set Line Delay Set Line Prefix Paste from File The Paste from File option sends the contents of a specified file to VLT and thence to the host When you select this option VLT will bring up a file requester Select the file that you want pasted and click on the Okay button or click on Cancel to abort the process You can abort the process at any time by selecting the Cancel Paste option Edit Paste File The Edit Paste File option resembles Paste from File except that it gives you the opportunity to edit each line before it is sent see the Edit Paste Clipboard option Cancel Paste Selecting the Cancel Paste option aborts the current paste operation Set Character Delay Set Line Delay After sending a character to the host the paste facility will wait a specified amount of time before sending the next character The Set Character Delay option allows you to set the size of the delay in milliseconds When you select this opt
175. not very useful for error checking They are even more outmoded than the even and odd parities and despite the fact that VLT supports the mark and space parities you will rarely have occasion to use them Mark parity always sets the parity bit to be On while space parity always sets the parity bit to be Off There is a simple reason why these parities make such poor error checkers when compared to the even and odd parities an error only occasionally changes the setting of the parity bit while an error will usually change the total number of On or Off bits in a byte Stop Bits After a byte is sent either one or two stop bits will be sent as well Stop bits are blank bits which do not belong to a byte They merely indicate that one byte has ended and another byte is about to begin Parity Abbreviations You will use the submenu generated by the Parity option of the Communications Menu to select which parity you are going to use The various parities are indicated by abbreviations Each abbreviation consists of three characters a number a letter and another number The lefthand number stands for the number of bits that are being used to transmit information For no parity options this number will be eight for most parity options this number will be seven for the parity options which transmit parity through a ninth bit this number will be eight The letter in the middle stands for the type of parity being used N stands for Normal or no
176. ns using the N option If you want to open a twenty sixth session use the N option and give the last session a name of your own devising Frankly though it s surprising you have enough memory to run that many sessions of VLT is there any reason for having twenty five sessions of VLT running simultaneously 106 6 Appendices Appendix A The file requester Using the Requester The file requester will look something like the picture below Capture File Names graphmen scalecon rough rough scalecon h o9 en Drw CTi pboards Dru T Every Amiga ficasine consists of two parts first the path which specifies t the device direc tory subdir subdir that a file resides in and second the file s name Hence there are files like SYS DEVS KEYMAPS USA1 or SYS NOBLES KNIGHTS IVANHOE In the first case the path is SYS DEVS KEYMAPS and the filename is USA1 In the second case the path is SYS NOBLES KNIGHTS and the filename is IVANHOE The two rectangular string gadgets at the bottom of the file requester allow you to specify the path and filename of a given file The string gadget wherein you type the path designation is labelled drawer in this case Sree refers to the file s entire path although this same term is used differently in other contexts The second string gadget into which the file s name is typed is labelled file If you click on the drawer gadget with your mouse you can specify the path
177. nsions to Tektronix 4107 About the only unsupported feature is the dialog area and all commands associated with it A few highlights of the supported features area fills panels including all 16 Tek style textures and 125 dithering patterns scaled and rotated 90 180 270 degrees fonts using strokefont libraries almost full support of Tek style pixel operations bitmaps and full support for the abovementioned features in the PostScript output Pictures are captured and can be saved to disk and reviewed later They can be saved as IFF bitmap files or sent to the printer as screen dumps They can also be stored as encapsulated PostScript files and sent to the printer as such The zoom and pan features allow enlargement of any part of the screen while retaining the full resolution inherent in the graphics primitives sent to the terminal This appendix describes the command sequences that the Tektronix emulator will respond to when they are received from the host In the first section the sequences are described that change 118 the supermode The ensuing sections describe respectively the sequences that are recognized in alpha mode vector and point plot mode incremental plot mode and GIN mode A section about the supported Tektronix 4105 sequences follows The final section describes the various reports to the host In the following sections most control characters will be referred to by their ASCII name Therefore a table of t
178. nt attributes Draw dark vectors erasing previously drawn graphics For some of the more frequently used commands we will now give a little more detail ESC LT string Display the Tektronix 4100 series character string string at the current position A 4100 series character string starts with a Tektronix 4100 series integer explained below indicating the length of the string followed by the string itself as printable ASCII charac ters ESC ML index Switch to color index index is a Tektronix 4100 series style integer in the range 0 through 15 ESC MV pattern Switch to pattern pattern pattern is a Tektronix 4100 series style integer The line patterns are the same as those in vector mode see there in the same sequence The pattern number is in the range 15 through 124 ESC TG surface colormap Change the color values Hues lightnesses and intensities of the ESC WLO new colors are specified in colormap The surface number has to be the integer 1 and the colormap is a standard 4100 series array of integers in the sequence color index hue lightness saturation next color index as explained below Private sequence When this sequence is sent the emulation will open a new capture file Tektronix 4100 series standard integers The encoding scheme of a standard Tektronix 4100 series integer is syntactically described by i Hil Hil Lol 1
179. nterference when text and graphics overlap and the text is then erased When the graphics is erased however Mask Colors is not sufficient Although text and graphics while Mask Colors is on will not interfere when one is drawn over the other portions of the text will be erased when the graphics is erased As a result you also have to set the Erase Mask before erasing overlaid or underlaid graphics Setting the Erase Mask tells VLT to only erase a pixel in specified bitplanes You specify these bitplanes by giving Erase Mask a color register number such as 4 VLT converts this number into the binary number 100 it then observes that this number has a one in the 22 place This tells VLT that you want it only to erase in bitplane 2 All other bitplanes will remain untouched If graphics is rendered in color register 4 while text is rendered in color register 2 then to keep VLT from erasing the text underneath the graphics you set your erase mask to be 4 VLT will erase bitplane 2 only and leave bitplane 1 alone Note the reason that you don t need to reset the Erase Mask when the tezt is erased is that VET automatically masks the erasure of text for you The Use and Cancel Gadgets The Use and Cancel gadgets at the bottom of the color options requester behave as you might expect clicking on the Use gadget tells VLT to use the modifications that you have made while clicking on the Cancel gadget aborts the entire process just as clicking on
180. o different keystrokes before sending them back to VLT and your host When is this useful Well suppose there s a character on your keyboard that your host misinterprets as a logoff command You might want to make sure that you could never type that character by mistake To do this you would WEDGE all keystrokes have a program check the incoming keystrokes for the logoff character and then if the logoff character was found send something else to VLT in the logoff character s place When a keystroke is intercepted and sent as a packet to a specified port it is sent in the form KEYSTROKE code qualifier iaddress character where code and qualifier numbers indicate which key was pressed and whether a ctrl shift or alt key was pressed in conjunction with it The character specification is simply the character associated with the key while the iaddress specification keeps a history of previous keystrokes The address specification was added as of VLT version 5 034 the change is unfortunately non compatible with previous versions so when you switch to version 5 034 any programs you have which use the WEDGE command must be modified to deal with the address specification On the next page is a sample program which shows how keystrokes can be intercepted and altered using the WEDGE command Note that since you are using ports you will want to use an ARexx macro to WEDGE keystrokes q AA O AAA ee ah Example program to int
181. o numbers and the computers can send these numbers back and forth Sometimes the host will tell the graphics screen set color register 0 to so much red so much blue so much green and so on down the line You may not mind this but then again you may have just set your colors to something you like and not want the host to interfere Setting Lock Colors to be on will tell VLT to ignore the host s directions to reset your colors Mask Colors There is as we mentioned a special screen type which can be selected using the Screen Type option on the graphics Screen Menu When you choose Main VLT Screen as your screen type you are returned to the text screen where the present graphics display is redrawn and all subsequent graphics displays are drawn as well Choosing this option creates a screen where you can work with both graphics and text at the same time There are however drawbacks If you input or receive text that goes over your graphics display an overlay so to speak the text and graphics will interfere As a result of this interference whenever you erase either text or graphics you will discover that the display now has holes in it The Mask Colors option provides a partial solution to this problem Selecting this option to be ON causes VLT to draw pixels of a particular color only in those bitplanes in which the pixel s bits should be ON it leaves those bitplanes where the pixel s bits are OFF alone This means that
182. odes depending upon what the mainframe is doing Either you type a character at the keyboard and the terminal puts it up on the screen echos it and sends it to the mainframe simultaneously or the terminal sends the character to the mainframe and the mainframe sends back a signal telling the terminal what to put up on the screen The first alternative is called local echo the second remote echo When you have selected the Off option in the submenu you will immediately recognize that you have made the wrong choice if none of your commands appear on screen If you have selected the On option on the other hand you will know that you have made the wrong choice if everything you type appears doubled on the screen As you will see by examining the submenu there are alternative keyboard commands for turning local echo on and off Strip 8th Bit Strip 8th Bit is used when you are dealing with bulletin boards or networks that use something known as mark parity These networks tend not to care whether the stuff that you send them has mark parity or not your Amiga on the other does care that everything the network sends you has mark parity because unless VLT is set for mark parity anything sent to it with mark parity will seem like garbage The reason this command is called Strip 8th Bit is that information is sent back and forth between the terminal and host computers in sets of eight bits one of which is used for parity when you are using parity
183. of a file you want to create or give VLT the path of an already existing file If you now hit the return key the names of all the files already stored in that path will appear in the region above the drawer and file gadgets If there x subdir subdirectory t Usually the terms drawer and directory are basically synonymous 109 are a sizeable number of files in this directory then it will take a few moments for the names of all files to be loaded If there are many files not all names will be visible at once however you can view them all by scrolling through the list of names You scroll through the list using the scroll bar at the right hand side of the requester which works like a rectangular knob sliding in a track To use it place your mouse over the rectangular knob hold down the left mouse button this grabs the knob and slide your mouse up or down As you do this the list of file names in the directory will be sorted alphabetically and will scroll past The up and down arrow gadgets beneath the scroll bar allow you to scroll in smaller increments than the scroll bar does the up arrow gadget moves you backwards in the list while the down arrow gadget moves you forward Instead of typing the desired filename into the file gadget you can take a shortcut namely move your mouse cursor over the filename you wish to select and click your left mouse button once The name will automatically appear in the file gadget Then to indicate that
184. ogram you should obtain it since VLT is really designed to function in conjunction with ARexx This product can be ordered from William S Hawes P O Box 308 Maynard MA 01754 508 568 8695 Although VLT will run perfectly well without ARexx the full scripting capabilities will not be available to you unless you are operating within the environment created by this program FastFonts and VLT If you are still running under AmigaDOS 1 3 you should also run FF FastFonts which comes with the Amiga 1 3 operating system FastFonts allows you to replace the system font with a more attractive font that speeds up the writing of text to the screen by a significant amount thus making for much smoother terminal operation in fact FastFonts are even nicer than some 2 0 fonts Unfortunately the 1 3 operating system only includes the FastFonts FF program not the fonts themselves At one time the fonts could be purchased as part of the program TxEd Plus but this program is no longer available At SLAC the fonts are part of the TxEd Site License so you can still get them VLT Jr There is a version of VLT known as VLT Jr VLT Jr is basically the same as VLT except that it doesn t do Tektronix emulation that is it doesn t handle graphics In return it is about 50 kilobytes smaller which is an advantage for those with limited memory The VLT Manual VLT has changed a great deal since it was first developed and even experienced us
185. olumns to be displayed using the Number of Columns option of the Screen Menu or increase the overscan for your Workbench see your Amiga documentation A Console problem whenever I select Open Console I get this error message Menu Unable to open con S 0 345 640 55 VLTConsole c If you re an AmigaDOS 1 3 user your console window relies on either Bill Hawes s ConMan version 1 3 or his WShell 2 0 Without ConMan or WShell 2 0 you won t be able to open the console window on VLT s custom screen Under AmigaDOS 2 04 you can use the console handler that comes with the system so if you re having difficulties your problem comes from a different source When you use the 2 0 console handler instead of ConMan VLT isn t 103 Q30 A30 Q31 A31 Q32 A32 Q33 A33 Q34 A34 Q35 happy with the S in the console string Instead you should use the following console string con 0 345 640 55 VLTConsole CLose Where are the Console Window menus that you mentioned earlier I can t find them You re an AmigaDOS 1 3 user right Or a 2 0 user who doesn t have WShell 2 0 For the console menus to work you need both the 2 0 operating system and WShell 2 0 How do I reopen VLT s main screen once I ve closed it The first method is to rerun VLT This causes VLT to reopen the screen and put up the famous message But I m already here You can also send VLT an ARexx message such as window op
186. ones although you may find some operations are slightly more difficult to accomplish from ARexx On the other hand there are operations you can only do from ARexx so it balances out 99 Q13 A13 Q14 Al4 Usually when I use the command I can get everything to work but if the file I want to execute lives in ram or if the filename has spaces in it VLT returns an error message Due to a technical problem with the AREXX port you cannot use the command if the name of your script file or the directory device in which it lives has one or more spaces I defined a short script that just blinked the cursor and bound it to A 1 Now when I hit A 1 a few dozen times the cursor goes wild and VLT s response gets jerky It is definitely true that VLT gets jerky when you have a few dozen scripts running around Have you tried Abort All Scripts You probably shouldn t have that many scripts running at the same time Directory Dilemmas Q15 Whenever I start up VLT from the CLI I would like its default directory to be the directory A15 Q16 A16 Q17 A17 Tm currently in In my case however VLT always comes up in sys exam ple How do I fix this You have probably saved your configuration after explicitly changing your current directory using the Change Directory menu option To fix it select Change Directory again remove all text from the string gadget of the requester and click on Okay Then selec
187. option is selected but the ANSI Color option is not selected two of the ANSI sequences are used for the following purposes Pa Color mode operation effect 40 Set normal rendition color 1 restore saved mode 41 Set normal rendition color 1 save mode set color mode on The latter two sequences allow you while using the terminal in Quick rendition mode to temporarily switch to Color rendition and then return to the saved settings These two sequences are not ANSI compatible but are used at SLAC by the IBM mainframe There are two escape sequences which let you set the number of lines on the screen One sequence has the form CSI P Pa Pa Pap where only Pa is significant since it represents the number of lines that the screen should be set to The second sequence has the form CSI Pi Pop where P is the number of columns and P the number of rows The VT220 escape sequences CSI 5i and CSI 4i are also supported All incoming characters between these two sequences are redirected to prt in accordance with the VT220 standard The display is not updated during that time The feature is cancelled by the Clear Screen option of the Screen Menu and by any option that closes the serial device Control sequences that start with the characters ESC are intercepted and disposed of in _ order to provide support for applications that expect a Modgraph terminal Such sequences are not effective but will also not cause visible traces on the di
188. orks When the program below is run VLT returns the message Timeout An ARexx macro that shows how the fault command and the RC variable can be used together Address VLT delay 1 fault RC say VLT Error Upon seeing Address VLT ARexx knew that it should send all unfamiliar commands to VLT First the unfamiliar command delay 1 was sent to VLT VLT ran a schedule with only that command in it The schedule timed out and the ARexx standard error code RC was set to 1 Then ARexx read the command fault RC and changed RC to 1 before sending the line to VLT VLT upon receiving the command fault 1 put the error message belonging to error 1 Timeout in the special VLT variable VLT Error VLT then informed ARexx of VLT Error s existence location and contents ARexx then executed the last command say VLT Error and printed the word Timeout on the screen Using the RC Variable with Timeouts Using the RC variable with the fault command is very advantageous when you are debugging a macro script and want to understand the error codes that VLT is returning to you As it so happens the RC variable by itself is extremely useful when you are dealing with timed commands and want to know if the command has timed out Suppose we want to wait for the host to send the string Ready Well we can just type in WShell 1 Address VLT wait Ready What if however the host was broken and the word Ready never appeared In that case you
189. ow Even though the text on the original graphics file sent by Computer A was blue Computer B will show the text in bright yellow Computer B doesn t know that it has drawn the text what we would consider to be the wrong color as far as it is concerned it s drawn everything in the right colors Pixels smallest picture element make up the Amiga screen display The number of pixels on a screen varies depending on the resolution of the display In order to display color the Amiga uses what is referred to as bitmapped graphics Every screen display consists of a number of bitplanes one be hind the other Each pixel on the display that we see has a pixel component or bit in each bitplane Bitplanes are numbered beginning with 0 0 1 2 and the num ber of bitplanes used to make up a display varies The color of a particular pixel in a display is determined by the state of the corresponding bits in each bitplane For instance take the pixel in the display to the right Its component bit in bitplane 0 is off while its component bits in bitplanes 1 and 2 are on The Amiga then takes the component bits and their status Off or On and combines them into a single binary number Since the bit in bitplane 0 is off the number in the 2 s place is zero since the bits in bitplanes 1 and 2 are on the number in the 2 s bitplane 0 57 place and the 2 s place are both one The resultant binary number is the number 110
190. ows you to save the picture currently on screen as a file of VLT script commands An ARexx program called VLT2Pro vec pvrx is provided with VLT that can translate these script commands into Provector ARexx instructions Provector is a drawing program for the Amiga Not all of the VLT script commands are supported by VLT2Provec pvrx but the most usual things lines colors fills are Start it from Provector using Rexxecute A requester will come up asking you for the VLT file name to import into Provector 51 The Zoom Pan Menu Select Zoom Area VLT supports true zoom This means that when you have downloaded a picture to the graph ics screen you can magnify any section of that picture to an arbitrary degree without losing the resolution that was present in the original picture To select the area to be magnified first select this option then position the cursor at the upper left hand corner of the region of interest and hold down the left mouse button When you move the mouse down and to the right a rectangle will appear adjust the rectangle until it outlines the desired zoom area then release the left mouse button Select Zoom Area A Z Select Pan Area A P a R Reset Zoom Pan Select Pan Area Once you have zoomed in on a region of a picture you might want to slide the viewport over so that another region of the picture is magnified Select Pan Area allows you to move your magnifying glass so to speak without having
191. parity E stands for even parity O stands for odd parity M stands for mark parity and S stands for space parity The number on the right represents the number of stop bits being used one or two So for instance to choose the parity used by the SLAC IBM mainframe you would select the 7E1 parity which uses seven information bits even parity and one stop bit 113 Appendix C VLT s Emulations Introduction This appendix briefly describes the VT100 and Tektronix emulations implemented in VLT When in VT100 mode VLT recognizes a large subset of the standard VT100 style escape se quences Some of these escape sequences however are handled in a somewhat different way In addition there are some sequences that a regular VT100 does not recognize We will discuss these differences and additions later in this appendix VLT also features full Tektronix 4010 4014 em ulation as found for example in the DEC VT240 terminal as well as almost complete Tektronix 4105 emulation and some features found in the Tektronix 4107 A fairly complete description of all graphics escape sequences for the Tektronix emulation can be found in Appendix D VLT s modes VLT has two supermodes Alphanumeric and Graphic also called VT100 and Tektronix In Alphanumeric supermode the program behaves as a VT100 ASCII terminal in Graphic su permode the program emulates a Tektronix graphics terminal Usually each supermode has its own window such that the t
192. pe the command with N and a name VLT will be given a new name on startup VLT s ARexx port will also be given this new name This option is useful when you have several serial ports and want to run multiple copies of VLT with each one talking to a different serial port You will of course also have to use either the S or U option to specify the different ports Since you want each copy of VLT to have a different name and a distinguishable ARexx port you will need to use the N option to rename the different copies RUN VLT N If you type the command with N each invocation of VLT will be started with a different name For instance the first time you invoke the command with N VLT will be given the name VLT 1 the second time you invoke VLT with this option VLT will be given the name VLT 2 and so on So you can have different sessions of VLT running at the same time each marked as different by the number appended to its name If you have VLT come up on the Workbench each successively invoked session will have its titlebar ten pixels lower than the previous invocation RUN VLT P VIPrefs filename If you type the command with P VLT will start up using the specified VT100 configuration file By default VLT loads a file called VTPrefs dat This file deals with parameters for the VT100 emulation or text part of VLT RUN VLT T TekPrefs filename If you type the command with T VLT will start up using the specified
193. ple the command wait Ready 3 5 will wait for 3 5 seconds and then permit the rest of the schedule to continue If it receives the string Ready within that time the schedule will continue immediately If no time limit is attached to the wait then the schedule will wait until Ready is received if Ready is never received from the host then the schedule will just sit there until it is cancelled On The on command watches for a particular string whenever this string is sent from the host the command associated with the on command is executed For example the following on command on Ready emit Host is ready tells VLT to wait until it receives the string Ready from the host and then tell the user Host is ready Unlike wait traps on traps do not put the schedule on hold after the on trap is set the rest of the schedule is executed even if the trap string isn t received As a consequence on traps exist from the moment they are called until the schedule is finished running each time the trap string is received the associated command is executed In order to rid yourself of an on trap before a schedule is finished running you will have to cancel the on trap which you do by issuing an on command with the same character string and an empty command string For instance to cancel the trap on Ready emit Host is ready issue the command on Ready Only one command such as emit Host is ready can
194. program was debugged and rewritten the original code disappeared so that now in the present version of VLT none of the original VT100 code remains Despite this we nevertheless owe a debt of gratitude to the authors of the original program because it kept VLT on the air and functioning while the changes were taking place Kudos also go to Joanne Dow who allowed us to use her code for handling the serial port Charlie Heath for the use of his file requester which turned into the ARP library Carolyn Scheppner for the palette tool and Dave Betz for his Bmodem code Having this stuff to fall back upon made the job of creating VLT much easier and helped things run faster and more smoothly Thanks too to Marvin Weinstein Jim Kent Jim Mackraz Tom Rokicki and others for various little snippets of code to Rick Huebner Steve Walton Marco Papa the Software Distillery and Marc Boucher for writing the XPR file transfer protocols used by VLT and to the many people too numerous to name who have served as beta testers What It Does At SLAC Terminal Emulation A good terminal program was one of the crucial links in establishing the Amiga as a feasible cost effective terminal TFX Workstation at SLAC Therefore VLT had to satisfy certain requirements 1 First it had to allow one to log onto IBM and VAX mainframes over various communications links telephone lines the Micom Switch and the Bridge This meant that various parity modes and p
195. quence by switching modes and screens by deselecting one of these sequences removing the checkmark next to the option you cause VLT to respond to that sequence by switching modes only thereby eliminating the flicker effect By default VLT is set to switch screens as well as modes in response to these sequences NOTE In previous versions of VLT only one of these sequences On Select Code was adjustable in this fashion When you install the new VLT you may find that the setting of this switch has been lost and that like the other sequence switches VLT has given it the default setting Use Duplex Stroke Font Using the duplex stroke font as a matter of course is usually a trifle slow Therefore you may wish to choose Never the first option on the Use Duplex Stroke Font item s submenu If you do so the duplex stroke font will never be used When however the graphics that you have brought to your screen have text on them e g graph titling captions and you zoom this text the duplex stroke font looks nicer than the simplex stroke font In that case you may wish to choose this option s second subitem In Zoom which allows use of the duplex stroke font in zoom mode and in cases where text needs to be displayed in extra large type Set Default Parameters The Set Default Parameters option allows you to reset your default parameters This option gives you two choices you can restore all default parameters to the last default paramete
196. r the default is 2048 bytes the lower limit is 128 bytes and the upper limit is 8192 bytes CANcel ALL script name cancelflag Cancels a specified script or all scripts except the current one if all is specified If a script needs to be run without interference from other scripts a cancel may be placed as the first command in a script Script names are determined by their first label Therefore it is recommended to specify the name of the script in the form of a label at the beginning of the script When two scripts of the same name are present the first script found will be cancelled If cancel is called with a scriptname and cancelflag specified and if the script to be can celled was run from an ARexx context then when the script is cancelled the ARexx context will now have a value assigned to VLT CANCELFLAG equal to the cancelflag that you speci fied This allows you to use scripts which sit around indefinitely and can be cancelled by various other scripts By using the cancelflag you can then tell which program cancelled the indefinitely running script For an example of how the cancelflag is used see the script VLTPhoneDial rexx 79 CAPture file name Captures the session to a file with the specified file name This script command is the same as the Capture Session option of the text screen s VLT Menu CAPture RAW ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE Select the capture mode With raw mode on all
197. r will appear containing the default packet size in bytes Enter the new packet size and hit return XMODEM Options Choosing XMODEM Options brings up a submenu that allows you to choose file transfer packet size and the type of XMODEM error checking to be used in file transfers Selecting the first option tells XMODEM to use a simple check sum for error checking and to use short packets for file transfer When the second choice is selected XMODEM uses the same simple error checking but transfers packets which have a length of one kilobyte The third and fourth choices call for a more complicated form of error checking CRC with the third choice specifying short packets and the last choice specifying long packets Again use short packets in situations where you may have many file transfer errors and long packets in situations where you usually encounter very few file transfer errors External Options External Options when selected will bring up a requester that asks you to enter options for the external protocol that you have selected This option should only be used when an external protocol other than Kermit or XMODEM has been selected Each external protocol has its own options requester since these requesters are always documented _ along with the protocol we will not discuss them here File Transfer Mode Selecting File Transfer Mode brings up a submenu that controls the way in which binary files are transferred The first option Binary
198. raphics program and want to position the cursor very accurately Switch Graphic Cursor On A X Switch Graphic Cursor Off A Y You can position the graphic cursor using the mouse or the cursor keys and shifted cursor keys clicking on the left mouse button is equivalent to hitting a key on the keyboard The Screen Menu Most of these commands behave exactly like their counterparts on the text screen Clear Screen Clear Screen allows you to erase the screen under local control Screen To Back Screen To Back moves the VLT screens and or windows to the back of all other screens which are open 52 Select Screen Type Select Screen Type lets you select the screen type Custom or Workbench Interlace or Non Interlaced Remember that if you select the Workbench screen you cannot specify Interlace or Non Interlaced mode from any VLT menu or change any of the screen settings from VLT There are however two screen types available on the graphics Screen Menu that are not available on the text Screen Menu Main VLT Screen and Double Clear Screen Screen To Back Select Screen Type Number of Colors Sized Custom Selecting the first option kills the special graphics screen and redraws the current graphics display in the text screen which then becomes a combination graphics text screen All subsequent graphics files will be drawn on this combination screen and graphics and text can be mixed Selecting the second opt
199. rdance with the VT240 documentation vector mode line style sequences see next section are also recognized in alpha mode Vector and point plot marker mode In both vector and point plot mode the emulation will interpret incoming printable char acters as x y coordinates After entering vector mode the pen moves to the first vector encountered the pen is up All subsequent vectors are drawn with pen down In the case of point plot mode all vectors are marked with a dot Before discussing the encoding scheme of x y pairs it should be noted that the emulation works internally with a 4096 x 4096 pixel coordinate system as required for the Tektronix 4100 series of graphics terminals The following protocol for transfer of x y coordinates is however completely backwards compatible with the older 4000 series and their internal coordinate system of 1024 x 1024 pixels when the application running on the host assumes a 4000 series terminal the emulation simply puts the two lowest order bits of each coordinate to zero The encoding scheme of x y pairs is syntactically described by x y HiY Extra LoY HiX LoX Each item enclosed in on the right hand side represents an ASCII character HiY Bit 0 through 4 most significant 5 bits of y coordinate Bit 5 and 6 01 Tag bits Bit 7 parity Extra Bit 0 and 1 least significant 2 bits of x coordinate Bit 2 and 3 least significant 2
200. reens If you open on the Workbench screen then your Workbench windows can be moved in front of the terminal window This can be very useful if for example you wish to shrink a CLI or application window to a small size and keep an eye on what is going on in that window while you are doing something on the mainframe It does however clutter up the Workbench with one more window If you open VLT on a custom screen then you can have up to eight colors on the text screen to provide for full color highlighting by the mainframe and up to sixteen colors on the graphics screen You can also set all the colors for that screen while you are running the program and save these values to your configuration files VLT provides menu options which allow you to change your current screen characteristics Also since the VLT custom screen opens without a drag bar front to back gadgets close gadgets etc in order to be able to display the maximum number of lines VLT provides keyboard and menu options to control the positioning of the VLT screen relative to the Workbench screen Screen Clear Screen Clear Screen The Clear Screen command does just what it says it clears the screen without informing the mainframe _ Refresh Screen The Refresh Screen command redraws the VLT screen Since it uses the history buffer to do so however the text on the restored screen is monochrome see View History In Detail Refresh Screen Screen to Bac
201. ring the DSR script command should be used as in the following example DSR 1 E 1 2 7c The DSR string is stored as part of the configuration file The Device Control String DCS is recognized by VLT as ESC P VLT doesn t actually do anything with the device control string In effect all serial input is thrown away until the sequence is interrupted either by a CAN character or another ESC character In the latter case the device control string is terminated and the beginning of a new escape sequence is signalled If that escape sequence is ESC the device control string is just terminated 117 Appendix D Tektronix Programmers Manual Overview VLT s Tektronix emulator consists of two parts a Tektronix 4010 14 emulator and a Tek tronix 4105 emulator Generally both emulations are in effect at the same time but the Tektronix 4105 emulation and and several associated features can be suppressed with a menu option VLT s Tektronix 4010 14 emulation supports alpha and vector graphics modes as well as point plot incremental plot and Graphic INput GIN mode In alpha mode the program behaves as a dumb ASCII terminal and allows the display of alphanumeric text please note that this mode is not the same as the VT100 Alphanumeric supermode In vector mode the program interprets incoming data from the serial port as x y coordinates of vectors and moves the pen to the location x y when the pen is up or dra
202. rotocols had to be supported and that it should be easy to switch between these modes VLT supports baud rates from 110 to 57600 15 parity modes and four different handshaking protocols 2 The terminals most in use at SLAC were Ann Arbor Ambassadors These had 24 function keys and allowed the system to reprogram various attributes of the terminal in order to au tomatically switch between 24 32 and 43 line modes on the IBM Since the Amiga keyboard only has 10 function keys along the top of the keyboard SLAC needed an alternative way of getting the same functionality The solution to this problem was to provide the user with several choices a First an ever growing number of keyboard sequences and menu options are programmable including the numeric keypad on the right hand side of the Amiga keyboard the alt ed and shift alt ed keypad and cursor keys the ten function keys at the top of the keyboard both alone and in combination with the shift alt and ctrl keys and the User Menu options b At the bottom of the screen a total of 30 function gadgets can be displayed These 8 gadgets are on screen software objects which may be activated by moving the mouse pointer over them and clicking the left mouse button They are programmed by default to emulate the way in which the function keys on an Ambassador work but they can be user programmed in a variety of ways which will be explained later For those users who do not wish to have these f
203. rs so the number of columns that fit using a certain font on the Workbench may not be the same as the number that fits on a custom screen If this is the case you will notice that VLT uses the small font Select Fonts The Select Fonts option allows you to select your favorite font for use with VLT To use a font with VLT the font must exist in both eight and eleven point tall forms must have an eight point width and must be monospaced VLT checks the font you specify for these attributes and won t load your font if it doesn t conform When you select this option a special font requester will appear or a string requester if you are under 1 3 select the font you want to use and either hit return or select Okay 38 Special Keymap The Special Keymap option by using a special keymap allows you to completely customize your keymap setup without rewriting your entire keymap The special keymap should consist mainly of NULL entries where the entry is not a NULL VLT will use that entry instead of the corresponding entry in the default keymap Note default keymaps are country specific These entries can be strings and if these strings begin with a or a they will be treated as if they were function keys that is they will execute commands or scripts You do need a keymap editor to create the special keymap however the one we would recommend is KeymapEd which is widely available on fish disks and bulletin board systems Scrolling Speed
204. rs saved using the Save Tek Configuration option or you can restore all default parameters to the original settings that came with VLT Save Tek Configuration All graphics screen settings will be saved to the file Tek Prefs dat or your current configuration file if your configuration file is not TekPrefs dat when you select the Save Tek Configuration option These settings then become the default settings used whenever the graphics screen is opened Save Tek Configuration As The Save Tek Configuration As option behaves like Save Tek Configuration except that it allows you to save your current configuration into a file with a different name instead of overwriting your current configuration file This would be useful for a user who deals with many different hosts each having specific configuration requirements and who therefore needs several different configuration files When you select this option a file requester will appear using this requester you can give the configuration file you create any name you choose In order to have VLT use a configuration file created this way instead of TekPrefs dat you invoke VLT using the T command line option see Getting Started Starting Up 7 56 The Control Menu Lock Graphics Lock Graphics does just what its counterpart on the text screen does except that it not only disables the escape sequence that throws you onto the graphics screen it also kicks you out of the graphics screen and puts yo
205. rst HiX Bit 0 through 4 most significant 5 bits of x coordinate Bit 5 and 6 01 Bit 7 parity LoX Bit 0 through 4 least significant 5 bits of x coordinate Bit 5 and 6 01 Bit 7 parity HiY Bit 0 through 4 most significant 5 bits of y coordinate Bit 5 and 6 01 Bit 7 parity LoY Bit 0 through 4 least significant 5 bits of y coordinate Bit 5 and 6 01 Bit 7 parity End of report sequence If the Extended subitem of the GIN Report Style menu item of the Operation Menu is selected the report appears as Status Same as above HiY Bit 0 through 4 most significant 5 bits of y coordinate Bit 5 and 6 01 Bit 7 parity Extra Bit 0 and 1 least significant 2 bits of x coordinate Bit 2 and 3 least significant 2 bits of y coordinate Bit 4 unused Bit 5 and 6 01 Bit 7 parity LoY Bit 0 through 4 intermediate 5 bits of y coordinate Bit 5 and 6 01 Bit 7 parity HiX Bit 0 through 4 most significant 5 bits of x coordinate Bit 5 and 6 01 Bit 7 parity LoX Bit 0 through 4 intermediate 5 bits of x coordinate Bit 5 and 6 01 Bit 7 parity End of report sequence The end of report sequence is in either of the above cases the same In 4010 14 mode it is either non existent a single CR or a CR EOT sequence depending on the currently 128 selected sub item of the Report EOL String menu item In 4105 4107 mode all options
206. rthermore if you set the cursor height greater than or equal to eight the cursor size will always be equal to the height of the font Rendering Mode The Rendering Mode option allows you to affect the way in which VLT handles special text modes italics boldface reverse video etc as it is sent from the mainframe If you select a custom eight color screen and select the Color option from the l Rendering Mode submenu then bold underlined reverse video and italic text will be displayed in different colors If you select the Normal option then normal text will be displayed in one color boldfaced text will be displayed in another color and reverse video and italic text will be displayed as is If you select the Quick option then instead of displaying boldfaced material in a different color it will be displayed in bold face type and reverse video italic and underlined text will also be displayed as is This mode is provided in order to speed up scrolling still further since in this mode text is being rendered only onto what is effectively a two color screen This option together with a prescroll setting of 8 is sufficient to provide scrolling which keeps up at 9600 baud on a standard Amiga A further speed increase can be gained by using no more than four colors on your text screen Finally if you prefer to live in non interlaced mode the text update speed scrolling speed is increased by another factor of two If you select the last optio
207. s Who are _ you and how much memory do you have You will not be aware of these questions they are asked and answered behind the scenes so to speak In these cases the EOL end of line string is used to end VLT s replies to the host The Report EOL String option gives you the following choices for an EOL String Save Tek Configuration CR a carriage return CR EOT a carriage return and an end of tape character LF a linefeed CR LF a carriage return and a linefeed None no EOL String specified Set By Host the host will specify the EOL String You will usually want to use CR a carriage return as your EOL String If you experience difficulty try allowing your host to set the EOL String Bypass Cancel Character Bypass Cancel Character also deals with those behind the scenes question and answer sessions VLT and the host engage in In order for VLT s replies not to come to your screen VLT when it receives one of these questions enters something known as Bypass mode The bypass cancel character is a character that is sent from the host when it has received the answer to its question this character tells VLT to quit bypass mode This option 54 is important because if VLT doesn t receive the bypass cancel character it will stay in bypass mode forever and nothing the host sends you will ever be shown on your screen Selecting Bypass Cancel Character gives you a submenu with the following choices
208. s All subse quent vectors will be drawn 5 This escape sequence is recognized in vector mode as a replacement for the DEL character that some hosts cannot send In addition while this is not strictly in accordance with the VT240 documentation the Alpha mode character set selection sequences are recognized though ignored Incremental Plot mode In incremental plot marker mode the following control and escape sequences are recognized as well as some printable characters It should be noted that the marker type can be selected using a Tektronix 4105 sequence The default marker is however a single dot ESC ESC NUL ESC ENQ ESC BEL ESC LF CR ESC CR ESC FF ESC ETB ESC CAN ESC ESC ESC SUB ESC US P mn keine Notes Introduce escape sequence Introduce escape sequence Set bypass and return terminal status Ring bell flash screen Introduce escape sequence Set alpha mode and move to left margin Introduce escape sequence Enter alpha mode erase and home Make copy Set bypass condition Introduce escape sequence Set GIN mode and bypass condition Set point plot mode Set point plot mode Set vector mode Set vector mode Set alpha mode Set alpha mode Turn beam off pen up Turn beam on pen down Move up north 5 Move up right northeast Move right east Move down right southeast 5 Move down south Move down l
209. s the numeric keypad key on Amiga 500 2000 3000 s unless the Help Key LF option is selected If you own an Amiga 1000 you can program the function keys 1 through 4 to play the role of the top four keys on the A500 2000 3000 numeric keypad VT100 PF1 through PF4 Shift Tab ESC TAB When Shift Tab ESC TAB is selected the shifted TAB key the one with the two arrows at the left hand side of the keyboard just above the Ctrl and Caps Lock keys will send the sequence ESC TAB to the mainframe For SLAC VM this effectively means back tab When not selected the shifted TAB key behaves like an unshifted TAB key Function Key Gadgets Since some users would prefer not to have the mouse operated function key gadgets on the screen and would rather spread a large number of lines of text over a greater area VLT provides an option which turns the function key gadgets on or off If you are working with the function key gadgets turned off selecting Function Key Gadgets brings them back on screen and vice versa CR Key Echo CR LF When you have set the Echo option to be on the CR Key Echo CR LF tells VLT to display an extra linefeed after every line you type The extra linefeed will not be sent to the host CR Key Send CR LF CR Key Send CR LF when ON sends a carriage return and linefeed as opposed to just a carriage return to the host every time you hit return Display CR as CR LF Display CR as CR LF causes VLT to display a carriage re
210. s Aad Shoe ah wet a se Y Tektronix 4105 4107 A oe eee Stee A Po ee ae ged Reports to the host 2 2 Aires te a ty rns 2 Seg aT Table of ASCII control characters 4 130 _ Appendix E ARP Escape Sequences i aw By ae ah Brn ra OY The Escape Character and SET ESCAPE comand Bag php Mel ithe eo de Nee eg dy was DBD Escape Sequences ee ee e 132 Appendix F y e e e 0 o ee a eG 133 The ARexx Phonebook facility 0 133 The NeatStuff Script 2 2 2 ee e o 134 The SetMiscFlags Program o 136 Index r A G 137 Mi a A a ar Be a a S oe ko A NA 139 1 Introduction An Introduction to VLT Mo came to be used at SLAC Stanford Linear Accelerator Center because SLAC wanted to assess the Amiga s usefulness as a color graphics terminal and T X workstation Before the project could really begin the people at SLAC needed a terminal emulator which could successfully talk to the IBM 3081 now the IBM ES9000 580 and all the VAXes on the site Moreover it had to compete in quality with the Ann Arbor Ambassador GXL terminals which were already in use at the laboratory Unfortunately at the time there was no commercial program which fit the bill Luckily Willy Langeveld had been independently hacking up a public domain VT100 emulator written by Dave Wecker et al and the result VLT suited SLAC s purposes Over the years as the
211. s are fake or logical devices you yourself have created Well this has to be accomplished in a slightly different way Position the mouse cursor over the body of the requester and click on the right mouse button or click on the Disks gadget which you will find at the bottom of the requester The names of all devices both real and logical will appear We ve discussed using the file requester in reverse that is we started with scrolling through filenames then went on to scrolling through directories and subdirectories and then went to scrolling through device names When you actually use the file requester you will probably go in the opposite order first scrolling through devices then directories and subdirectories and then finally through filenames Going through these various stages is like peeling away the layers of an onion until you find the file you are looking for Sometimes you will choose the wrong directory or subdirectory Clicking on the Parent gadget one of the rectangular gadgets at the bottom of the requester will get back the list of files that lie outside this directory First the directory name wil revert to the name of the parent directory and then the list of filenames in the parent directory will be redisplayed The fourth button at the bottom of the requester is the CANCEL gadget When you click on the cancel gadget the file requester disappears without doing anything allowing you to abort the entire pro
212. s zero as it would be if ZOOM were called without any arguments the action will be to zoom to full size in other words to unzoom the picture TEKtronix There are several other TEKtronix script commands available Since they are rather arcane we won t discuss them here but you can find out what they are by saving a graphics file as script commands To do this use the Save As Script Commands option of the Image 89 Menu see The User Interface Graphics Screen Menus TITlebar ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE When this is switched on VLT s custom screen will display a titlebar on both the alphanu meric screen and the Tektronix screen VLT will correctly take the title bar height into account when calculating where to display text TRACE flags command delay When flags is set to a non zero value certain tracing options are switched on When command delay is non zero a delay is inserted after each line of trace output The delay is in ticks i e 50 ticks is one second The flags variable consists of a mask bit 0 enables tracing of every line in the script bit 1 enables tracing of all traps i e ons waits and traps Also little tick marks are displayed on the screen at or near the words that caused the trap Bit 2 causes the output to be displayed in VLT s Console window if it is open and bit 3 causes the output to be appended to the file VLT log in the current default directory The file is closed after
213. selectdown is implied The program string must start with a to be interpreted as a script command with the keyword auto being the one exception Since the command is basically the same as the menu option see The User Interface Text Screen Menus for more details MOVecursor x1 y1 x2 y2 Moves the location of the cursor to x y when only the first two coordinates are specified 1 1 is the upper left hand corner The maximum values are determined by the displayed number of lines and columns Notice that this command does not notify the host of the new cursor location When at least the first three coordinates are specified this command applies to the secondary cursor The second set of coordinates are row and column specifications either in absolute screen coordinates or relative to the text cursor you indicate which you want used by prefacing the coordinate with either ABS or REL The coordinates can also be specified as MOUSE in which case that coordinate is set to the current X or Y position of the mouse depending on which coordinate you specified in this way For example the command move rel O mouse 12 mouse would display the secondary cursor with the top left corner positioned at the column of the current text cursor rel 0 and at line 12 The bottom right edge would be at the current mouse position Note that the coordinates are sorted appropriately to disallow negative sized cursors To see this command in action check t
214. semicolons and bounded by string delimiters trap cause Causes trap s with specified ID s to be sprung even if the match string has not been received The syntax of this command is as follows trap cause trap ID trap ID trap activate Causes trap s with specified ID s to be activated this command is used when a trap has been deferred and you want to activate it The syntax of this command is as follows trap activate trap ID trap ID all trap deactivate Causes trap s with specified ID s to be deactivated The syntax of this command is as follows trap deactivate trap ID trap ID al trap remove Removes trap s with specified ID s from the trap list The syntax of this com mand is as follows trap remove trap ID trap ID all 69 The PASte Command The PASte command is a major new command which is actually used internally by the Paste Menu options It has a slew of subcommands among them clip file and string which indicate what type of material is to be pasted Using the PASte command requires a few peculiar constructions since actually pasting something requires using the command in a loop and the actual operation requires several steps First the contents of the clipboard file or string must be loaded into VLT s internal paste buffer You can accomplish this using the clip file or string options For example the command paste clip retrieves the Amiga c
215. should check for by selecting Select Device Close Device Parity Strip 8th Bit Set Break Time While the terms baud and bps bits per second technically speaking refer to entirely different things in current and common usage they both refer to the number of data bits transferred per second 29 various options in its submenu When a particular type of error checking has been selected a check will appear beside the corresponding suboption When VLT detects an error for which you ve told it to check it will post a message to that effect Moreover if the error is a read error that is an error in the information being sent to VLT VLT will flush the serial device Serial Device Busy the first suboption tells VLT to check for cases in which data flow to your Amiga has been turned off by an Xoff character from the host Baud Rate Mismatch checks to see if VLT and the host are set to send receive at different baud rates Line Error checks for a generic error while Parity Error checks for a parity mismatch between VLT and the host Buffer Overflow checks for an overfull buffer that is too much information being sent to your Amiga for your serial device s buffer to handle No DSR DSR Data Set Ready when set notifies you if the other side e g the host is not ready to send or receive data Break Received tells you if VLT has received a break signal Echo Terminals tend to operate in one of two possible m
216. so you may not need flow control At higher baud rates however it does become more likely that you could lose some data without flow control In that case try to use CTS RTS handshaking since it often avoids problems that show up with Xon X off I don t know what s wrong but when VLT receives data it loses characters There are several programs that when run at the same time as VLT cause VLT to drop characters from the data it receives These programs not VLT are causing the problem Suspect programs are those that mess with the way the Amiga multitasks or that try to monitor the tasks in the system although not all of these programs cause difficulties There are also some hard disk controllers whose software causes problems in which case data loss usually occurs only during hard disk activity When I log off BIX I am getting a burst of noise that has already more than once opened up the graphics screen This is kind of disconcerting Is there a way to filter or block that sort of thing Set your graphics lock on by selecting the menu option Graphics Lock and you won t be thrown onto the graphics screen anymore If you never use graphics anyway you might also want to consider using VLTjr instead since it saves memory space Review Buffer Riddles Q23 A23 Q24 A24 The review buffer doesn t work VLT says it can t find it One likely reason you didn t copy review library to VLT libs or libs You may
217. splay Sending commands to VLT from the host An escape sequence was introduced to allow the host to send a script command to be executed by VLT Together with VLT s rx script command this allows the host to execute ARexx scripts on the Amiga The syntax is start of VLT command SystemPassWord VLT command end of VLT command where start of V LT command end of VLT command SystemPass Word VLT command In the first escape sequence the variable P represents an optional size if the size is specified the command buffer will be allocated at either the specified size or 256 bytes whichever is larger The variable P in the second escape sequence is also optional and specifies a destination for the CSI 91h or CSI 91 P h CSI 911 or CSI 91 Pal current value of environment variable SystemPassWord a valid VLT script command 116 command Currently only destination 0 is supported the command is directly interpreted as a VLT action string An example would be ESC 91hMyAmigaPassword rx address command WLens 100 100 VLT ESC 911 Upon receipt of this string from the host the sequence of events in VLT would be as follows VLT would enter command capture mode after receiving the h of the escape sequence It would then store every incoming printable ASCII character with the maximum determined by the buffer size in a buffer until it received the ESC character of the end of command sequ
218. t and left arrow moves left When you are dealing with a VAX you would normally leave this option deselected since VAX Beep Volume editors will set these keys as necessary When dealing with other hosts you will have to consult with host help files or a local expert to find out whether or not you need to reprogram these keys These cursor keys are often referred to as arrow keys Numeric Keypad Function Key Gadgets Mouse Support Swap BS lt gt Delete Swap BS lt gt Delete is provided as a courtesy to VAX users who wish to interchange the function of the backspace and delete key the backspace key is the key with the arrow just to the left of the delete key 40 Destructive BS Destructive BS makes the backspace key destructive in other words after selecting this option when you backspace using this key it erases the text it backspaces over character by character Selecting this option also affects the behavior of backspace characters received from the host Help Key LF Since the Amiga keyboard does not provide a labelled linefeed LF key VLT allows the user if he so desires to program the Help key to perform this function Selecting the Help Key LF option allows you to use the Help key to perform the same function as the LF key on a VT100 Note the Amiga 1000 has a different numeric keypad layout from the 500 s 2000 s and 3000 s As a result for A1000 users the help key has the same function a
219. t Character Path Select Fill Pattern 4107 extension colors 8 through 15 are supported patterns 8 through 15 Set Graphtext Rotation Conform 4105 standard only 0 90 180 and 270 degrees are supported Set Text Index 4107 extension colors 8 through 15 are supported Set Line Style Set Bypass Cancel Character This character can also be set using a menu option Set EOL String This string can also be set using a menu option Set View Attributes Set Pixel Beam Position Runlength Write Raster Write Rectangle Fill Set Pixel Viewport 4107 Amiga extension the full range of addressable pixels available in the current window screen is available 125 ESC RU ESC RW ESC RX ESC TG ESC TM Begin Pixel Operations Set Window Only windows that preserve the aspect ratio are allowed Windows that don t preserve the aspect ratio are rescaled until they do Pixel Copy Only straight copies are supported Copies where the second source x and or y coordinate is are smaller than the first will be performed after sorting the coordi nates Set Surface Color Map 4107 extension Surface 1 is supported as well as colors 8 through 15 Set Color Mode 4107 extension RGB HLS and CMY color coordinate systems are all supported both in setting color maps as in color reports The following two sequences are also recognized ESC 0d ESC 1d Draw light vectors with curre
220. t Save Configuration When I m receiving a file using Kermit it always goes to my current default directory What if I want it to go elsewhere Before you start the transfer change VLT s default directory using the Change Directory option Make the new default directory the directory where you want the file to go You can also set the download path using Kermit s External Options requester or the xprkermit environment variable see the documentation which comes with xprkermit How do I get VLT to reuse the color screen etc settings I set up It saves them at least it creates a file in S but the next time I load VLT it s back to the old settings You saved your setting using Save Configuration right And saved them to the S directory Well the S directory does not have a particularly high priority in VLT s search path if when you start VLT up from scratch there is a VTPrefs dat file in a higher priority directory VLT will use the settings there So if you want the settings in your S directory to be used make sure that there isn t a VTPrefs dat file in any directory ahead of S in VLT s search path see Getting Started VLT s Method of Searching Paths This goes for using VTPrefs dat files in all lower priority directories x In this context AREXX stands for asynchronous REXX not AmigaREXX 100 Data Flow Difficulties Q18 A18 Q19 A19 Q20 A20 I can t get A H to work for hanging up The menu
221. t are Fifo Pipes They re basically input output control alternatives to the serial port as such they are very useful There are two types of Fifo Pipes in VLT local and remote The local pipes are called VLT name L and the remote pipes are called VLT name R Since VLT by default is called VLT the default pipe names are VLTL and VLTR Both VLTL and VLTR consist of two pipes each one to handle input and one to handle output What do the Fifo Pipes do You can use them to hook up to a CLI on your Amiga while VLT is running especially useful when you want to preview a Tektronix file or to set up a primitive bulletin board service and hook up to another Amiga Hooking up to a CLI To use Fifo Pipes to hook up with a CLI from VLT go to your CLI and issue the following commands newcli fifo VLTL rwkecs you can use newwsh etc instead of newcli run VLT if VLT isn t already running Then set VLT to no echo close the serial device see the Communications Menu and set the Display LF as CR LF option to be on you will find that last option in the Operation Menu it causes incoming linefeeds to be displayed as returns plus linefeeds Switch the Fifo Pipes on using the menu option Fifo Pipes You should see the cli shell prompt appear on VLT s screen Type any command such as dir cd info etc and the response should appear on VLT s screen While hooked up to the CLI you can preview any Tektronix files you happen to have lying arou
222. tains commands that ARexx doesn t recognize it will send the interpreted line to VLT as a separate schedule VLT will then execute these commands Of course if VLT doesn t recognize a command either the schedule containing the command will be aborted and VLT will put up an error message Sometimes ARexx will think that a VLT command or symbol is an ARexx command or symbol and try to interpret it accordingly This can result in your macro making mistakes or returning error messages If you want to be certain that nothing in a particular command or group of commands is interpreted by ARexx before being sent to VLT surround each line of commands with ARexx string delimiters double quotes or single quotes Once an Address VLT command is issued anything between quotes is sent directly to VLT Note In an ARezz macro just typing Address VLT and continuing your program on a new line is sufficient When typing commands from WShell however you must preface Address VLT with a double quote Furthermore whenever you type a series of commands on the same line as the Address VLT command be sure to follow the Address VLT command with a semicolon Otherwise only the command immediately following the Address VLT command will be sent to VET Finally when you run an ARezz macro from VLT it is not necessary to put in the Address VLT at all since ARezz will automatically know where to send the commands In fact this last feature is frequently useful sin
223. that is Strip 8th Bit strips the parity bits from anything sent to VLT from the host computer making information sent to VLT with mark parity intelligible to VLT While you could also set VLT for mark parity this can be a nuisance so the Strip 8th Bit option can be very useful Note See Appendix B for a more comprehensive discussion of parity Reset Reset resets the serial device to the current settings Normally this should not cause a disconnect from the host some modems however are picky enough to notice and disconnect you Send Break The Break signal is a special signal which is useful when dealing with some hosts Since the Break signal means different things to different hosts you will need to find out what a Break signal means to whatever host you are dealing with Since there is no break key on the Amiga keyboard we have it included as a menu option This command has the alternative keyboard sequence A B i e hold down the Amiga key to the right of the space bar and type B This key is sometimes necessary on Tymnet and in IBM line mode but has no use in IBM full screen mode Hang Up Sometimes you want to drop your connection with the host or Modem Micom Switch Bridge Box etc without leaving the terminal program This menu choice does that by shutting down the serial port for about a second Its keyboard alternative is A H 30 Set Break Time The break signal is sent as a pulse along the data line Most hosts recognize
224. the Binary option selected you might end up with some peculiar looking characters in the transferred file The Text option translates between text file formats so that the transferred text file doesn t contain these funny characters To verify that this option is switched on look for a check mark to the left of this item on the submenu The Transfer Status Window Whenever you send or receive a file the transfer status window comes up This window has several gadgets When you click on the CANCEL ALL gadget VLT attempts to shut down any and all file transfers as soon as possible When you click on the CANCEL FILE gadget VLT attempts to abort only the current file transfer in a multi file transfer the file transfer currently in progress would be aborted and VLT would start sending or receiving the next file to be transferred You can also abort a file transfer by typing Esc but only if the transfer status window is active Clicking on the third gadget SHOW WORKBENCH puts VLT behind all other screens or windows and brings the Workbench to the front Typing a character in the status window after a transfer is completed causes the window to close and the character to be sent on to the host The Script Menu You can program VLT to perform highly specialized operations on two levels At a lower level you can write scripts in VLT s own simple command language On a higher level you can combine this simple command language with the more powerf
225. the previous line when using arrow keys and or the backspace key Key Repeat Key Repeat allows you to set your keys to automatically repeat when you hold them down A check by this option means that key repeat is on no check means that it is off Wrap Numeric Keypad Ordinarily the numeric key Key Repeat pad is set up_to operate in function key mode that is instead of behaving like ordinary keys do they di rect VLT or the host to do special things like quit or Application Cursor send a file or clear the screen etc On the VAX the keypad is used in the same manner as it is used on a evap Ee meen as VT100 When logged onto the IBM the keypad is used Destructive BS to access the 24 PFkeys available on various terminals Help Key LF used with the IBM mainframes such as the Ambas _ sador IBM 3270 etc To use the numeric keypad so Shift Tab ESC TAB that unshifted characters provide numbers and symbols select the Numeric Keypad option Application Cursor The Application Cur CR Key Echo CR LF sor feature is there in order to give the user control CR Key Send CR LF over the way in which the cursor keys the ones with arrows on them arranged in a T between the alphabetic Display CR as CR LF and numeric keypad operate When the Application Display LF as CR LF Cursor option is deselected these keys behave as ex pected on an IBM mainframe up arrow is up down Auto Screen to Back arrow is down right arrow moves righ
226. therwise you have the wrong version Testing VLT Insert the VLT boot floppy you just created into one of your disk drives Reboot In half a minute or so you should see a screen with a number of icons Click twice on the icon called Work A window with a bunch of icons in it should appear one of these icons is the VLT drawer icon Double click on this icon a new window will appear containing among other icons the VLT icon you can t miss it Increase the size of the window drag the icons around so that they aren t overlapping anymore and make a snapshot of the window See your Amiga manual In the process you should have discovered another icon called TestScript scp If you click twice on either icon VLT should start up For those who clicked on the TestScript icon a little story will be told and VLT will exit automatically after thirty seconds If you followed the installation procedure correctly then you won t have any trouble with this If you do find problems go back over the installation procedure and check for mistakes If you installed VLT on your hard disk follow the procedure outlined above minus the floppy disk insertion 13 VLT s Method of Searching Paths As of version 5 517 VLT has acquired a new ability the ability to search for the files it needs in several places instead of looking only in a single place as it used to do This is why instead of having to install the files VLT needs in various directories a
227. this screen to be either interlaced or non interlaced Number of Colors The Number of Colors option allows you to select the number of colors that can be displayed on the terminal text screen Since the number of colors which can be displayed on a Workbench screen is fixed this option only works if you have already selected your Screen Type to be Custom If you are on a custom screen then you have the option of using 2 4 or 8 colors on your text screen Select Colors When you choose the Select Colors option a palette requester appears on your screen This gadget works just like the one in Workbench preferences and allows you to interactively change the colors on your screen by moving the sliders with the mouse To change a color click on the square showing that color and then move the R red G green and B blue sliders until you get the color you want If for example the red slider is moved all the way to the left than there will be no red in the color that you are making if on the other hand the red slider is all the way to the right then you will have added the maximum amount of red to the color Number of Lines There will probably be commands specific to your host that allow you to alter the number of lines of text that are displayed on your terminal screen If the number of lines to be displayed is too large VLT will do its best to display as many as it can You may however wish to change the number of lines to be displayed without
228. to be used for Kermit transfers KERmit MODE Hostserver Sendreceive Lets you select Kermit s transfer mode your choices are host is server or regular send re celve KEYMap keymap name Lets you select a different special keymap See the corresponding menu option for more details KEYRepeat ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE Lets you switch key repeat mode on or off When key repeat is on any key pressed and held will send characters repeatedly When not set keys will never repeat KEYScriptcharacter ASCII character number Allows you to select the keyscript character By default this is the ANSI character tilde ASCII number 126 Since many scripts assume the keyscript character to be a tilde it is usually unwise to change it LINES nuniber of lines Changes the number of lines to be displayed on the screen to the number indicated If necessary possible the font will be changed to a smaller or larger size LOCAL ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE Sets VLT to operate in local mode which means that characters typed on the keyboard are not sent on to the host Note that text sent by other means does get sent to the host i e text sent from the console pasted from the Review Buffer or sent from scripts MENU menunum itemnum subnum Executes specified menu item as if it had been selected from the main window s menus Note that when counting items the count starts from zero and the dashed s
229. to do is hit return once or twice Everything might go very smoothly after that in which case you will be ready to log on to your favorite host Of course Murphy s Law being what it is you will probably not be so fortunate you will have to reset some of VLT s defaults so that it will work with your modem and host combination The question we will address in this section is how you go about doing this and how when you are finished doing this you save the results of your efforts If you are an Amiga novice the first step is to get acquainted with Amiga menus in general and VLT s in particular To display a menu put your hand on your mouse and hold down the right mouse button At the top of the screen the following words will appear VLT Comm Paste Transfer Script Screen Operation User Graphics These are the names of the nine menus which belong to VLT s alphanumeric screen i e the screen on which text is displayed Moving the cursor over any one of these names while you are holding the right mouse button down causes the menu associated with that name to drop down from the menu bar Each of these menus has several items or options displayed on it Some of these options even have sub options or sub items associated with them Sub items are revealed only when you slide the mouse cursor down along the menu and point at the correct item To select a menu option you slide the mouse cursor over the option until the choice you wish is hi
230. tten its attention In the latter case you will have to type in some sort of quit command As you have to direct your host to send or receive a file before you tell the Amiga to receive or send the file you will need to learn how to run the file transfer protocol that you are using by reading its documentation Receive File Receive File performs the file transfer in the opposite direction i e from the mainframe to the Amiga Once again this option controls what the Amiga does not what is going on on the mainframe Always tell the mainframe to send the file before you direct the Amiga to receive the file Again to abort a transfer hit the ESC key several times in a row for Kermit and not too fast or click on CANCEL ALL 32 Protocol Protocol is the menu item which allows you to choose the basic file transfer protocol to be used by the Send File and Receive File commands When you select this option you will be presented with a submenu displaying seven options XMODEM Kermit ASCII CISQuickB ZMODEM YMODEM and Other Each option can be selected by entering the indicated alternate keyboard commands shown next to the subitem names VLT uses external file transfer protocols which are specially written programs in the form of libraries on the Amiga These protocols may be written by anyone but they must be written according to a special format outlined by the XPR specification VLT will recognize and use any protocol which fits this speci
231. tual color values You can set VLT up so that it uses your color settings and still has proper shine and shadow colors see CustomColors scp or WorkbenchColors scp for examples I use a sunmouse program which causes windows to be activated when the mouse pointer _ is within the boundaries of that window but since VLT puts up busy pointers in the main A35 window my requester windows won t stay active It is for this reason that we don t recommend using sunmouse style programs VLT like many other programs isn t really designed to work with that type of mouse 104 Q36 A36 Q37 A37 Q38 A38 Q39 A39 Q40 AAO VLT says that it can t find rexx or VTPrefs dat or TekPrefs dat or any of the xprli braries Yet when I looked in the directory they were all there What s wrong Have you made VLT resident or are you starting VLT from a Workbench menu using an old version of ToolManager AmigaDOS 2 0 has a new feature the progdir assign which assigns progdir locally within VLT to the directory containing the VLT executable VLT depends on this assignment to find all sorts of files When VLT is resident or when you are working with old versions of ToolManager the progdir assignment doesn t get made and VLT has serious problems Try assigning VLT to your VLT directory this should make it possible for VLT to find those files VLT isn t paying attention when I program the
232. u back in the text screen Lock Graphics A A F Return To Alpha Numeric Return To Alpha Numeric Return To Alpha Numeric sends you back to the text screen If you have selected your screen type to be Main VLT Screen however this option will change the set of menus at the top of the screen to be the text menus instead of the graphics menus The Color Options Requester In Detail The Color Options requester allows you to do some unusual things to understand how to use this requester you must first understand how the Amiga deals with color as well as how the Amiga display works When computers talk to each other about colors they don t talk in terms of vermilion print a gold background pink menus and purple highlighting They deal with color in terms of color registers which are numbered from 0 on upwards the color assigned to each color register can be redefined by the user As a result computers are effectively color blind For example one computer sending a graphics file to another would inform the second computer that the text was to be drawn in color 1 the background in color 0 and the rest of the drawing in color 3 Computer B has no way of knowing what color Computer A considers color 1 to be Computer B only knows what color it considers color 1 to be Thus Computer A s color 1 might be defined as deep blue while Computer B s color 1 is defined as bright yell
233. uboption lets you specify the amount of space left between the bottom of the text above the console window and the bottom of the screen In order to implement this command the old CONSolewindowadjust was deleted If you don t want VLT to change the text display just because there is a console then specify a console height of 0 The console height that you set with this command does not actually affect the size of the console window it only specifies how much room to leave at the bottom for a console or whatever else The default is 55 pixels CURsorheight height Specifies the height of the cursor If the height specified is larger than eight the cursor height will adapt to any font changes CUStomscreen ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE When set to be on CUStomscreen opens VLT on its own custom screen When CUStomscreen is not on VLT opens on the Workbench DELAY timeout Causes the script to pause for the specified amount of time DESTructivebackspace ON YES 1 OFF NO 0 TOGGLE When DESTructivebackspace is set to be on the backspace key causes the cursor to erase text as it moves backwards DISPLAY Crascrlf ON OFF Behaves just like the Display CR as CR LF option of the Communications Menu DISPLAYLfascrlf ON OFF Behaves just like the Display LF as CR LF option of the Communications Menu DSR number device status report string Chooses the primary number 1 or secondary number 2
234. ul AmigaREXX These scripts can be executed by using the ARexx Macro and VLT Script menu options or by assigning one of 128 programmable keyboard sequences to call and execute the script file ARexx Macro VLT Script Abort All Scripts ARexx Macro When you select this menu option the file requester appears and displays all files found in the appro priate search path with the file extension v1t To execute one of these files double click on its name or single click on its name and then click on the OK gadget A brief explana tion of ARexx scripts will be given in the next chapter which is an introduction to writing scripts VLT Script There is a set of commands which VLT understands and which can be used to write VLT scripts When these scripts are saved as files they should have the file extension scp Examples of script files will appear in the next chapter The file requester which appears when you select this menu option automatically assumes that these files will be found in a certain set of directories Remove All Traps 35 see Getting Started VLT s Method of Searching Paths you can however direct the requester to look in other directories for your file Again to execute one of these files double click on its name or single click on its name and then click on the OK gadget The difference between ARexx scripts macros and VLT script files is that ARexx is a more powerful language Furthermore while
235. ultiple script files at startup time using extended select see Running Multiple Scripts above then VLT will start up using the Tool Types of the first script icon If you click once on the VLT icon or any script icon then go up to the menu bar of the Workbench screen three menu names will appear Move your cursor over the menu named Icons then when the menu drops down select the Information option A window with all sorts of gadgets will appear One of these gadgets will be labeled TOOL TYPES and it will have up and down arrow gadgets a button gadget labeled NEW and a button gadget labeled DEL When you want to specify an execution parameter for VLT from the Workbench you click on the NEW gadget type in a parameter such as B and click on the SAVE gadget at the bottom of the window You can specify as many parameters as you want in this fashion but be sure to specify each parameter separately For example if you want to specify the parameters B and I you would click on NEW type in B then click on NEW again and type in I Then you would click on SAVE Don t click on SAVE until you have finished entering all your parameters since selecting SAVE closes the Information window If you want to specify a parameter which requires an argument such as S or C you have to enter the parameter in the following fashion S tsstrm device Make sure that you don t begin the above command with a space or surround the equals si
236. unction gadgets displayed at the bottom of the screen there is a means for removing and restoring them at will c VLT also allows you to program any key on the keyboard and command sequences using a special keymap for use of the Program Mode and Special Keymap options see The User Interface Text Screen Menus 3 It was important that the terminal allow the mainframe to send escape sequences in order to tell the Amiga to use different colors VLT supports these features the escape sequences which should be sent by the host in order to activate them are documented in Appendix C 4 VLT is designed to provide the same sort of Tektronix emulation that is used by the Ambas sador GXL terminal it opens a second screen for graphics independent of the alphanumeric screen This second screen provides color support It is also possible to display graphics and text on the same screen The details of the Tektronix emulation are given in Appendix D 5 The Amiga is naturally a mouse keyboard oriented machine Once a person gets used to this he or she often wishes to have a way to use the mouse to handle cursor positioning and interactive graphics support VLT allows you to program the mouse s behavior in a variety of ways using the Mouse Support menu option see The User Interface Text Screen Menus File Transfer File transfer protocols are used to transfer files between two different computers version of the file transfer protocol m
237. upposed to be waiting for There is however a nice sneaky way around this difficulty Let s take another look at the set of sample commands we used when discussing the rx command Address VLT on Ready rx address MYPORT ready delay 10 You ve probably noticed the delay 10 command issued just after the on command You may have also noticed that the pair of commands on Ready rx address MYPORT ready delay 10 are surrounded by single quotes ARexx string delimiters The delay command and these delimiters comprise the solution to the problem As both the on command and the delay command are surrounded by the delimiters ARexx sends them to VLT without interpreting them and sends them to VLT as a single schedule The schedule now has two commands in it the on command and the delay 10 command Until the ten second delay occasioned by the delay command times out the schedule will still be alive and so will the on trap x Not to be confused with the RX cli command that comes with ARexx 75 The Wedge Command Currently you can only WEDGE keystrokes By issuing the command wedge keystrokes portname you tell VLT to wedge all keystrokes and send them as packets to the port that you have named WEDGING keystrokes means that all keystrokes everything typed by the user are intercepted by VLT and sent to your program before being acted on This means that you can write a program to intercept certain keystrokes and change them int
238. usally send lines of text followed by a return character With these hosts the review buffer simply appends the new lines of text to the bottom of the buffer as they come in discarding lines if necessary from the top of the buffer On the other hand with page oriented hosts such as IBM mainframes running VM CMS the buffer keeps a record of what is on each page scrolling a page at a time Page oriented hosts present the buffer with a problem this problem will be explained in detail later in this section when the New Page option of the Buffer menu is discussed An important thing to remember is that the review buffer tries to keep track of all text as it appears on the screen Text must appear on the screen to appear in the review buffer The history buffer does not remember the color of any text or if the text used graphics fonts Since the history buffer is also used to restore VLT s screen contents when you change the number of lines or columns refresh the screen or change the properties of the screen e g changing from two to four colors or from interlace to non interlace mode the restored screen will be monochrome and may look peculiar in places if the original contents used any of the graphics fonts This can be fixed however by directing the host to redraw the screen On the IBM this may be accomplished by hitting the Enter key on the numeric keypad When you save your configuration Save Configuration option VLT Menu
239. ust be run on both machines which means that to use the Amiga for file transfer the terminal program has to support these file transfer protocols Usually the file transfer protocols are built into the terminal program Since only so many protocols can be included in this manner this limits the user s choices VLT however offers a better solution VLT supports what are known as external file transfer protocols This means that the file transfer protocols are not part of VLT itself but are accessed by VLT from special XPR external protocol libraries VLT will let you use any file transfer protocol as long as an Amiga version of the protocol written according to the XPR specification has been stored in the appropriate place in the form of an XPR library When you obtain VLT you should also obtain at least two XPR li braries xprkermit library and and xprxmoden library These libraries contain respectively the file transfer protocols Kermit and XMODEM Among the other XPR s currently available are xprascii library included with VLT xprzmodem library and xprquickb library KERMIT IBM mainframes do not in general like to talk to non IBM hardware Therefore special file transfer protocols had to be developed in order to make it possible to transfer files from an IBM mainframe to a desktop computer such as the Amiga The most popular protocol for carrying on such transfers with an IBM mainframe is named Kermit yes for the frog K
240. ut you will need WShell 2 0 if you want to use the VLT ConsoleMenus file in s the console menus only work under AmigaDOS 2 04 None of these files are absolutely required but if you don t have them you may not be able to open the console window or get it to behave properly Next if you intend to play with FifoBBS rexx and similar Fifo based utilities you must install the Fifo handler by Matt Dillon For more details see The User Interface Text Screen Menus for the discussion of Fifo Pipes VLT will complain if it cannot find the external file transfer protocol library XPR you have currently selected Please note although it may appear that the XMODEM and Kermit file transfer protocols are part of VLT they actually depend on external protocols While VLT s other features work perfectly without external file transfer protocols you will need them if you intend to do file transfers and you probably do We suggest that you acquire the freely distributable XPR libraries of your choice Currently XPR s for the XMODEM Kermit ZMODEM YMO DEM CISQuickB and Jmodem protocols are available An ASCII XPR is included with VLT xprascii library 10 Some of the ARexx programs that come with VLT require that you have rexxarplib library version 3 0 earlier versions of rexxarplib library will not work correctly Rexxarplib library like most other files discussed in this section is available on BIX and on the anonymous FTP site unixhu
241. will store the data and add any new data you ve meanwhile tried to send and try to send the whole bunch again If it still fails it puts up the message requester Temporarily unable to send data Waiting If you wait and if the Xoff was indeed sent by the host or modem the serial port may become unstuck by itself and the requester will go away If you click on RETRY then the timer will be restarted and if the device is still stuck the requester will reappear In both of these cases you are relying on the serial device to unstick itself If you click on RESET VLT will reset the serial port and the serial port then effectively will have forgotten that it ever received an Xoff However 101 Q21 A21 Q22 A22 you may lose data even though the data that you were about to send should be sent again after the reset Moreover line noise can go both ways In such a case it may well be that the connection is broken because of it this is why you are sometimes logged off of the host Conversely when a connection to the host is broken for whatever reason including telling the host to log you off the act of disconnecting sometimes causes a lot of line noise resulting in the same problem If you run into this a lot and if you usually run at low baud rates 2400 or so you may try to run with Handshaking set to None While in that case no flow control is performed it is also fairly unlikely that a lot of data will stack up
242. would be up the creek because WShell would just sit there and nothing short of cancelling everything from the menu or from another script would cure it Now suppose we decide that the string Ready should come within the next three and a half seconds and that if it does not the host is surely kaputt We can then use the timeout feature of wait to create the following ARexx macro simple rexx program Address VLT wait Ready 3 5 if RC 1 then do say Host must have croaked exit 20 end say Okay I guess we re ready exit 0 73 The exit 20 and exit 0 commands are ARexx commands not VLT script commands which is why they have numerical arguments As a matter of fact the only VLT script command in the entire macro is the wait Ready 3 5 command so the macro may require a bit of explanation The macro waits for three and a half seconds if the string Ready is received within that time the if then do section is skipped entirely and the macro goes directly to the say Okay I guess we re ready command If the wait command times out however VLT returns an error code of one to ARexx who stores it in the RC variable Since RC 1 the if then do clause is obeyed Host must have croaked is displayed on your screen and the macro immediately exits returning an ARezz error code of 20 to the caller The Extract Command Color settings programs associated with function keys program options outstanding sched
243. ws a line from the current position to x y when the pen is down Vectors can be light or dark Light vectors can have normal or high intensity and a full set of patterns is provided VLT supports the extended variable length vector mode protocol of the Tektronix 4014 and 4100 series of terminals for a maximum resolution of 4096 x 4096 pixels Point plot mode also called marker mode operates the same way as vector mode does with the exception that all incoming x y coordinates are marked on the screen by a dot In incremental plot mode incoming data are interpreted as single pixel movements of the pen in any of the 8 possible directions A line is drawn or continued if the pen is currently down and a move is executed if the pen is currently up In GIN mode VLT displays a graphic cursor cross hair and enters a bypass mode in this mode VLT ignores all data from the host and intercepts all keyboard keys In GIN mode the graphic cursor can be moved with the mouse or the arrow keys To exit GIN mode you type an alphanumeric character or press the select button of the mouse VLT then sends a report to the host consisting of the character that was typed or in case the left mouse button was pressed its currently selected character and the current x y position of the graphic cursor followed by an end of report sequence In the Tektronix 4105 emulation almost all of the Tektronix 4105 escape sequences are supported with some obvious exte
244. y are set to equal x1 and or yl If x1 and or yl are missing they are set to zero The coordinates are in pixels so beware TEKtronix PRINT MAXimum SMALL MEDIUM FULL LARGE Behaves like the Print Bitmap menu option of the Graphics screen s Image Menu lets you print the image currently displayed on your graphics screen using a printer attached to your Amiga Each option allows you to print the picture in a different size the maxiumum size small size one third page medium size two thirds page large size or full page size FULL and LARGE are the same option really TEKtronix SAVEas ILBM filename POStscript filename BINary filename COMmand filename Corresponds to the various save commands in the Image Menu The ILBM option corre sponds to the Save Bitmap As IFF File option The POStscript option corresponds to the Save as PostScript menu option The BINary option corresponds to the Save As New File and Save As Current File options if a file is not specified the current display is saved to a file opened in a previous attempt overwriting that file s contents The COMmand option corresponds to the Save As Script Commands option TEKtronix ZOOM x1 y1 x2 y2 The coordinates specify in pixels the upper left and lower right corner of the area to be zoomed in on If x2 and or y2 are missing they are set to equal x1 and or yl If x1 and or yl are missing they are set to zero If the size of the box i

A VALIANT LITTLE TERMINAL A VLT User`s Manual

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