• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Telnet Terminal with good VT100 emulation

peterbbu

Experienced Member
Joined
Jun 13, 2016
Messages
81
Location
Midlands - UK
What is a PC Telnet program with good VT100 emulation?

I would like to run Teco as a screen editor installed for either a VT52 or VT100 over a telnet session.

What is a good Telnet program for the PC with a useable emulation of either a VT52 or a VT100 that is good enough to run Teco as an on screen editor?

I have tried both Putty and TeraTerm neither of which seem to have a good enough screen emulation. I would also like to switch to VT100 132 character mode on occasions.

Do you have any suggestions?

Thanks

Peter
 
Not free, but with free evaluation versions and good enough for text editing:
ZOC terminal
IBM Pcomm

-Alon.
 
I use ZOC on my Mac for all my terminal emulation. I've been using it since V6 and have been happy. But, not free. It's about $80 US or £68 , When I bought V6 I got V7 free when it came out and V8 was a $30 US upgrade. It's very flexible and EM-TEC keeps it updated. I haven't used it for TECO but I use it for EDT, EVE, vi (Linux/Unix)
 
Have you tried Teraterm or Kermit. The later versions of Kermit seem to have come on quite a bit I tried the ADM-3A emulation a while back and was quite surprised how well it worked, there even seems to be a VT100 test suite on one of the Kermit pages VTtest
 
I have a physical Lynwood ELT-320 and a VT100 software emulator but they only work with a serial connection.

I was after a telnet based terminal that offered VT100 emulation, such that I could send it the VT100 test suite over a telnet session and it would correctly display as on the serial terminals.

I either use Windows on a PC or Debian on a Raspberry Pi. So far I have not managed to find a terminal emulator that offers both Telnet connectivity and correclty interprest the VT100 test suite.

Both the ELT and the VT100 serial emulators pass.


Thanks

Peter
 
Have you tried Teraterm or Kermit. The later versions of Kermit seem to have come on quite a bit I tried the ADM-3A emulation a while back and was quite surprised how well it worked, there even seems to be a VT100 test suite on one of the Kermit pages VTtest
Hi Martyn,

As far as I am aware Kermit uses a serial connection and doe snot work over telnet.
I have tried both TeraTerm and Putty but the VT100 emulation fails miserably at interpreting VT100 ANSI sequences over a telnet connection. Which version are you using that works?

Thanks

Peter
 
As the current maintainer of C-Kermit for Windows my recommendation would be for that :)

C-Kermit for Windows supports virtual terminal connections over: telnet, rlogin, ssh, modem, and serial port. If you've got Pathworks32 installed it will do LAT and CTERM too. Its VT52 and VT100 emulation should be much better than PuTTY or TeraTerm plus it emulates a pile of other terminal types (around 40 all up). Aside from vttest test 1 screen 5 I think it passes all the VT100 tests and a reasonable chunk of the tests for newer terminals too.
 
What's wrong with running telnet under Linux on a PC?
Nothing Chuck but some obviously have an aversion to use Linux for some reason.

The Terminal program in GeoWorks Pro1.2 works pretty good via null modem cable to a Linux box using telnet.;)
 
As the current maintainer of C-Kermit for Windows my recommendation would be for that :)

C-Kermit for Windows supports virtual terminal connections over: telnet, rlogin, ssh, modem, and serial port. If you've got Pathworks32 installed it will do LAT and CTERM too. Its VT52 and VT100 emulation should be much better than PuTTY or TeraTerm plus it emulates a pile of other terminal types (around 40 all up). Aside from vttest test 1 screen 5 I think it passes all the VT100 tests and a reasonable chunk of the tests for newer terminals too.
Anther vote for C-Kermit for Windows!

Excellent emulations (VT100, VT102, VT220, VT320, and *many* others), with the ability to remap the keyboard in flexible ways, and as David also mentioned many connection options over serial and network (and other things like ptys). Also a variety of file transfer options (over serial as well as network), a complete scripting language, and lots more.

Plus completely open source and free, and with the benefit of having a strong family resemblance to the Kermit versions I've been using for decades :)
 
As the current maintainer of C-Kermit for Windows my recommendation would be for that :)

C-Kermit for Windows supports virtual terminal connections over: telnet, rlogin, ssh, modem, and serial port. If you've got Pathworks32 installed it will do LAT and CTERM too. Its VT52 and VT100 emulation should be much better than PuTTY or TeraTerm plus it emulates a pile of other terminal types (around 40 all up). Aside from vttest test 1 screen 5 I think it passes all the VT100 tests and a reasonable chunk of the tests for newer terminals too.

I have been using Kermit 95 2.1.3 for years as my terminal emulator of choice, either through a direct serial port connection, or through a Telnet connection to a remote terminal server. It does almost everything I have ever needed in a terminal emulator.

I haven't gotten around to trying the new Open Source release of the Program Formerly Known as Kermit 95 yet. One of these days I'll give it a try when I need to set up a system where I don't already have Kermit 95 2.1.3 installed.
 
What's wrong with running telnet under Linux on a PC?
I would still need a good VT100 terminal emulation.

Telnet from Unix still doesn't solve the terminal emulation problem. If I run a telnet session from Debian on the Pi it does not correctly display VT100 sequences on the kbd and screen, if I use a serially connected VT100 emulation / real terminal I might as well plug it directly into the PDP11 emulator or into my micro 11/73.

The C-Kermit for Windows looks to be promising I'll download a copy and give it a go.

Thanks

Peter
 
Hi Martyn,

As far as I am aware Kermit uses a serial connection and doe snot work over telnet.
I have tried both TeraTerm and Putty but the VT100 emulation fails miserably at interpreting VT100 ANSI sequences over a telnet connection. Which version are you using that works?

Thanks

Peter
I am surprised about TeraTerm failing "miserably". I have not used anything fancy, but I have not noticed any problems with it in the past two decades of using it. Could it be that your real problem is that you are feeding it bad data over the Telnet connection? Could you try masking the most significant bit of every byte. Are there any Telnet escape sequences embedded in your data stream (starting with a 0xFF byte)? Could you supply any failing sequences for others to check out? Could it be that whatever you are talking to is not actually implementing the Telnet protocol, but instead is using a raw TCP connection?
 
elnet from Unix still doesn't solve the terminal emulation problem. If I run a telnet session from Debian on the Pi it does not correctly display VT100 sequences on the kbd and screen, if I use a serially connected VT100 emulation / real terminal I might as well plug it directly into the PDP11 emulator or into my micro 11/73.
What's your TERM environment variable set to? I think Debian sets it to "xterm-256color" by default, not "vt100".
 
The fist step is to find out what computer operating system the OP intends to use this VT100 terminal emulator on.....

At this stage we are just throwing shit at a wall;)
 
I would still need a good VT100 terminal emulation.

Telnet from Unix still doesn't solve the terminal emulation problem. If I run a telnet session from Debian on the Pi it does not correctly display VT100 sequences on the kbd and screen, if I use a serially connected VT100 emulation / real terminal I might as well plug it directly into the PDP11 emulator or into my micro 11/73.

The C-Kermit for Windows looks to be promising I'll download a copy and give it a go.

Let me know if you run into any problems!

If its not clear, k95g.exe is the one you want. From there it should just be a case of:

Code:
set terminal type vt100               ; or vt52 or any other terminal type
set terminal bytesize 7               ; If your host is expecting 7 bit characters rather than 8
set terminal remote latin1-iso        ; Or whatever character set the machine at the other end uses
telnet 10.0.1.52 23                   ; You can leave off the port number if its 23

If the telnet server at the other end isn't very smart and doesn't negotiate options properly you can do telnet /nowait 10.0.1.52 instead. You can also switch the terminal type and character set with the drop-down boxes at the top of the window, and bytesize is in the Actions menu.

For more built-in assistance, run the intro command or type ? for a list of completion options. There is also a full manual here which still mostly applies to CKW: https://kermitproject.org/k95manual/

In addition to k95g.exe, there is also k95.exe which runs in a windows console window rather than implementing the console itself but still does terminal emulation (as best it can given the constrains imposed by the windows console environment), and k95dial.exe which is the old graphical connection manager ("dialer") which may or may not be useful - the current version has a bug that sets the terminal emulator to some weird colour palette.
 
Last edited:
Code:
set terminal type vt100               ; or vt52 or any other terminal type
set terminal bytesize 7               ; If your host is expecting 7 bit characters rather than 8
set terminal remote latin1-iso        ; Or whatever character set the machine at the other end uses
telnet 10.0.1.52 23                   ; You can leave off the port number if its 23

In some cases I also found I needed to add "SET TELNET NEWLINE RAW" to prevent some CR/LF type of translations from happening.

I forget the specifics of the cases where that was causing a problem. I vaguely remember using a Telnet connection to a remote terminal server that was attached to a VAX console port, and after entering the new system account password during VMS installation setup, I couldn't get the same password to be accepted again later. Something led me to believe it might have been related to CR/LF transactions, and disabling those resolved the issue.
 
probably also worth mentioning that if all this works and CKW solves the problem you can then be lazy and chuck all this into k95custom.ini as a macro:

Code:
def tnvt100 {
   ; Put whatever settings you want
   set term type vt100
   set term bytesize 7
   set term remote latin1-iso

   ; Then telnet to whatever address is supplied as a parameter
   telnet \%1
}

Then in CKW you can just go tnvt100 10.0.1.52 instead of having to type all that stuff every time.
 
Back
Top