Date   : Wed, 22 Feb 2006 05:36:34 +0000
From   : Mike Tomlinson <mike@...>
Subject: Re: Terminal Emulator/Arcade Problems

In article <060221215509@...>, Jonathan Graham Harston
<jgh@...> writes

>Me please! What is it? LePidoptra DFS? :)

Lancashire Poly Disk(?) Filing System I think.  It's a ROM with five
different terminal emulators, which allowed it to be used with the
poly's PR1ME mainframe.  You chose the appropriate terminal emulation
for the software you wanted to use.  The poly had many terminals (many
dozen?) connected to the PR1ME through a Gandalf multiplexer, and the
BBCs were useful as a cheap alternative to the high-priced single-
emulation terminals.

The nice thing about it was *LPDFS, a filing system which allowed you to
load and save files over the serial port. It was rather slow (I think
the baud rate used was 4800), but it was popular for playing games at
lunchtime.  

I don't remember how files were loaded after entering *LPDFS (*BBCGAMES
comes to mind), but do remember that the ROM made a soft bleep from the
speaker after loading so many bytes (1k?) via the serial port to let the
user know things were working and the machine hadn't hung.

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