Technical information

Cterm Serial Solutions
Chapter 7
Cterm.
Introduction.____________
C is a powerful language which is gaining popularity
because of its comprehensive libraries and the economy of the
run-time code developed. The serial ports provided by NewCOM
can be easily programmed in C, and this chapter describes how.
CTERM is a terminal emulator originally written in
Microsoft C. (It was developed under QuickC version 2.0, and
the distributed version compiled using the C 5.1 optimising
compiler.) It is primarily a teaching aid for NewCOM and C, but
is in its own right a powerful tool for working with serial
devices.
This chapter contains two main sections. The first and
most important section discusses the way that CTERM uses the
serial port. The second section takes a less detailed look at the
organisation of the whole of CTERM.
Running Cterm.______________
Run Cterm with the command:
c>Cterm <defn_file>
Where <defn_file> is an optional file of commands for Cterm to
execute- described in detail in an earlier chapter. These
commands define the way that the terminal will operate.
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 the serial port. At each menu the user must hit one of the
digit keys to make a selection. The menus include setting the
Chapter 7 Page 115