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Text File | 1987-04-02 | 14.5 KB | 345 lines

HandShake V1.20a Summary of Features. If you want to see how this version of Handshake has changed from the previous versions please refer to the Version History section at the end of this document. WHAT IS IT? Handshake is a Full featured VT52/100/102 terminal emulator for those people who really need it. I have taken great pains to support the full VT102 spec. (VT102 is a superset of VT100). Feel free to use and distribute this program as you like, as long as it is not for commercial use. If you like it, use it and want to see it get better, please send a contribution of $25.00 to the address listed in the program's "About.." requester. Commercial users are urged to contact the author. WHAT IS IT NOT? Handshake doesn't try to be an all round, general purpose, modem program which supports a multitude of transfer protocols, a script language, etc. There are plenty of good programs out there which fulfill this need. WHAT IS THIS DOCUMENT? This document is a quick description of the features of Handshake paying particular attention to the less obvious aspects of Handshake so that an experienced user will be able to use the program. This document assumes that the user has experience with terminal programs and the Amiga. Especially the Intuition user interface ( Menus, requesters, etc. ) WHAT IS THIS DOCUMENT NOT? This is not full Handshake documentation!! That will be coming at a later date. If you are not familiar with terminal programs or the Amiga user interface, find a friend who is and ask him/her to help you. WHAT DO YOU NEED TO RUN HANDSHAKE? An Amiga with 256K or more. Version 1.2 of Kickstart and Workbench. THIS PROGRAM WILL NOT WORK WITH VERSION 1.1 OR EARLIER OF AMIGADOS. Hardware to connect to the other computer. This may consist of only a cable if you are locally wired, or a cable and a modem if you are accessing the other computer over the telephone. WHY SHOULD YOU USE HANDSHAKE? If you have a requirement for FULL VT100/102 compatability and have not been satisfied by other programs which only do half the job, this is probably the program you have been looking for! Here is a list of some of the features that Handshake offers: - Full 24 line display with title bar enabled! No more turning the title bar on and off to see all 24 lines. - Full VT52 support. Every VT100 has a VT52 inside of it. So does Handshake -- right down to the VT52 graphics character set. - VT102 Edit mode. Local insert and deletes. - Smooth or Jump scrolling. - Block or Underline see through reverse video cursor. - Full VT100 Special Graphics Character Set. - Full double height and double width characters. - 132 character per line mode. - Double height and width characters in 132 column mode. - All character modes. Normal, Bold, Reverse video, Underline and Blinking in any combination. - Full keyboard support. This includes VT52 mode. Handshake handles the escape sequences to turn auto repeat on and off and lock the keyboard. No more run away cursors while in EDT under VMS etc. - ASCII file transfer mode with user definable end-of-line translation for both sending and receiving. No more carriage returns in your received files. - XMODEM file transfer for binary files. - Dialing Support with a 20 Phone number Directory. Optional auto redialing is available. System characteristics ( baud rate, data bits, parity, stop bits ) can be specified in the dialing directory entry. Auto redial can be specified in the directory entry. This dialing mode is geared to Hayes compatible modems, although the user can specify the dialing prefix ( ATDP or ATE0DT, etc. ). - Fast! Using a 95K text file captured from a VAX which was then sent to Handshake from a local microcomputer, Handshake maintained a throughput of 875 characters per second. This means that Handshake can take characters as fast as your host can send them at 7200 baud, and still look good at 9600. A real VT100 can't keep up at 9600 baud either. - Complete Workbench integration. Handshake can be started from the Workbench. As you save parameter files icons are created. These icons can be used to invoke Handshake later with the same paremeters. You can even specify a host to dial immediately when the icon is invoked. WHAT DO YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT HANDSHAKE TO USE IT NOW? The follwing things about Handshake are not obvious so you should familiarize yourself with this section. Command line. Handshake can be invoked from the CLI. The general form of the command line is illustrated below (parts in square brackets are optional): Handshake [-p parameter_file_name] [destination_name] The parameter file name is the parameter file to be used, if none is specified the default file Handshake.parms is used. The destination name is the name of the remote computer to be dialed. This name must be one that appears in dialing directory of the parameter file being used and must be spelled exactly the same way it is spelled in the dialing directory entry (Case of characters is not significant). If the name in the dialing diretory entry ends in a '*' or the Auto Redial menu selection is set in the parameter file, Handshake will keep dialing the number until a connection is made. If the name in the dialing directory entry ends in a '*', do not include the '*' on the command line when specifying the destination name. If this dialing directory entry appeared in the default file Handshake.parms: 555-1234:1200,8,n,1 Fred's BBS* The following command line coule be used to call this BBS. Handshake "Fred's BBS" Note that the '"'s are necessary in this case because the name of the BBS has a space in it. Here is another example. Handshake -p universities.parms UCLA This would dial the phone number associated with the descriptor UCLA in the parameter file universities.parms For a complete description of dialing directory entries, see the discussion later in this section Workbench. Handshake can also be invoked from the Workbench. There is an icon which looks like a terminal. Invoking this icon will cause Handshake to be invoked with the parameters from Handshake.parms, or if this file does not exist Handshake will use it's built in parameters. In the project menu there is an item "Create Icons". if you set this to "Yes" Handshake will create a telephone icon every time that you save the parameters. While Handshake is saving the parameters it will also prompt you for a dialing descriptor which if specified will be used as the initial dialing destination when the icon is invoked. CLI users will probably want to keep the "Create Icons" option set to "No" so that their disks will not be cluttered with un-necessary .info files. Keyboard. VT100 Keys Amiga Keys ---------- ---------- Arrow keys Arrow keys F1 through F4 F1 through F4 Keypad 0 through 9 Keypad 0 through 9 Keypad . Keypad . Keypad - Keypad - Keypad , Help key ** Watch for this ** Keypad Enter Keypad Enter The Back space and Del keys can be reversed with a menu option. File Transfers. The "Receive/Transmit CR/LF as ..." menu options are only applicable to the ASCII file transfer modes. These can be used to translate end of line characters when sending to the other system. For instance, when sending to a VAX which is receiving with the CREATE command, you will want to send a carriage return to the VAX at the end of each line. Amiga text files have no carriage returns in them so lines are terminated with line feed characters. By selecting the Transmit LF as CR option Handshake will do the conversion for you. If you use the XMODEM binary file transfer mode, be aware that the received file will probably have to be truncated. This is because all files received by XMODEM are a multiple of 128 bytes long. AmigaDos does not like these extra bytes. There are several good public domain utilities available to strip these bytes off the end of the file (TAILRID, for one). If you send your files in ARC format then this is not a problem. Dialing the Phone. In order to dial a number from the dialing directory ( Menu option "Dial Phone" ), click using the mouse on the small square gadget immediately to the left of the number that you want to dial. Clicking on the text of the number allows you to edit the entry, but not to dial it. The dialing directory is saved to disk whenever you save the parameters It is possible to have several diailing directories by using different parameter files. Format of dialing directory entries. A dialing directory entry has the following general format. The parts in the square brackets are optional. The * at the end of the line is used to indicate auto redialing. telephone_number[:baudrate[,data_bits[,parity[,stop_bits]]]] [desc][*] Below are some sample dialing directory entries: 123-4567 Simplest case. Dial the number using the current serial parameters. 123-4567 Joe's BBS Same as above with a description. 123-4567 * Both of these will dial 123-4567 Joe's BBS* Until the other system Answers. 123-4567:1200 Call the number changing baud rate to 1200 if necessary. 123-4567:1200,8,n,1 Joe's BBS* A biggie. Call Joe's until it answers using 1200 baud, 8 data bits, no parity and 1 stop bit. Interlace. The Half screen interlace mode is intended to give you a full 24 line VT100 Emulation in half a screen. This leaves you the other half to do whatever you like, and still watch your terminal screen. The full screen interlace mode is useful in 132 column mode. Readability of characters in interlaced mode may depend on your selection of colors. (I find that black characters on a gray background look just super ). WHAT PROBLEMS ARE THERE WITH HANDSHAKE? Nothing that I currently Know of. However you may find that you can not see the last two or three columns of 132 column mode. If this happens to you, run Preferences and move the screen centering gadget to the left a bit. This should fix the problem. WHO DO YOU CALL WITH PROBLEMS, SUGGESTIONS ETC? Me! Eric Haberfellner, 57 Marble Arch Crescent Scarborough, Ontario CANADA M1R 1W8 Phone (416) 757-1055 ( After Six P.M. please ). I am on BIX as ehaberfellner. HANDSHAKE VERSION HISTORY Version 1.20a - Improved Workbench interface. Handshake will now optionally create create Telephone icons for saved parameter files. This allows the user to select which paramter file to use from the Workbench. The icons can also be created in such a way that Handshake will automatically start dialing a specified number when it is invoked with that icon. - Fixed a bug which caused XMODEM transmits to sometimes hang. - Changed autodialing support so that it now works with modems that report status while they are dialing (Like the Volksmodem 1200). - Dialing destinations which contained spaces on the command line did not work, even when enclosed in quotes. This has been fixed. - Selecting the Reset Terminal option from the menu or typing Amiga-V would cause two cursors to appear on the screen. This has been fixed. Version 1.10a - At last, a real 132 columns instead of 128. - Added some intelligence to the routines that display the cursor. This yielded a 35% performance improvement. Handshake now has an average throughput of about 875 characters per second. - Cleaned up parsing of command line parameters especially the dialing directory entry. - Put error checking into reading of parameter files. If the file does not exist or is of the wrong size put up a requester advising the user. If the default file Handshake.parms cannot be found do not annoy the user with a requester (use the built in defaults). - The command line dialing direcotry entry is now case insensitive. - Added some register variables in several places. Handshake is now about six percent faster because of this. - Fixed a bug which caused the line attribute for the bottom line to not be reset when the screen was cleared. - Fixed a hideous bug which caused the input subtask to lock up sometimes. This would appear to the user as a blank title bar. This would only happen if the user interface task sent a "go to sleep" message to the serial input task at the same instant that an IO completed, therefore this was more likely to happen at higher baud rates. Sorry about that one. Version 1.02a ( not released to the public at large ). - Added command line parameters to specify parameter file to use, and to allow the user to specify a remote computer to dial from the command line. - Added 20 second dialing timeout to the dial timeout menu. - In order to abort redialing it was sometimes necessary to select the abort requester more than once. This is now fixed. - Moved File transfer and redialing abort requester to upper right portion of screen. - General cleanup of the file transfer code. Receiveing to disk is now much faster. Transfer aborts now work porperly at high baud rates. Version 1.01a - Auto redialing added. - Pulse/Dial menu option replaced with user definable dialing string. - Added menu item to allow user to specify backspace & del key operation. - Fixed bug which caused menus to not be updated after a reset if no parameter file was present. Version 1.00a - Handshake Unleashed on an unsuspecting public. An historic Moment!