Technical information

Serial Solutions Aterm
Chapter 8
Aterm
Introduction.____________
The serial ports provided by NewCOM can be easily
accessed from Assembly language, and this, combined with
assembly language’s advantages of speed, compact code and
good machine control, make it a good choice for serial port
programming.
ATERM is a version of the terminal emulator. Its main
purpose is to demonstrate serial port programming in 8086
assembly language under MS-DOS, and was written for MASM
(Microsoft macro assembler) version 5.1. It will also prove to be
a useful tool for using serial devices.
This chapter contains two main sections. The first and
most important section discusses the way that ATERM uses the
serial port. The second section takes a less detailed look at the
organisation of the whole of ATERM.
Running ATERM.________________
Once the driver and port have been set up the user can
execute ATERM using the command
c>aterm <definition_file>
where <definition_file> is the optional name of a text file
containing commands for ATERM to read when it starts. These
define the way that ATERM will work, and are detailed in the
earlier chapter "Terminal Emulators".
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
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