Title:  Modern Terminal Addendum
Date:  20190818
Tags:  hardware retrocomputers
========================================

Some additional info and caveats of my terminal build in it's current form.

Problems:
PiGFX, actually uspi which provides USB keyboard support, defaults to en_UK
keyboard layout so I had to recompile everything to change it to en_US.

Changing the baud rate of PiGFX requires me to pull the SD card from the Pi, put
it into my PC, and change a timer value in a config file.  Being able to change
that on the fly would be nice.

PiGFX leaves the background color on the cursor space some times.  This is
noticeable as a block covering up your @ character in rogue.

Backspacing writes the foreground color over the character instead of the
background so deleting a string of characters leaves a white line.  Also leaves
random blocks around if a program uses backspace to clear parts of the screen.

Booting up is very much dependent on order.  Where I have the Pi Zero powered by
the monitor, and the battery powering the monitor and RC2014, it all powers on
together.  However, the monitor takes a couple seconds to come on and either
misses the Pi booting up or the Pi doesn't detect the HDMI connection and
nothing shows on the monitor.  I have to then reboot the Pi, which has to come
up, set up the UART and detect the keyboard.  It then waits for data over the
serial connection before it allows you to send anything over it.  So I then have
to reboot the RC2014 so the boot monitor will send data and trigger the Pi Zero
and get the whole system working.  If the Pi would just blindly pass serial
data, I could hit the key to select my OS from the boot monitor and the RC2014
would send data back as it booted the chosen OS.

Some good news:
I'm blind.  There is a kit[0] for Geoff's ASCII VT100 terminal card.  It's right
in Geoff's article about it but I missed it or forgot about or something.
Geoff's board has jumpers for baud rate which would be good.  It does not
support HDMI (don't need it) or USB keyboards, though.  It also seems to support
VT-100 escape codes.  Seems a lot of CP/M software was very dependent on VT-100
functionality.

I've run into more and more problems with PiGFX and while I like the super tiny,
and cheap Pi Zero, I need the VT-100 compatibility.  I can either learn to
program the Pi to improve PiGFX or spend nearly 10x as much for a kit of Geoff's
board.  Not going to break the bank and if it works, it's worth it.  But I like
the compact Pi Zero and USB support.

Maybe there is another, more accurate VT-100 serial board or software out there.


[0] https://www.tindie.com/products/petrohi/geoffs-vt100-terminal-kit/

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