============================================================================= = Twilight Terminal version 2.06c Instruction Booklet = ============================================================================= Congratulations on choosing a fine terminal program! In this informal text we'll explain a few things about Twilight Term for you. I'm sure everyone who uses it wants to know everything about it, even some of the history behind it's making. First off, Twilight Terminal is a Shareware program. This means that you can recieve this program from any source without cost to you. This program should be free to obtain. You may also pass out copies of it to anyone you know. The only conditions to this agreement are that the Twilight Terminal program itself should not be modified in any way and that if you use the program regularly - please send 20 dollars to the starving programmer who slaved away at creating it. If you do find a version of the program that seems to have been tampered with, please write to me about it. ----------------------- - History of Twi-Term - ----------------------- The origins of the program go back to late 1993. I was considering adding extended ASCII support to my BBS. (You know, all those fancy/funny characters that most BBSes these days like drawing pictures with.) But running the BBS on a Coco doesn't allow you to see anything except the regular Coco 7bit ASCII characters. I decided to just make a terminal program that runs in a graphics screen and drew a proper 256 character extended ASCII font on it. The very first test program just did that, and ran at a locked in speed of 2400 baud. It still didn't show exactly what a PC user would have seen when they called my BBS, so I decided to make it color. The problem is that we only get 4 colors in the hi-res graphics screen, and 4 colors just isn't enough to make the display look very good. I had been experimenting with schemes to push more colors out of the Coco in the past, I decided to take one of my successful experiments and adapt it to work in a terminal program. The scheme works when you draw three copies of your graphics in memory, each with slightly offset phases of dithered pixels...each screen pretty much contains the same thing as each other, but has the dither pattern offset. If you kept cycling between the three screens, the eye would be fooled into thinking it was a single image but with more colors than any of the screens by themselves. It was pretty complex to program, but the result was very nice. I even got carried away and shrunk the font by a pixel to try to squeeze more lines into the screen. The result? A screen capable of showing full extended ASCII, in 80 columbs by 32 lines with 20 simultaneous colors! The oldest version of this program I can find is from Jan 14, 1994. It boots up looking very similar to the newest version, but it runs so much slower that it's scary. (Having to draw 3 seperate graphics screens of data, each slightly different than the other takes a lot of processor power!) Anyways, the next couple of versions added things like smooth scrolling text, and upping the baud rate support a few notches. The real BIG change came with Twi-Term version 2 - Pop up windows for your configurations and stuff. Because of that, I could now add in some extra features like a pop-up auto-dialer, macros, configuration save/load..etc.. All throughout the whole process I was also on a quest to accomplish the impossible. I wanted the program to have more colors than ever seen before, more lines of text on the screen ever before, more font characters than seen before, the smoothest scrolling anyone's ever seen on a terminal, and lastly... It should be the damned fastest terminal program ever made for the Coco! (I had a hard time making it go fast, though. Since it runs in graphics mode, and has to draw many copies of each thing on the screen, it has no way of competing against someone else's terminal that just runs in a 4k text screen (Twi-Term has to draw on a 140k graphics screen) but the newest version allows you to BBS at 19200 baud, and still draws on the screen faster than any other terminal program I have seen on the Coco!) ------------------------ - Features in Twi-Term - ------------------------ Version 2.06c isn't vastly different from the last version, but there are a few improvements. It's a little faster, it finally has proper decoding of virtually all ANSI codes. (there are still a very few ANSI codes not supported, but I have never actually seen any BBS use them, so nobody should miss them. I'll try to add them in a future version.) And of course, I fixed a few bugs that managed to creep into the previous release of Twi-term. Version 2.06c has been out for a while now, and I haven't spotted or heard of any bugs in it except for one (tell you about that later). Version 2.06c of Twi-Term has - big 80 column by 32 line screen. - full extended ASCII (256 character) font. - full color ANSI capability, also including most other ANSI effects such as cursor relocation...etc. - selectable smooth scrolling (makes it MUCH easier to read at high baud rates!). - 300K of fast response scrollback buffer. - ten number autodial directory (which can also remember passwords & RS-232 preferen!)s for each entry). - ten selectable macro keys. - ANSI arrow key ability. - ability to 'type' extended ASCII (with ALT key depressed). - RS-232 PAK support up to 19200 baud! - Serial (bitbanger) port support to 9600 baud! ------------------ - Pop-up windows - ------------------ There are Pop-up windows to allow you to select and configure all sorts of things in Twi-term. I'll try to explain the functions of each one without making it too boring to read! All Pop-up windows are called up by holding the F1 key down while simultaneously hitting another key. Here are the keys and information about each pop-up window they call up. F1+H F1+Key Command List. If ever you need to remember which F1 commands to use, press F1 and H to see the command list. F1+O Default Parameters menu. It can be called the 'MAIN' mee of Twi- Term. By pressing the highlighted letters shown here, you call up other pop-up menus. If you made any changes to your settings anywhere and want to make sure that Twi-Term remembers them next time you load it in, make sure to use the 'S'ave settings function. F1+R RS232 Configuration. From here you can change your baud rate, and other RS-232 settings. You can also select either a Tandy RS-232 PAK, a Disto RS-232 card, or the Cocos own serial port on the back. Make sure not to select an RS-232 device you don't have because it could possibly crash your computer. Lastly, there is also an Interrupt select. Unless you are absolutely sure of what you are doing, it is recommended that you leave it set to GIME. This just makes the GIME generate the interrupt to drive the RS-232. If you set it to 6551, you must be sure that your RS-232 chip actually has a wire going to the CPU's IRQ or FIRQ (Yes, Twi-Term should work with either. But FIRQ will waste less CPU power hence run faster). Unless you have an RS-232 modified to run at 38400 baud, there is no real advantage to using the 6551 as the interrupt source (the extra programming logic needed to decode the interrupts actually make the terminal program run SLOWER than if simply using the GIME's RS-232 polling interrupt). F1+M Modem Parameter Strings. This window contains the codes that your modem responds with when calling out, and also the commands that the terminal sends to the modem when it wants it to dial out. Check your modem's manual to find out what strings your modem needs if the default values in Twi-Term do not work. '1' is the dial prefix (usually ATDT on most modems). '2' is the dial suffix (in case you need to add something after the phone number is sent). The 'funny' characters you might see in here are 'cr's (ENTER codes) and the triangles pointing to the right are codes representing half second pauses in the sending of the strings. F1+E Edit Macros window. From here you see a list of all your macros, and can edit any of them by simply pressing the highlighted number before the macro you want to edit. ---- "Edit/Type in new string. Ctrl+P=1/2 sec pause, Shift+Esc=Esc." In this pop-up window, you are simply expected to edit a string and the apress your 'Break/Esc' key when you are done. If you press ENTER, it records a 'cr' code as part of the string, if you don't want those make sure to backspace them. Pressing Ctrl-P will add a half second delay at that point every time that string is sent out. If you need an actual Escape code in your string, you can type one in by pressing Shift+'Break/Esc' on your keyboard. F1+D Dial Directory window. This window shows you all the numbers in your dial directory. By pressing the highlighted number before each entry, you can mark or unmark those numbers for dialing. When you press 'D' to dial, Twi-Term will dial in sequence all the numbers have marked off until it connects to one of them. To edit an entry press 'E' and then the number of the entry. ---- "Dial Directory Editor. Esc=exit." In this window you edit all the details about the numbers you want put in your dial directory. Each number can have a different baud rate and number of bits/parity etc. This way you don't have to manually select these things each time you try calling a system with non-standard settings. Pressing 'H' lets you edit the phone number, 'W' lets you make youself a little note (a good place to keep track of your passwords, user numbers or other details about a BBS). 'N' lets you edit the name of the system you are currently adding to your dial directory. F1+mb Video Settings. Of all the pop-up windows, this is probably the one that confuses most people. From here, you can pretty much edit any of the colors that you see in the terminal program. Just because you see 32 colors here, doesn't mean this graphics mode actually supports that many colors. As far as the GIME in your Coco is concerned, you are looking at a 4 color screen. (The four colors are shown at the bottom marked by 7, 8, 9 and 0 before them.) Lets start with the bottom half of this window. To edit the 4 base palette colors of Twi-Term, first press the number before the color you want to change (7,8,9 or 0) Then, press from numbers 1 to 6 to adjust t t Red,Green or Blue contents of that color. Hitting '1' lowers the RED in the color, '4' raises the RED Hitting '2' lowers the GREEN in the color, '5' raises the GREEN Hitting '3' lowers the BLUE in the color, '6' rstses the BLUE You can see the effect of changing the 4 base colors when you look at the colored blocks under the word 'Choices'. Make sure that all the important colors are all there when you customize your palette. Now, lets go over to the top half of the window. This part lets you select which 16 choices of colors to use for your ANSI emulation. The left side of the window should contain in alphabetical order - Black,Red,Green,Yellow,Blue,Purple(Magenta),Cyan(Pale blue),White. And then repeat those colors again only brighter in 'I' through 'P'. To change the value of a color in the SET, press the letter shown before that color, Then press the letter before a color from the CHOICES list on the right. You have now just changed one of the base 16 colors of Twi-term. A note to remember - It matters if you press upper or lower case characters! If you want to set color 'H' with 'n' for example, you must type capital H followed by lowercase n for it to work. F1+Z "Hang up modem? (Y/N)" This window is pretty self explanatory. Pressing 'Y' makes Twi-Term hang up the modem, pressing anything else cancels the command. F1+S Smooth Scroll select. This function was so simple, I neglected to make a pop-up window for it. Press it once, it turns off the smooth scrolling of the screen. Press it again, it turns it back on. F1+'arrow keys' ANSI arrow keys. Since the arrow keys are already used for things like the backspace and tab codes, I had to think of some other way of typing ANSI arrow keys (for BBSes with fancy ANSI graphics and arrow key controlled menus). By holding F1 and then pressing an arrow key, you can send the proper ANSI code for directional cursor control. F1+'0 to 9' Macro keys. You can trigger any of your ten selectable macros by holding down F1 and pressing a number key. Any macro can be up to 64 characters long, and can include control codes and escape sequences in them. You can even put Extended ASCII in your macros. -------------- - Conclusion - -------------- Well, I think that aboin covers most of what you would want to know about Twilight Terminal. I'm sure I probably forgot something, but I'll try to include it in the next release of Twi-Term and it's instruction file. I hope you enjoy the program, and I hope it also gives new life and functionality to your Color Computer 3! I Thank everyone who have helped me out in my projects for the CoCo. I hope that my programs are good enough to return the favour! December 14th, 1995. John Kowalski (Sock Master) sock@axess.com