Technical information

Terminal Emulators Serial Solutions
Using Terminal Programs. ________________________
Setting up.__________
The terminal programs are designed to be used with
NewCOM, the interrupt-driven serial port device driver. The
device driver handles all the more difficult parts of serial
communications, such as handshaking and buffering. It must
have been installed in the machine by placing the line
c>device = newcom.sys
in the config.sys file of the machine. See earlier chapters for
more details of the installation process.
NewCOM will recognise all serial ports correctly in the
CONFIG.SYS file.
Running Terminal Programs.__________________________
Once the driver has booted the user can execute the
terminal using the command
c><name> <definition_file>
where <definition_file> is the optional name of a text file
containing commands for the program to read when it starts, and
<name> is ’Cterm’, ’Pasterm’, ’Aterm’, ’BASterm’ or
’FORterm’. The file ’BASTERM.EXE’ on the distribution disk
was compiled under QuickBASIC 4.5, but the source can be run
under Visual Basic for DOS, QBASIC, GW-BASIC or BASICA.
The chapter on BASterm provides more information. The file of
commands defines the way that the terminal will work, and are
detailed later in this section. If there is no file specified on the
command line, or the specified file cannot be found, then
Terminal looks for a file called ’TERMDEF.TXT’, and if it
finds it treats it as a definition file. A sample TERMDEF.TXT is
included on the distribution disk.
Once the terminal is running any characters typed at the
keyboard are sent to the serial port, and any characters received
from the serial port are displayed on the screen. At any time the
user can hit a function key, which have the following effects:
F1 Display a help screen
F2 Setup. This is a group of menus which interactively set up
Chapter 6 Page 109