GETTING THE ARCHIMEDES ON LINE

A brief survey of the state of comms on the Archimedes by Ian Burley, News and Features editor of Micronet.

The old BBC Model B was a superb comms tool. It had an easily accessible RS423 serial port - even from Basic, an 80 column screen for ASCII text, and perhaps most important of all, the full Teletext character set as standard.

The Archimedes carries on these traditions, and a number of companies are working on sophisticated comms packages for the Archimedes, though as this is written, none have been properly released, save one. The reason for the delay centres around the now infamous RS232 bug. Actually Acorn claims there are lots of bugs, and they're all the fault of the 6551 serial line chip they chose for the Archimedes. Unfortunately the latest release of Arthur (version 1.20) compounds RS232 problems even further, corrupting bytes being transmitted when bytes are being received. This effectively reduces the serial port to being half duplex! However, Acorn are on the verge of producing a relocatable module patch which they say will entirely cure the serial port problems.

The one Archimedes comms program actually available also happens to be free! It's ARCterm, and was written by Hugo Fiennes, D.R.Boyd, and Brian Smith for the Public Domain. The program is written entirely in Basic, and offers quite adequate scrolling text handling, and a primitive viewdata mode. Hugo hates desktops and so he has deliberately ignored the mouse. ARCterm boots up into scrolling text mode, and features a status area at the base of the screen, and help menus can be summoned via ALT-H.

Hayes command accessibility is provided, as is the ubiquitous XMODEM file transfer. The viewdata mode is disappointing, though improvements are promised. For example, once into viewdata you're cut off from the rest of ARCterm, and you have to reset the machine to exit. There is also no telesoftware downloading facility. But the package is free! If you want to download ARCterm, you can do so by dialling into Hugo's BB on (0458) 47608 (V21 through V22bis) using another machine with XMODEM capability.

Hugo is working on a commercial version of ARCterm, to feature Kermit, ZMODEM, XMODEM and XMODEM CRC, XMODEM-1K, Megalink, full VT100, VT52, IBM ANSI colour, Teletype, CET viewdata downloading, and a built in host with its own programming language. But Hugo insists that even this won't be mouse driven!

Oddly enough, you can resort to using the 6502 emulator to get online to Prestel compatible systems using Watford's old Modem 84 ROM!

Also in the pipeline is "Deputy" written by Micky Spalter from Synchrotech. This is waiting until the RS232 problem is fixed. To be distributed by Dataphone, who make the new Demon Modems, Deputy does use the Archimedes WIMPs so the viewdata section won't use mode 7, but instead a screen mode to emulate viewdata characters whilst retaining desktop accessibility.

Deputy promises some fine features, e.g. a 300 telephone number store, Demon Modem auto baud-rate setting, an elapsed time clock, Hayes support, XMODEM and CET telesoftware, offline mailbox editing, a "chat-cache" for spooling text to, etc. This will eventually sell for £49.95.

Pete Gaunt, author of the excellent Modem Master for the Beeb, is working on a mouse driven package for the Archimedes, and this too will re-emulate mode 7 in 80 columns using the WIMPs. It's likely that this will eventually be released under the BBC Soft label, as was Modem Master.

Finally, Acorn has a Dutch package called Acom in the wings, but perhaps the one to look out for is BEEBUG's own package, as yet unnamed, to go with the keenly awaited BEEBUG internal modem for the Archimedes.