Technical information

Pasterm Serial Solutions
Chapter 9
Pasterm
Introduction.____________
Pascal is a widely used and well structured language.
Borland’s implementation of it, Turbo Pascal, is popular and
offers many extra features which make programming the serial
ports that NewCOM provides very simple.
Pasterm is a Turbo Pascal v4 terminal emulation. Its main
purpose is to demonstrate how serial ports can be programmed
from Turbo Pascal, but it is in its own right a powerful tool for
using serial devices.
This chapter contains two main sections. The first and
most important section discusses the way that Pasterm uses the
serial port. The second section takes a less detailed look at the
organisation of the whole of Pasterm.
Running Pasterm.________________
Once the driver and port have been set up the user can
execute Pasterm using the command
c>Pasterm <definition_file>
where <definition_file> is the optional name of a text file
containing commands for Pasterm to read when it starts. These
define the way that Pasterm will work, and are detailed in the
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
digit keys to make a selection. The menus include setting the
port, the Baud rate, the number of data bits, the number of stop
Chapter 9 Page 141