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Date   : Wed, 03 Jun 1992 01:51:20 +1200
From   : Dave Sainty <terros@...>
Subject: TequilaComm

Alan Ralph <aralph@...> writes:

>Perhaps we'd better make a list of who's produced what, what capabilities
>each program has so far, and compatability with various machines.
>
>So far I've counted yours and Dave's, plus the one I use, Gareth Babb's
>ATerm 0.79 (SWR version - also available in TTY and ANSI main-memory
>versions). Oh, and a 4-colour version of same, which has to be seen to be
>believed.
>
>All these can handle ANSI emulation and are at or working towards Ymodem
>transfer. Any others?

Well, mine goes something like this:

=== TequilaComm (1.2) ==

ansi/vt52 modes: ansi supports all of the vt102 codes as far as I am aware, and
    some of the extras found in vt200+ (oh, 132 col mode isn't supported
    tho...)

Italics, inverse, underline all work. Flashing does not, italics are used
instead.

Built in PC graphics font, which is the standard graphics character set used
    here at east...

X/Ymodem: This uses unbuffered file saves. The advantage of this is there is
never any delay as the data is writte/read from file in a big block. The
disadvantage is that at 9600+ baud, the disc interrupts start butting in on the
serial interrupts, and the drive is constantly stopping and starting. None of
this worried me, I run at 2400 and I preferred not waiting while a block loaded
in, but eventually I will probably include an option for a buffered mode as it
seems popular

the file transfers have an estimated time til finish clock, a time so far
clock, and a %age transferred reading. CRC mode is supported of course.

Scrollback This is my favourite feature, and the real reason I wrote my
program. scrollback takes as much sideways ram as you have to offer, on my
mchine about 40k of scrollback ends up free. That's a lot of text! Also,
quoting from scrollback and saving text from scrollback.

80 column, 40 column and teletext modes are supported. There is a mode 2 colour
mode which operates in 80 columns, but is only for displaying colour Ansi
screens, as the text is unreadable. 32, 25 and 24 row modes are all supported
for 80 and 40 column modes.

That 4 colour mode you talked of sounds interesting...

All screen writes are direct write, very fast, but won't work on shadow ram.

All options are menu driven.

There is a dialling directory with auto login options, repeat and list dialling
modes.

There is an online help system too, not context sensitive sorry.

The input buffer is 1k long, instead of 256 bytes. I inted making it longer
still for master owners, but that's still to be done.

... and lots of neat extras, like anti-idle (avoids getting ogged off due to
idle time), and saveable startup configuration.

The menu/dialling directory/file transfer overlays are stored in either
sideways ram or on disc, in order to workwith any system. Some of the more
advanced options only work with sideays ram.

Oh, and there's a nice animated mode 7 title screen, which is interrupt driven,
so runs whilst the rest of the program is loaded in. Don't you appreciate those
little touches? :-)

The whole thing is written in assembly and took a bit over a year to get to
what I thought was a releasable stage. it's taken a further 6 months so far and
I still haven't managed to "release" it! BBC software distribution I am finding
is not an easy thing to do!

========

I want to release it as shareware, with a registerable version priced at $30
NZ. Uncompressed total size is 45k in a bfm archive.

In actual fact, a lot of the features listed above are not in the unregistered
version, including the infamous Ymodem. The most obviously missing features are
Ymodem, repeat/list dialling, and auto login feature.

A friend of mine is working on getting the shareware version onto
shiraz.ohm.york.ac.uk

...it is on the actrix ftp site, bulletin board, but that's not much
use to you outside new zealand...

Dave.
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